I took several photos in Perth last week. The first two are of the Playhouse Cinema.

The street seems to double as a bus station so there’s a bus in this first one.
The bus had moved on by the time I took the second.

Typical Deco styling here, lots of vertical/horizontal interplay. It’s a strange mixture, though, of brickwork and white rendering. Both the Chester cinemas I featured a while back have features in common with this.

Here’s a picture of The Playhouse on flickr. And another.

This is just down from Perth Museum And Art Gallery (which is worth a visit by the way.) It was probably originally a mill building. It runs along Mill Street, anyway. This side is clearly Deco.

As is this side as far as the third windows along. Note the flagpole.

No idea what this last one, on South Street, used to be. It’s a Co-operative Travel shop now, obviously.

The last thing I expected to find in Chester on our trip was Art Deco buildings, but it was riddled with them.

Just outside the city wall, right where the clock is, lies this former Burton’s.

Almost opposite Burton’s was an Art Deco (former?) Marks & Spencer which was so tall and wide I couldn’t photograph it. I also can’t find a picture of it on the web.

Further along the same road was what is now a night club or something (called Brannigan’s and Lot 76) but looks as if it was once a cinema.

Most strikingly, and inside the city wall, was the now disused Odeon Cinema. A great example of Art Deco in the fascist tendency. On Flickr I found these pictures from when it was still open. I particularly like the trianguloid columns.

Here’s a very minor example of Art Deco just opposite Lot 76.

Proof that the word Raith has/had a wider use than just for the name of the local football team.
This was the Raith cinema and is now some sort of church. It’s situated in Links Street in what is known as Linktown, which maybe once was a separate entity from The Lang Toun but now there is no gap between them and it’s just another part of Kirkcaldy.

The curly flourishes on the entrance are about all that makes this Art Deco, but their Eastern influence is one of the hallmarks of Deco styling (cf the Hoover Factory and India of Inchinnan.) Those apart it’s a pretty bog standard barn of a cinema building.
I’ve no idea what it looks like inside or if there were any Art Deco detailings in the interior.

Do you suppose that when folk exited the cinema after watching a musical they were dancing in the streets of Raith?

See a similar photo at the Scottish cinemas website.

Curiously just along the same street from the former Raith there is another unusual religious building; for Scotland that is. A Coptic church. You can occasionally see the priest in Kirkcaldy High Street, in his full beard, ecclesiastical hat and black robes.

This is a sad one as it’s now in a depressing state. I caught a glimpse of it one day when driving past and the next time I was nearby and on foot I made sure to take a photograph.

Upstairs used to be the cinema’s cafe. The windows there are just amazing.

This is what it looked like when it was still operating as a cinema.

There are some photos of the closing night also on the Scottish cinemas website.

Two more photos of the cinema in its heyday are on this site.

It’s a shame that a building like this has fallen into disuse.

I finally got over to Glasgow and took some (not very good) photos.

 

This is a former cinema now very sympathetically converted to flats.

The Art Deco/modernist styling of the conversion can also be seen in this second photo.

A better picture than either of mine is on Flickr. It helps that that one was taken in sunshine!
 

You can read about The Ascot’s history as a cinema at the Scottish cinemas and theatres project website. There are some nice pictures there of the building lit up at night. The historical photos there show that the orange pillars are a relatively new embellishment! They are effective, though. The foyer looks great in the black and white photos.

More information is available at The Glasgow Story where the original configuration of the roof line can be seen.

There is another good picture of the update at Cala Finance.