Queen’s Road in Brighton was always full of aspirations. A full-size Hill, Norman, and Beard theater organ, a dance hall, a café, a restaurant, and an orchestra pit were all included when the Regent Cinema opened there on July 27, 1921. That’s an incredible amount of infrastructure for a movie theater. That reveals something about Brighton’s past and present as a city that values entertainment, spectacle, and doing things correctly. The Regent’s initial organ performed satisfactorily. British-made, capable, and appropriate for the silent film era, it guided viewers through the emotional shifts of images lacking a voice. The building was…
Author: Alison James
At the Troxy in Stepney, east London, there’s a moment when you hear something before you realize what you’re seeing. The walls appear to be breathing. A shimmering white and gold console with four rows of keys, hundreds of stops, and pedals extending in all directions can be seen when you hear a noise coming from somewhere you can’t quite place. It’s a lot to process. The largest cinema organ ever installed in Britain is the Trocadero Elephant and Castle Wurlitzer, which is also arguably the most durable instrument this nation has ever had. It began at the Trocadero Cinema…
A crate containing what would turn out to be a tiny but significant piece of British musical history arrived at Southampton Docks on a chilly December day in 1924. The Wurlitzer Opus 956, a small, two-manual, six-rank Style-D pipe organ, was constructed at the company’s North Tonawanda, New York, factory and transported across the Atlantic to the Picture House in Walsall, Staffordshire. It wasn’t a big show. A provincial theater eager to add something unique to its silent film schedule made the sensible purchase. Nevertheless, this instrument is still in use a century later. Even those who were only present…
There is an instant difference between sitting at a church organ and a theater organ. Although the keys, pedals, and stops on the console may appear somewhat familiar, the reasoning behind everything changes. One instrument was designed with reverence in mind. The other was constructed for display. Knowing that difference reveals something genuinely fascinating about the past of entertainment and music. Since the Middle Ages, the church organ has existed in a variety of forms. It gradually changed over centuries to accommodate liturgical music, such as Bach, congregational hymns, and the kind of sound that reverberates throughout a stone cathedral.…
You are momentarily stopped by a 1921 photograph of the front of the Regent Cinema on Queen’s Road in Brighton. Not because it’s particularly dramatic, but rather because the scale seems out of place for the time—too big, too planned, too confident for a city still adjusting to life after the war. When the Regent first opened on July 27 of that year, it was operating in a different category than anything the nation had ever seen. It was designed by Robert Atkinson, who approached the Adam and Art Deco style commission with a confidence that is no longer found…
The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company was finishing and shipping one theater organ every day in 1926, at the height of the silent film era. It’s difficult to visualize that figure. Each instrument had hundreds of pipes ranging in length from pencil-thin to thirty feet or more, weighed several tons, and needed its own special chambers built into the structure. The console, which was the organist’s curved, horseshoe-shaped desk surrounded by colored stop-tabs, was merely the portion of the apparatus that was visible. The actual equipment was located inside the walls, beneath the stage, backstage. Nevertheless, the majority of those instruments had…
On July 27, 1921, Brighton’s Regent Cinema on Queen’s Road opened, and it wasn’t modest about what it had to offer. This was more than just a picture house; it included an orchestra pit, a dance hall, a café, and a restaurant. The structure presented itself as a destination rather than merely a venue. The Regent was a perfect fit for Brighton’s understanding of leisure in the early 1920s. A reputable British theater organ, the Hill, Norman, and Beard organ, was the first instrument installed there. It seemed fitting for a movie theater with such aspirations. It carried a full…