Former pub and cinema up for sale
A PROMINENT Derbyshire town centre building which has been a cinema, pub, restaurant and nightclub is on the market once again.
The property in West Street, Swadlincote, has gone by many different names over the years – including The Lounge Bar, The Paramount, and most recently The Balearic Eye.
It was once the town’s Empire Cinema where many would go to enjoy a film, and the name is still proudly on the wall as a nod to its past. It was formerly known as The Lounge Bar, which stopped trading in 2019, before the Ibiza-themed Balearic Eye burger restaurant opened there last year.
The acid house themed venue, which also recently hosted events under the name Suburbia NiteLife, closed its doors this spring. The building has now been left looking empty once again, and a small ‘to let’ sign has appeared in one of the windows with a phone number.
It has also operated under the name of The Paramount, which
opened in 2007 and closed in 2013. Creating 20 jobs at the time, The Paramount opened as a pub in April 2007 inviting hundreds of punters including VIP guests and town traders for its first night, following a refurbishment of the former Empire Cinema building.
The site was originally home to the Empire Picture Palace which opened in 1912 with a hall seating 500 people on one level and later housed the New Empire cinema, built in 1931 to seat 716 people. It closed in the 1960s and became an amusement arcade for several years until bought by the Barracuda Group (later the Bramwell Pub Company) and converted into a Smith & Jones pub named The Paramount.
It was also previously made part of Swadlincote’s new heritage trail celebrating the town’s rich history with plaques dedicated to buildings such as The Empire, as well as people such as John Avery, who worked at the cinema in the 1950s before being appointed general manager of the London Palladium until his retirement in 1992. He died on May 11, 2016, aged 89.