Save our sole cinema (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

Save our sole cinema

3:49pm Friday 6th February 2009

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By Janet Wright »

What would you like to have in the heart of Walthamstow? A magnificent Art Deco cinema surrounded by shops and cafes, or a centre for a controversial religious group surrounded by traffic-choked streets?

Write now to your local councillor if you don’t want the council to sabotage Walthamstow’s chance of town-centre revival.

Waltham Forest’s only remaining cinema, the Granada, was bought by a Brazilian organisation called the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) in 2002. They promptly closed it down, but were refused permission to change it into a meeting place. Since then, the UCKG has shown its contempt for Walthamstow, and for the law governing care of listed buildings: handed over in sparkling condition, the lovely old cinema is now a semi-derelict eyesore.

The Granada has much to offer as a cinema: not only its stunning architecture and town-centre location, but one of the country’s few working cinema organs and a stage. Special events including silent films with live music used to bring audiences flocking to Walthamstow. At least six cinema chains have wanted to buy and reopen the Granada (also known as the EMD) over the years. But the council has refused to do a compulsory purchase order and sell the building on. Instead, pie-in-the-sky plans for a multiscreen cinema on the site next door have been leaked to the press and scared off would-be operators.

Now the council is in secret talks to allow the change of use. Part of the building will supposedly set aside as a conference centre where films could be shown.

But a group of film-lovers, formed to try to save the Granada, has found out what actually happens when the UCKG comes to town. Here’s what happened when the UCKG bought the ABC cinema in Catford: “Despite massive local opposition, planning permission was granted for a similar ‘compromise solution’ during 2005, after UCKG gave assurances that a portion of the building would be used as a ‘community cinema’,” the McGuffins report on their website, www.mcguffin.info. “An independent cinema operator was engaged to run this ‘community cinema’ at the site while UCKG developed the remaining portion of the building for church use.

“The independent cinema operator has since told the McGuffin Film Society that UCKG ‘became extremely uncooperative as soon as their planning permission was approved’ and the cinema plan was eventually scrapped when the operator walked away ‘in disgust’. The former ABC Cinema reopened as a fully fledged UCKG church in 2006 and no community cinema facilities were ever developed at the site.”

When the public enquiry was held, I watched the UCKG bringing in coachloads of supporters to claim that that they lived in Walthamstow and wanted a local meeting-place. Strangely, they didn’t seem to know the area or be able to name a street in Walthamstow. But once the UCKG owns a building, thousands of members arrive in cars. Anyone who knows the former Rainbow Theatre near Finsbury Park tube will know how the surrounding streets have been clogged since the UCKG took over the building.

Write to your local councillor here and the McGuffins at themcguffins@hotmail.com. Take action now, if you don’t want the council allowing this final blow to Walthamstow’s long-neglected heart.