“There’s a lot of real anger here about it.”
Edwin Mingard, founder of Deptford Cinema, is talking about The Jobcentre. Not the employment-seeking office, but the provocatively titled dole-chic bar in Deptford, south-east London, that has become ground zero for the controversy over this area’s dizzying gentrification. Property values have increased more than a third here since 2007. “If you live in a neighbourhood that’s poor and ethnically diverse, and suddenly a place pops up where a drink is £5, that’s what people talk about.”
At first glance, Mingard’s own project seems a likely contender to attract the same kind of ire. It’s a volunteer-run, not-for-profit bid to turn a former cheese cash’n’carry, just a few hundred yards away from The Jobcentre, into a new indie cinema. Initiatives like this often get lumped in with the first, arty stage of gentrification, the seemingly irresistible force that has been accused of shattering urban communities worldwide.
But Mingard is determined to avoid the kind of furore that has surrounded The Jobcentre. The sign outside the unfinished plaster shop says “All welcome”, and Deptford’s punters aren’t just invited: they’ll be building, promoting and running the place too. On Sunday around 20 of them were sat on the floor of the venue, on a ring of salvaged velvet seats (just the base, not the chair back), full of eager resolve. Franck, a student training to be a human-rights lawyer, railed against “Odeonisation”. Sam, a photographer who’s overseeing marketing, was relieved the council has agreed to fund subsidised tickets for asylum seekers and other vulnerable groups. The representative of a local anarchist book fair made a special request that Deptford Cinema run the chill-out room at an upcoming rave.
Indeed, Deptford Cinema is an intriguing hint of how the much-maligned process of gentrification could, in Hollywood parlance, find redemption. Local cinemas are all the rage. In London there has been a resurgence of small picturehouses led by local residents, mostly in districts like Deptford where property prices have spiralled upwards. After a campaign supported by director Mike Figgis, planning permission was granted in July for a new one-screen cinema in Kentish Town on the site of a 1920s technical college; it will be the first since the Venus, the last of the area’s eight cinemas, closed in 1975.
In Walthamstow, residents have been fighting for five years to prevent the former Granada cinema – which shut in 2003 after more than 70 years in business – from being converted into a church. They’ve now teamed up with Soho theatre to raise the £8m needed to make it an all-purpose arts venue – which would bring Waltham Forest, the capital’s other cinema-less borough along with Lewisham, back in the game. Outside of London, Whiteladies Picture House in Bristol, located in affluent Clifton but derelict since 2001, is the subject of a similar campaign.
It’s not just happening in Britain. In Rome’s once-bohemian but increasingly money-clotted Trastevere, police recently cleared out activists trying to prevent the 1950s Cinema America from being the latest victim of property speculation; the struggle to save it continues, supported by the likes of Paolo Sorrentino and Nanni Moretti.
And Brooklyn residents went down the crowdfunding route early this year to prop up the Brooklyn Heights two-screener, the oldest remaining independent in New York, though that scheme looks to have fallen victim to the Darwinian forces of development.
The shining beacon for these projects is the fully operational Arthouse in Crouch End, north London. Housed in a dinky, green-turretted former Salvation Army music hall, it is the first purpose-built cinema in the neighbourhood since a fire gutted the Hippodrome, further down on Tottenham Lane, shortly after a showing of Arthur Askey comedy Back Room Boy in 1942. Since opening in May, more than 70 years later, it already has nearly 1,000 annual members; Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw, a Crouch End local, regularly introduces films there.
Emerging on Thursday afternoon from a showing of Gone Girl, an audience member banters with an usher about the homicidal fun we’ve all just watched: “I’ve been married for 19 years, and I haven’t murdered him yet.” Sitting next to a bearded hipster in the outdoor cafe, 85-year-old Sybil praises the political bent of the Arthouse’s selection, such as a recent documentary about Tony Benn. Lucy, 32, a freelance book reviewer, points out a recent Robin Williams night as an example of the responsive programming. There certainly seems to be a sparky community vibe in the air, a rebuttal to anyone who might think the distressed wood tables, Dalston Cola and quirky signage are tell-tale danger signs.
George Georgiou, the owner, says talk of gentrification misses the point. “Generally, not just with cinema, I think people are looking for ways to feel part of a community, to give them an identity,” he says. His father owns a deli in Tufnell Park, and he hopes his cinema will similarly serve as a long-awaited focal point for his own neck of the woods. “Especially in London, which can be a lonely place. People like to support what’s local.”
Georgiou rejected a planned collaboration with the Curzon cinema chain because he felt their brand was too “high end”, unreflective of the homespun approach he wanted for the Arthouse. Which might involve, for instance, programming works by local film-makers, and not being bound to a larger chain’s release-slate commitments.
Before multiplexes swept everyone up and forced many of the small venues to close, picturehouses offered a more bespoke and intimate form of movie-going, in close proximity to individual neighbourhoods. The revival points to a desire to recapture this social function. Ironically, it is a reversal of the pattern currently unfolding in developing-world countries like India, where cinema-going used to be rooted in the single-screen picturehouse, but is now switching over to the multiplex.
In the west, meanwhile, driven by a hankering for a more “personalised” consumption, we have come full circle, back to the bourgeois, early 20th-century origins of the picturehouse. The first wave was built in the 1910s, in suburbs built for the new urban middle classes some 20-30 years previously. Cinema, and the imaginative licence to roam it offered, was part of the spectrum of new freedoms. The second wave of larger, more ornate buildings – art-deco palaces to house the products of Hollywood’s Golden Age – arrived in the 1920s and 1930s. By then, however, many of the neighbourhoods in which they stood were in economic decline (Kentish Town and Deptford, certainly; even Crouch End languished in postwar doldrums). But cinema was already on the way to becoming the great popular art form of the 20th century, feeding the fancies and frustrations of the metropolitan hordes.
However sincere the current fetish for the bygone glamour, brass fittings and old Pearl & Dean fanfare might be, those days aren’t coming back. Publicly exhibited cinema is not the force it once was: there were 903m cinema visits in the UK in 1933; in 2011, with a population nearly 40% larger, just 172m. But perhaps the 21st century picturehouses – instead of being a middle-class retro affectation – can reclaim their places at the heart of their communities and still exert meaningful social influence.
Mingard says he took great care to approach residents as forthrightly as possible about Deptford Cinema. The name, contrary to appearances, took several meetings to decide on, and was chosen for its air of plainspoken accessibility: “You know what you’re going to get, and you’re know you’re invited.” Lines of communication are all-important, he says. “If you only ever put stuff out on Twitter, that’s fine, but only a certain type of person will come. Another kind of person will respond to a flyer put through the door, something given to them in person or a conversation on the street.”
There was a promising smattering of men and women, nationalities and accents at the meeting, although apart from 88-year-old Dickie Owen, a former actor who appeared alongside Michael Caine in Zulu, most of them were in the expected twentysomething bracket. Mingard says vigilance is needed to make sure the team don’t get complacent in their efforts to pull in working-class people. That is key, he says, if Deptford Cinema’s social aspirations to allow people from different backgrounds to exchange skills and contacts are going to bear fruit. You could apply this philosophy to gentrification as a whole.
Up in Crouch End, Georgiou is feeling bullish about his community links. The multiplexes are fighting back: the Picturehouse chain, owned by Cineworld, who already have a 12-screener up the road in Wood Green, are now opening a branch just 20 metres away from the Arthouse … on the site where the Perfect Picture House, Crouch End’s very first cinema, once stood. It’s a clear bid for psychogeographical legitimacy, but Georgiou isn’t worried. “There was a whole gallery of people protesting when they put their application in,” he says. “We’ve got so much community support, I don’t see how they’re going to survive.”
He has another cinema in nearby Archway awaiting approval, and in his mind is doing picturehouse dot-to-dot across north London. “There are loads of places, like Southgate or Bounds Green. They’re very residential, and there’s not much there. They need that kind of centre to pull everyone together.” Community spirit and the future of cinema rescued – now that could be a drastic revision to the script of Gentrification: The Movie.
Deptford in Documentaries, a series of five short films, is screening at 7pm on 24 October as part of Deptford Cinema’s pre-launch events
