Regal Remnant

  • Tamzin Munro
This print series documents the rooms and machinery of a dilapidated and abandoned cinema which first opened 15th february 1932 in Kingston Upon Thames. After the cinema closed 17th July 1976, it was turned into a bingo hall. When this then closed, I began to wonder about its past. It took me a few weeks just to find a way in, but when I finally gained access, the wait was certainly worth it.

Hidden behind it’s decorated outer shell, the crumbling interior of this building is astonishing. You first enter where the stage would have originally been. The height of the ceiling makes you feel insignificant, with shards of yellow and red being exposed by the fleeting sky light.

Even though there is more paint scattered on the floors than on the walls, and it has become a home for hundreds of pigeons, it still retains some strange sort elegance and allure, and a tangible sense of excitement. The way the paint is peeling, layer after layer, makes the walls look like great archaic pieces of fine art.

The projection room, with all its original machinery, is my favourite. Today’s advanced technology has long rendered the machinery in this room obsolete. There are square holes in the walls that look down and over the balcony, down across the whole theatre. From here you can see everything; the old seats, the private balconies, the aisles and where the stage used to lie. Impressive now, but imagine what it would’ve been like decades ago, with the bright lights, the animated actors and the rising music? Most of the rooms are tiny and dark, with the odd spit of sunlight from a broken window hanging on the wall.

What attracted me most to this building, was the idea that so many memories have been created in the same space that I was standing. A complete different era had celebrated and used this building in a way it would never be used like again. There is now very little to show for it, apart from a few remaining details to remind us of its previous function. And of course, the click and roll of my camera.

This print series celebrates the crumbling grandeur of a bygone era that will eventually be forgotten. My photos are a record of this building before it becomes something completely new, or worse, nothing at all.