Britain has a strong history of popular local cinema history, particularly as explored by amateur historians and non-academics. While they vary in their modes of address, they share a common emphasis on collating empirical ...

1929 and 1930 were years of concentrated change within the British film exhibition industry. Sound cinema had quickly established itself as the essential attraction of the time, and cinemas throughout the country swiftly ...

The Kingsway Cinema in King’s Heath, Birmingham, opened in 1925 as a super cinema to serve a localised, habitually attending audience. It showed second-run screenings at low prices, and handily out-performed its only local ...

The coming of sound was a swift and decisive moment in cinema history. In the space of half a decade, the paradigms for film production and exhibition underwent a sea change largely unparalleled elsewhere in the medium’s ...

Business records constitute a fundamental source of primary empirical evidence, which illuminate the granular details that collectively form wider regional and national trends. Their rarity has meant that each discovery ...

During the years of transition to sound, no-one had any real idea as to what the lasting impact of the new talking picture would be. Amidst confusion and scepticism amongst film producers and exhibitors alike about the ...

Sound cinema came to Britain and the rest of Europe during a period of general decline in national film industry. The end of the First World War had seen capital and investment in British filmmaking decrease, bolstered by ...