Newcastle Odeon and its rise and fall
FOR those of us familiar with the streets of central Newcastle, the sight of the old Odeon cinema is a miss these days. For decades it sat reassuringly on busy Pilgrim Street as the city transformed around it.
Watching a film at the Odeon, for countless thousands, was a Tyneside rite of passage - and regular trips there became a way of life.
Today, the one-time favourite picture house is no more, its space filled instead by the Stack - a shipping container village featuring a lower level of shops and an upper level of cafes and bars.
It is a temporary development - and will be gone in four years’ time.
Our two main photos were, again, kindly provided by Trevor Ermel. The keen amateur photographer, who lives in Whitley Bay, has charted the changing face of urban Tyneside and the River Tyne since the late 1960s.
We see the Odeon in 1995 - and the same location today.
Despite much opposition, the building was finally demolished and consigned to history late last year.
It had closed its doors in 2002, standing empty and crumbling - a sad shell of its former grand self as it awaited its fate.
It was a far cry from the glory days. Originally called The Paramount, the cinema opened on September 7, 1931. (It changed its name in 1939 after becoming part of the Odeon chain).
It was the beginning of an era which would see the spectacular spread of the cinema phenomenon - a time when every town in the region would have at least one, often more, picture halls.
Back in the 1930s there was no cinema in the North East comparable to the The Paramount. It was described as one of the best in Europe. Moviegoers at the time were said to be amazed by the opulence of the new picture palace.
It seated 2,602 people and its American super-cinema design attracted film-goers from across the North East. The hanging light fittings in the foyer were coated in nine-carat gold, and the walls of the circle lounge were hung with oil paintings from the Paramount Gallery.
The cinema’s Wurlitzer organ rose on a power-operated lift at the side of the stage, as did the symphony orchestra pit.
Big-name dance bands like Billy Cotton and Joe Loss played The Paramount, and there were personal appearances by stars of the day like George Robey, Anna Neagle, Al Bowlly and George Formby.
The Odeon continued to do good business through the decades, until a slow decline in audiences from the 1960s onwards brought its closure 16 years ago.