Broadway

The Broadway Cinema at 80 Main Street, Prestwick, opened in April 1935. It was built for the Prestwick Cinema Company Limited.

The chairman of the company was J.C. Sword, who ran a haulage business in Airdrie, Lanarkshire. Papers from the 1940s also list Sir Alexander B. King as managing director, along with James McClure and T.W. Richardson. The latter seems to have been replaced by J.C. McGregor by the early 1950s, while the secretary during the same period was William Gardner.

Of these names, Alex King seems to have been the most hands-on of the directors. Much correspondence survives between the famous Scottish cinema mogul and his long-time manager at the Broadway, James C. Ross, to which we shall return later.

Architect

The architect of the Broadway was Alister G. MacDonald, a figure just as interesting as the cinema’s colourful managing director.

MacDonald was the eldest son of Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsey MacDonald. Alister’s first cinema job was probably as Clerk of Works to Frank Verity for Paramount’s Plaza in London’s Regent Street in 1925–26. After a spell studying skyscrapers and sound insulation design in America, he became the leading architect of newsreel cinemas in Britain.

The skills he learned in the USA proved useful when designing these small, compact news cinemas for cramped and awkward sites such as railway stations. His most famous designs of this kind were at Victoria and Waterloo stations in London, although his plans for a cinema in Glasgow’s Central Station were sadly unrealised.

He also built numerous conventional cinemas, most notably for the Caledonian Associated Cinemas group (CAC) in Scotland. These included the Playhouses in Peebles, Montrose, now demolished, and Elgin, all completed in 1932. He also designed the Empire Cinema for the Empire Exhibition in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park in 1938. This was later moved to Lochgilphead, where it survives as a guesthouse.

Exterior Design

MacDonald’s design for the Broadway had a symmetrical, streamlined façade with a recessed, three-storey central section, flanked by two-storey wings which curved in to meet it on both sides. These were in turn flanked by single-storey shop units extending out to either side. A car park was provided at the rear.

The shop units had attractive Art Deco glazing and were separated from each other by vertical bands of horizontally striped coloured stone. These curved in towards the main entrance portico, which was set back from the street and had a terrazzo floor and four sets of double doors. The doors and the panels above them also featured attractive Art Deco glazing. A small canopy projected slightly over the street above the entrance.

The central section of the façade was largely made from reconstituted stone and had a vertical emphasis. Its four tall bands of stone were relieved by three similarly narrow window bays. These had taller windows at first-floor level to illuminate the café, with smaller windows directly above, separated by a lighter-coloured stone infill. At the top of the central section was a large horizontal Broadway name sign, set on a horizontal string course, coloured red and outlined in neon.

By contrast, the flanking wings of the café were made largely of brick and had a horizontal emphasis, with stone string courses above the windows and at coping level. The windows were wide and narrow, following the curve of the wall at ground-floor level below.

Main Foyer

Once inside, the Broadway had a surprisingly deep foyer area. This was split-level, with the wider rear section reached by descending a few steps. The narrower outer section contained a central island paybox at the top of the steps. The wider rear level had a multitude of doors leading to the gents’ toilets on the right, the stalls straight ahead, and the ladies’ toilets and car park on the left.

The main staircase to the balcony was on the right, while a secondary staircase to the balcony foyer and adjacent offices was located in the corridor leading to the car park.

Another feature of the foyer was a double-height section which formed a small rectangular lightwell from the balcony foyer above. MacDonald cleverly placed large windows in the rear wall of the café so that light from the main façade windows would illuminate both the balcony foyer behind it and the rear stalls foyer below.

Balcony Foyer

The balcony foyer was compact and featured a sloping ceiling which followed the rake of the rear balcony above. As elsewhere in the cinema, the lower half of the walls was adorned with dark wood panelling and metal banisters, while the upper walls were relieved by linear horizontal notches.

The ceiling above the lightwell was deeply coffered, and metal balustrades prevented anyone from leaning too far into the void below.

Café

As well as various offices and toilets, the front of the building at first-floor level contained the café. This also featured a coffered ceiling and rich wooden panelling on the lower half of the walls.

A faux fireplace adorned the rear wall between the two internal windows. The counter and café equipment were discreetly situated in one of the corner niches in the flanking wings.

A dumb waiter led to a kitchen area beside the foyer below. A small staircase that would have given direct access to the café was also present.

MacDonald’s attention to finishing was again evident here. Details included highly polished wooden doors with glazed inlays, stainless steel or chrome banisters and dados, small Art Deco light fittings and moulded triangular architraves above the doors. Almost all the doors had illuminated glass signs above them and featured chrome hexagonal handles.

Auditorium

The auditorium itself was relatively simple but effective. Above the curved wooden panelling, the side walls were relieved only by shallow vertical overlaps which continued up onto the ceiling. MacDonald was known to have used such features at other cinemas, including the Montrose Playhouse, as they provided a relatively inexpensive way of producing a three-dimensional effect through light and shade.

In the centre of the ceiling, a large rectangular trough feature with scalloped internal edges and recessed lighting ran almost as far as the deep ante-proscenium arch. This arch was very wide and splayed into an inner ante-proscenium much closer to the actual screen opening. The curve of the balcony front continued up to the proscenium.

Rather curiously, the auditorium also featured ceiling ventilation grilles decorated with a camel motif. At the rear of the balcony, an exit led to the secondary staircase and provided access to the projection room and storerooms. A vomitory from the upper foyer emerged in the centre of the balcony.

The rear stalls had horizontal banding running along the back wall and a central, deeply stepped rectangular recess in the ceiling beneath the balcony.

Closure and Conversion

The cinema continued into the 1960s but contemporary documentation records it as operating on bingo part-time by March 1964, with bingo taking over completely around 1966. After ten years of bingo use, an attempt was made to screen films again, for four nights a week, starting on the 23rd February 1976. John Sword, who had been a director of the cinema since it opened, said that family films would be shown, remarking that "we are not in business to cater for the 'X" market". In actuality, adverts in the Ayrshire Post show that X-certificate films featured regularly, including The Exorcist (advertised with the special warning that it was not for the weak of heart!), Confessions of a Window Cleaner, a double bill of Naughty Nurses and Sex Clinic, Emmanuelle and the final film shown in this era of the cinema's history, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest on the 20th November 1976. The revived cinema experiment had lasted only 9 months, and had experimented with various types of programming and days of the week, and even weekend late shows ("NB Couples only admitted"). The final advert carried by the Ayrshire Post noted that closure was "due to a lack of public support".

In the early 1980s, it was sold to the Sheerans, a family in the amusements business, and was converted, this time involving more radical physical changes to the building. The ground-floor entrance foyer was clad with false wall and ceiling panels and converted into an amusement arcade. The main staircase to the balcony was blocked off. Interestingly, all the other original doors were retained, and the island paybox was brought back into use as a change booth.

In the rear stalls, a small area was walled off to form a pool room. Some of the original plasterwork in that area was retained, although it was painted in a uniform dark colour.

Perhaps most destructively, four squash courts were built in the front of the main auditorium. These extended into and damaged both the stage and proscenium at the front and the front of the balcony at the rear - cutting out a large chunk of balcony steelwork to fit. The balcony itself, together with the upper foyer and café areas, fell out of public use at this time. The building was renamed the Prestwick Leisure Centre.

Post-closure Dereliction & Failed Plans

The leisure centre had closed by 2003, and the building was sold then to the Buzzworks Group, who run pubs and restaurants throughout Ayrshire. The building was listed at Category-C by Historic Scotland in 2004, affording a degree of protection.

Prior to listing, in 2003, South Ayrshire Council granted planning permission (03/01043/COU) to demolish the auditorium block and replace it with a hotel development. The main foyer block would be retained as part of the redevelopment and would house a restaurant, coffee shop and cocktail lounge. Surviving Art Deco features were to be retained where appropriate.

This permission was never enacted. Subsequently, with the building now listed, a similar application (06/01546/COU) with accompanying listed building consent (06/01550/LBC) was made in 2006. This time, permission was refused as there was insufficient detail on the retention and salvage of surviving historical features. A 2010 application to convert the building into a pub was passed (10/00974/APP) but, again, never enacted.

Conclusion

All in all, the Prestwick Broadway is a remarkable survival. The furnishings and fittings which survive today may not be entirely original, but the fascinating and invaluable archive documents which we rescued from a projection room toilet show that, where maintenance and replacement were necessary, considerable effort was made to obtain matching and appropriate repairs or replacements. These documents were donated to the Moving Image Archive at the National Library of Scotland.

To this end, it is one of the most atmospheric surviving 1930s cinemas in Scotland and remains highly evocative of the period in which it was built. Following the demolition of Alister MacDonald’s famous newsreel cinemas in Waterloo and Victoria stations in London, it is also perhaps his best surviving cinema commission.

It is made all the more interesting by the aforementioned large written archive, which offers a glimpse into the day-to-day running of a cinema from its heyday to its slow demise at the hands of bingo.

Many thanks to the staff of the Buzzworks Group and the Friends of the Broadway Prestwick for granting access to the building so that it could be recorded at various points.