BIG PICTURE
rinks, in Prestbury Road and Bond Street, around this time. The King’s Hall had a maple floor, and was doubtless used for dancing as well as roller-skating.
The next craze was for moving pictures, and the Picturedrome Company bought the hall in 1911, and obtained a licence to use it as a cinema. Presumably this was only ever intended as a temporary measure, since the Picturedrome Company was already building a new cinema on the site of Pitts’s furniture shop which had burned down in January 1910.
The King’s Hall Picture Palace opened on 15 May 1911, and closed on July 2. The Picturedrome, Chestergate, which is still standing though no longer a cinema, opened on October 21. For some years the King’s Hall was a part of the fire station – it is marked as such on the large-scale Ordnance Survey map of the 1960s.
It would seem that the bus depot was built on the garden of the old house, fronting King Edward Street. In fact, I would guess it is the front of the bus garage, with the big sliding doors, that appears to the right of the photograph that I took in 1972.
As Peter Nash wrote in his letter, bus services started in November 1913, but the North Western Road Car Company moved its headquarters to Charles Street, Stockport, in 1924. It isn’t clear how long they retained the garage in King Edward Street. The bus station in Sunderland Street opened in 1939.
Holyrood House itself was demolished in 1920, but one gate-post was left, which you can see in the photograph. Beyond it are the premises of Wood and Sons, produce merchants,