VERITY'S DOUBLE (November 2013)

David Jones gave a well illustrated talk about the development of the Plaza, Lower Regent Street, London from its opening in 1926 by Paramount (1,896 seats) to its twinning in 1967-68 to give London "The Cinema with the Cinema Upstairs". The Plaza - upstairs - had 820 seats and the Paramount underneath it in the former stall area had 972. Even these spaces eventually proved too large and it again sub-divided in 1977 into Plaza 1-4 . This survived until 2004 when the building was stripped out for offices, a Tesco store and in the basement a 5-screen Apollo cinema.

Adam Unger took up the story with the Carlton, Haymarket designed by the same architect, Frank T Verity, and opened with rather smaller capacity (1,159 seats) in 1927 with a stage production Lady Luck. Film came in March 1928 and the cinema was run by Paramount for 25 years. 20th Century Fox took over in 1954 and the Carlton became the third London cinema to show CinemaScope. Although plans had been drawn up for sub-division they were not carried out, by 1969 the building was falling into disrepair. New plans in 1977 also fell through and after closure that year and the loss of the stage end of the building to offices, it was taken over by Classic and tripled. After several re-brandings, the cinema remains open as Cineworld.