Electric Palace Cinema

The Electric Palace was built at a cost of £1,500 and opened on Wednesday 29 November 1911. The cinema was an immediate success and continued to be financially successful through WW1 thanks to the presence of Navy personnel in the port of Harwich. However almost as soon as the war was over business at the “Palace”, as the cinema was now called, went into decline due to the loss of population from Harwich to nearby Dovercourt and competition from the newer, plusher, cinemas there.

For nearly four decades the Palace struggled on, never doing badly enough to close, but never doing well enough to justify enlargement or a major facelift. The coming of sound in 1930 gave a boost, but it was short-lived. Then in 1953 the cinema was inundated by seawater due to the East-Coast flood of that year, which forced it to close. Although it was dried-out, repaired and reopened, the floods had affected more than just the cinema, nearby housing had also been affected reducing further the local population. This proved to be the ‘last nail in the coffin’, and the Palace closed after 45 years of operation. On 3 November 1956.

For the next 16 years the building lay abandoned and largely forgotten until in 1972 it was discovered by Gordon Miller of Kingston Polytechnic, who was leading a group of students on a survey of Harwich. He was amazed to find this virtually unaltered relic of the early period of cinema architecture lying forgotten in a Harwich side street. He was also disturbed to discover that the town council was intending to demolish the entire block of which the cinema was a part to provide additional parking space for Lorries. With the aid of the Harwich Society he obtained a Listing for the cinema as being “a building of sociological interest” in September of that year.