A BRIEF HISTORY

The cinema was built on the site of The Broadmead Hotel, or more precisely to the back of it. The auditorium or hall being built first, sometime between 1907 and 1910 as the Paignton Bioscopic Exhibition centre - the word 'cinema' didn't exist in those days. People would come through the front door of the hotel, through its hall into the auditorium to watch slides and short films of about 4 to 5 minutes each, with a 21 piece orchestra playing during the showing.

As the showings became more popular a proper cinema was built in place of the hall and the hotel was then closed and knocked down. The final part of the present building, the office block to the side was completed in 1913, and the Paignton Picture House was formed.

The whole enterprise began when one of our local business men, a Mr Lambshead, decided Paignton needed a picture palace, he and his fellow local business friends did not really know how to go about this, so they set off to Paris to visit the Gaumont, which opened in 1911 (as the largest cinema in the World at that time, with 3,400 seats) to see if they could get some ideas. When they came back the building started.

The Broadmead hotel had been built on a outcrop of sandstone, but the back (where

the cinema was to be built) had to have a different type of foundation because it, like so much of that area of Paignton, was reclaimed salt marsh land.

To create the foundations, they used to grow vast areas of long flexible willow twigs called withies. Apparently they cut it, weaved huge mats, mixed it with local clay, and let it dry in huge slabs, then placed these on top of the salt beds, layer after layer. They would then put down about ten layers of railway sleepers, which had been pickled in creosote and on top of that 5 feet of reinforced concrete. Seeing that the building is next to a railway and busy road it has moved very little in the last 100 years.