I have already noted the Odeon Cinema in Ayr. Apparently the Gaiety Theatre also used to show films. Checking the Scottish cinemas website I now see that one of the buildings I featured here, was also a cinema, the Orient.

While we were in Ayr I also found the former Green’s Playhouse, in Boswell Park, once the second biggest cinema in Scotland, which opened in 1931 as a replacement for an earlier cinema which had burnt down.

Entrance:-

Roofline:-

Detail:-

By the seaside, on the appropriately named Pavilion Road, is the former Pavilion Cinema, which opened in 1911, has been a ballroom and a nightclub but is now a children’s play centre:-

I was strolling about Dundee a while back (as you do) and noticed an Art Deco building I hadn’t seen before. Since I knew there were several other Art Deco buildings in the city centre, the next time I was in Dundee I took the camera. The pictures will be appearing here over the next wee whiley. (Well, I had to put in a bit of Dundonian for this post.)

The first one is of course of the most striking example of the form in the city. Even if it’s a travesty of its former glory you can’t miss the tower.

Green’s Playhouse was erected in the Nethergate in 1936 as a cinema but has now been converted (rather obviously) to a bingo Hall.

The following is from the Theatres Trust website.
“A large “super-cinema” – second only in the UK in size to Green’s Playhouse in Glasgow (1927) – by John Fairweather. The lavish interior was by John Alexander, with Art Deco foyer and restaurant, and the auditorium, with Corinthian columns and piers marching down the side walls, was described as an”outstanding and enormous Classical/Art Deco theatre”. It was said to have set “standards of luxury unrivalled anywhere else in Scotland”. The exterior was dominated by a 25m lattice steel neon advertising tower, later clad with sheet metal. Bingo and other uses from 1967 until a devastating fire in 1995. The remains were deemed to be dangerous and demolition followed, although the tower survived and is listed (Category B).”

The Scottish cinemas website has some stonking old pictures of the Playhouse in its heyday, including a few of postcards that were made of the exterior, the foyer and Sunshine Café; not to mention of the management and staff! Those were the days. Some of the plans are shown there too.

The building was certainly much classier then than it is now.

Here are the external lighting cylinders in close up.

There’s a photo here of the cylinders with their tips lit up.