The Penistone Paramount Cinema is a community
cinema and
theatre in Shrewsbury Road in
Penistone, near
Barnsley
Barnsley () is a market town in South Yorkshire, England. As the main settlement of the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley and the fourth largest settlement in South Yorkshire. In Barnsley, the population was 96,888 while the wider Borough has ...
, in the heart of the
South Yorkshire Pennines
The Pennines (), also known as the Pennine Chain or Pennine Hills, are a range of uplands running between three regions of Northern England: North West England on the west, North East England and Yorkshire and the Humber on the east. Commo ...
. Besides the film releases, there are also live shows and monthly organ concerts.
History
The building was commissioned as an assembly hall for the town and formed part of a larger complex including
council offices and a library. It was designed by Henry R. Collins in the
Art Deco style, built in brick and stone and was opened by the mayor of
Huddersfield, Joseph Blamires, on 31 October 1914.
The design involved a
rusticated main frontage facing onto Shrewsbury Road. It featured a doorcase with an
architrave
In classical architecture, an architrave (; from it, architrave "chief beam", also called an epistyle; from Greek ἐπίστυλον ''epistylon'' "door frame") is the lintel or beam that rests on the capitals of columns.
The term can ...
and a
keystone. There was a row of seven windows on the first floor and an open
pediment above. It became the Town Hall Picture House showing silent films on 20 November 1915. It proved successful, and with a balcony added in the 1920s, could seat 900 people. A stage and bar were added in the 1960s. In 1986, it was renamed as the Metro Cinema.
The Compton
Organ
Organ may refer to:
Biology
* Organ (biology), a part of an organism
Musical instruments
* Organ (music), a family of keyboard musical instruments characterized by sustained tone
** Electronic organ, an electronic keyboard instrument
** Hammond ...
was built by the John Compton Organ Company in
London, for the Paramount Theatre in
Birmingham, in 1937. The organ was removed from there, when the cinema was refurbished and made into a multiplex, in 1988. It was then transferred to the Regal in
Oswestry
Oswestry ( ; ) is a market town, civil parish and historic railway town in Shropshire, England, close to the Welsh border. It is at the junction of the A5, A483 and A495 roads.
The town was the administrative headquarters of the Borough of ...
, where it stayed until the cinema closed in 1994. It then went into storage for six years. In 2000 The Penistone Cinema Organ Trust purchased the organ, and all of the 1,000 pipes were cleaned out as part of the organ restoration. The trust then entered into an agreement with the council for the organ to be based in the cinema. The cinema was then renamed as the Paramount in honour of the new organ.
The building itself remains the property of Barnsley Metropolitan District Council, and is leased out to Penistone Town Council to keep it open as a cinema. The cinema was featured on the BBC
Politics Show in January 2007 as an example of how a small provincial community cinema can survive. It was used as the cinema setting for episode 2 of the television series,
Brief Encounters
''Brief Encounters'' is a studio album by French singer Amanda Lear, released in 2009 by independent label Just Good Music for Your Ears.
Background
Amanda Lear met the singer and producer Enrico Petrelli in Paris in 2008, and started working ...
, in 2016, and it was refurbished at a cost of £100,000 in summer 2020.
References
{{reflist
External links
Penistone Paramount Cinema website
Buildings and structures in the Metropolitan Borough of Barnsley
Cinemas in Yorkshire
Penistone
Theatres in South Yorkshire