Building with colourful past has a bleak future

THE future now looks bleak for a boarded-up building in Manchester city centre with a colourful past dating back over 100 years.

- By LEE GRIMSDITCH

Ten years ago, the old Cornerhouse cinema building just off Oxford Street station closed.

Except for a group of squatters who turned the building into a temporary art gallery in 2017, the 115-year-old building has lain empty and abandoned.

With work starting in the next few weeks to upgrade Manchester Oxford Road station, the future of this building looks bleak.

Most recently, it was used as the Cornerhouse cinema until 2015.

According to the Cinema Treasures website, the building opened on May 2, 1935, as the Tatler New Theatre. It was Manchester's first news cinema, where people paid to watch news reels.

The 300-seat cinema showed news, cartoons, sports, and travel films to the paying public. However, by the early 1950s, the public's consumption of news in cinemas started to decline.

Like other newsreel cinemas, the Tatler adapted its output to show more cartoons, such as Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry, as well as general-interest topics. However, as fewer new cartoons were made, the cinema needed to change again to survive.

In November 1961, the cinema underwent extensive alterations. It reinvented itself as the Classic Tatler Cinema, showing arthouse, film noir, Westerns, and foreign language films. But in 1969, when the Tatler became the Tatler Cinema Club, eyebrows were raised.

The cinema began showing 'uncensored' and adult films to a membersonly audience. To become a member, you paid £1 a year and seven shillings and sixpence for every show.

The M.E.N spoke to the cinema's publicity controller for the first anniversary of Tatler's reinvention as an 'uncensored' cinema.

A story in the newspaper on May 1, 1970, read: "You get the feeling that 42-year-old Pat Brown, publicity controller for Classic Cinemas, does not mind a bit of outrageous publicity.