The Picture House is a

pub A pub (short for public house) is a kind of drinking establishment which is licensed to serve alcoholic drinks for consumption on the premises. The term ''public house'' first appeared in the United Kingdom in late 17th century, and was ...

and former cinema in

Stafford Stafford () is a market town and the county town of Staffordshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It lies about north of Wolverhampton, south of Stoke-on-Trent and northwest of Birmingham. The town had a population of 70,145 in t ...

Staffordshire Staffordshire (; postal abbreviation Staffs.) is a landlocked county in the West Midlands region of England. It borders Cheshire to the northwest, Derbyshire and Leicestershire to the east, Warwickshire to the southeast, the West Midlands Cou ...

, England. It was built in 1913, and is a Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

; it is described in the listing as "A good example of an early cinema retaining interior features."

History and description

The cinema was built in 1913 for Goodalls Pictures. The architects were Campbell and Fairhurst. The brick building has a

stucco Stucco or render is a construction material made of aggregates, a binder, and water. Stucco is applied wet and hardens to a very dense solid. It is used as a decorative coating for walls and ceilings, exterior walls, and as a sculptural and a ...

façade, with a centrally located gable and applied

timber framing Timber framing (german: Holzfachwerk) and "post-and-beam" construction are traditional methods of building with heavy timbers, creating structures using squared-off and carefully fitted and joined timbers with joints secured by large wooden ...

Tudor style Tudor Revival architecture (also known as mock Tudor in the UK) first manifested itself in domestic architecture in the United Kingdom in the latter half of the 19th century. Based on revival of aspects that were perceived as Tudor architecture ...

. The original ticket office has remained. The auditorium has a seven-bay segmented

barrel-vaulted A barrel vault, also known as a tunnel vault, wagon vault or wagonhead vault, is an architectural element formed by the extrusion of a single curve (or pair of curves, in the case of a pointed barrel vault) along a given distance. The curves are ...

ceiling with decorative plaster between the bays. The first film shown was '' The House of Temperley'', on 23 February 1914. A cinema organ was installed in 1917, and the cinema was later equipped for

talkies A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades passed before ...

, of which the first, '' The Last of Mrs. Cheyney'', was shown in 1930."Picture House"
''Cinema Treasures''. Retrieved 9 September 2021. The cinema was purchased in 1930 by the Everston family, and they operated it until it closed in March 1995. It was purchased by

Wetherspoons J D Wetherspoon plc (branded variously as Wetherspoon or Wetherspoons, and colloquially known as Spoons) is a pub company operating in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The company was founded in 1979 by Tim Martin and is based in Watford. It op ...

, and in 1997 it opened as a pub, retaining the name The Picture House.

References

{{Reflist Grade II listed buildings in Staffordshire Buildings and structures in Stafford Former cinemas in England Grade II listed pubs in Staffordshire Tudor Revival pubs