Hippodrome Cinema

In Langley Park, a village four miles to the west of Durham, County Durham. The New Hippodrome opened on Monday 20th March 1911 with a mixture of variety, films and plays (especially ‘blood and thunder’ melodramas such as “The Face at the Window”). There was seating for 700 patrons.

The building was 75ft by 40ft, with a stage frontage of 30ft. Its construction, of corrugated iron with an internal lining of wood, appears to have been rather flimsy. The proprietors were Messrs. Dixon & Winter.

The New Hippodrome moved over exclusively to film shows in 1920, and was renamed the Hippodrome Cinema.

When the ‘talkies’ arrived, a British Thomson-Houston(BTH) system was installed. It is not known whether CinemaScope, as such, was installed, although former patrons did remember the arrival of a “wide screen” (the proscenium is listed as 19ft wide in the 1959 Kinematograph Year Book, but CinemaScope is not mentioned). By this time, the seating capacity had been reduced, rather drastically, to 450.

The Hippodrome Cinema closed on 6th February 1960 with “Idle on Parade”, starring Anthony Newley. Manager Tommy Wilkinson, who had been at the cinema since 1939, advocated a move to bingo, interspersed with film shows, but there were already no fewer than four venues in the village offering bingo sessions.

It is not known what uses the building went over to, but it was eventually demolished in December 2005.

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