Sneaking into the Cinema

In through the out door

The doors we rarely used (photo by kind permission of Dan Madden)

In the centre of my home town, Blyth, there stands a huge building that was once a cinema, but which, like many of its fellows, is now a pub belonging to a huge national chain. The building had lain derelict for many years, so its refurbishment was welcomed, and an eyesore was transformed.

It used to be known as the Wallaw Cinema, the proprietor being one WALter LAWson, and I spent many a pleasant hour there as a child. I also have some not so happy memories, such as the film jamming during a Saturday morning sci-fi, and once at the start of a Sinbad film, I was violently sick after eating some Spanish Gold sweet tobacco (I’m convinced that in the darkness I mistakenly picked up my dad’s Old Holborn).

Teenagers Looking for Mischief

When I got to that age where I could go out onto the streets on my own and hang about with friends, we took to prowling the town centre in the evenings, looking for stuff to do. While hanging about in the alley behind the Wallaw one night, we came across an older friend of ours, V, who showed us how to open the cinema fire exit doors from the outside, using a wire coat hanger.

We soon became quite adept at this and we got to see many a film by this means. It wasn’t so much that we couldn’t afford to go to the…