Stoll Picture Theatre

The Stoll Picture Theatre on the Kingsway opened in 1917, making it the only West End cinema to begin its life during World War I. The imposing building was originally designed as the London Opera House, before it was purchased in 1916 by the music hall impresario Oswald Stoll, who converted it from a live theatre to a cinema the following year.¹ In later years, Stoll would open more cinemas in other cities around Britain. He also become increasingly involved in the film industry, both as a distributor and producer of films, making the Stoll Picture Theatre part of a larger entertainment empire.² It lasted as a cinema until the 1940s, when it switched to hosting revues and musical shows.³

During the 1920s, the Stoll Picture Theatre offered audiences a range of pleasures. In common with other West End cinemas, the venue offered much more than simply films. Other amenities included an ice cream parlour, a soda fountain and a café, all of which seem to have been aimed especially at women patrons.⁴ Its in-house magazine, the Stoll Herald, edited by Kathleen Mason, kept viewers informed on the current films and film star gossip, and even featured letters from patrons.⁵ The cinema also boasted a large organ, installed in 1922, and an orchestra. Looking back over the cinema’s first decade in the mid-1920s, a journalist for The Bioscope remarked that the Stoll Picture Theatre (which seated over 2,000 people) could lay claim to be an early example of a ‘super cinema’ like the Tivoli, opened at a time when ‘the “Super” of to-day was undreamed of’.⁶

The Stoll Picture Theatre also arguably formed a link between the large West End picture palaces and the smaller specialist cinemas and film societies that appeared in London during the 1920s. In 1918, the cinema launched the Stoll Picture Theatre Club, under the directorship of Leila Lewis. The club allowed its members access to special club rooms and admission to lectures from notable speakers, including the popular writer Edgar Wallace and the psychologist Cyril Bert, who spoke on the effect of cinema on children.⁷ The club did not turn the Stoll Picture Theatre into an art cinema, like the nearby Embassy Theatre. But it did suggest that that London’s cinemagoers were increasingly eager to share their enthusiasm for films and to discuss the cinema’s place in the modern world.

Image: Detail showing the Stoll Picture Theatre in the 1920s, from Graham Sutton, ‘The Coming of the Cinema’, in St. John Adcock (ed.), Wonderful London, 3 vols. (London: Fleetway Press, 1926), vol. 3, pp. 1072-83.

Further reading:

• Allen Eyles with Keith Skone, London’s West End Cinemas, third edition (Swindon: English Heritage, 2014).
• Nathalie Morris, ‘Pictures, Romance and Luxury: Women and British Cinema in the 1910s and 1920s’, in Melanie Bell and Melanie Williams (eds), British Women’s Cinema (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 19-33.
• Cathy Ross, Twenties London: A City in the Jazz Age (London: Museum of London/Wilson, 2003).