Pathé Building

103-109 Wardour Street, or the Pathé Building, was not a cinema but it did contain multiple private screening rooms. As the name suggests, the building was one of the main London premises for the French film company Pathé-Frères. Pathé films were shown all over the world, and proved especially popular on the fairground circuit.¹ The company established a sales agency in London in 1902, and it was soon responsible for over 20 per cent of the films shown in Britain.² Pathé occupied various offices in London before World War I, including the building at 84 Wardour Street. It expanded into nos 103-109 in 1913. This move reflected the increasing importance of the area as the centre of the London film distribution business, as companies moved from earlier premises, like those in Cecil Court (nicknamed ‘Flicker Alley’), to larger buildings in Soho.³ In 1913, when the London County Council (LCC) investigated conditions in the city’s private screening rooms, the inspectors identified 55 venues. All of them were in the West End, and many of them were located in Soho thoroughfares, such as Wardour Street, Gerrard Street, Denman Street and Shaftesbury Avenue.⁴ Wardour Street, in particular, soon became synonymous with the London film business. Prior to this, it had been best known as a base for second-hand furniture brokers and dealers in ‘spurious antiquities’.⁵

Private trade screening rooms, or showrooms, were important for the growing film industry, because they allowed exhibitors and renters to see new films in advance, in order to decide which films would go down well with their customers. They also allowed film distributors to settle in one place, rather than sending sales agents around the country, or circulating prints of films directly to clients on a sale-or-return basis, both of which had been common practices in the earliest years.⁶ Renters and exhibitors were increasingly expected to travel to a central location to see films. Having clusters of showrooms, like those in Soho, made it easier for people coming from outside London to visit a number of companies in a limited time.⁷

Conditions inside early trade showrooms could be very makeshift, with only basic projection apparatus and often no musical accompaniment. The film journalist Low Warren recalled that sitting in silence on upturned packing crates to watch new films was not an uncommon experience.⁸ A safety inspector visiting the basement screening room of the New Century Film Service on Rupert Street in 1912 found, to his horror, that films were projected in a storeroom full of paper and unprotected nitrate film stock by ‘a lad of about 15 years of age’, while a kettle boiled away on the flame of a nearby gas stove.⁹ Because of these fire risks, the LCC tried at various points to use their licensing powers to shut down screening rooms that were considered particularly dangerous, until it was finally decided in 1914 that private showrooms were exempt from the laws governing public film exhibition.¹⁰

The conditions in the Pathé Building were notably different to such basement showrooms. Instead, they were more like conditions in contemporary picture theatres, allowing Pathé to show off its films in a good light. The building contained screening rooms on the first and second floors, big enough to seat more than 100 viewers in each.¹¹ There was another screening room on the fifth floor. A rough plan of the room submitted to the council shows seats for 80 people, with a separate enclosure for the projection apparatus.¹² In 1915, the fifth-floor screening room was revamped as a ‘roof garden theatre’, with expanded seating for 150 people, a refreshment bar and ‘an elaborate and artistic floral and decorative effect’. ¹³ The private screening theatre was reopened in October, with a special press screening of episodes from the hugely successful Pathé serial The Exploits of Elaine, accompanied by an orchestra. A trade journalist noted: ‘The theatre is in all respects a perfect cinema in miniature – and not so very much in miniature when one considers the large number of people it can comfortably accommodate.’¹⁴ The Pathé Building continued to be a fixture of the Soho film trade into the 1920s.

Further reading:

• Richard Abel, ‘Pathé-Frères’, in Richard Abel (ed.), Encyclopedia of Early Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 505-8.
• Richard Brown, ‘The Missing Link: Film Renters in Manchester, 1910-1920’, Film Studies, 10 (2007), 58-63.
• Simon Brown, ‘Flicker Alley: Cecil Court and the Emergence of the British Film Industry’, Film Studies, 10 (2007), 21-33.
• Simon Brown, ‘From Inventor to Renter: The Middleman, the Production Crisis and the Formation of the British Film Industry’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 11:2 (2013), 100-12.
• María Antonía Velez Serna, ‘Preview Screenings and the Spaces of an Emerging Local Cinema Trade in Scotland’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (2015): http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439685.2015.1052222 (Open Access).