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 in buildings. Walpole Champneys designed the interiors, and Walter Bayes, the principal of the Royal College of Art at the time, created the murals that covered the walls. Lawrence Preston of Brighton College of Art created the proscenium, the enormous painted arch that framed the screen.
It had vibrantly colored dancing figures that viewers would have seen each time they looked up from their seats. More than 2,000 of those seats were set up in a single opulent auditorium that didn’t compromise on the notion that a movie theater should feel modest or practical.
But it was more than just the auditorium that set the Regent apart from its peers. The structure was intended to resemble a social complex rather than a picture home. By 1923, it had grown to include a Ship Café with curved walls, period details, and an 18th-century vessel-like interior, as well as a Georgian Restaurant with a resident orchestra.
Above all, there was a rooftop ballroom with one of the nation’s best-sprung dance floors. It could accommodate about a thousand people and frequently did. Without leaving the building, you could come for dinner, watch a movie, and dance to cap off the evening.
Even the seemingly strange details were intentional. According to reports, live budgerigars were kept in wire enclosures on the walls of the Regent’s auditorium, and guests could have tea and toast delivered right to their seats. It’s the kind of detail that sounds made up but perfectly complements the building’s intended purpose. The Regent wasn’t trying to sell you a movie ticket. It was offering you an afternoon or evening of something that seemed genuinely opulent for the cost of admission.
Its location on Queen’s Road was also important. The movie theater sat at the intersection of North Street and Brighton Railroad Station, the city’s busiest pedestrian thoroughfare. Before they reached the sea, tourists arriving by train would have passed it. There was no reason for locals to go anywhere else when they left for the evening. It wasn’t a coincidental location. The Regent set up shop there fully aware that it was the city’s main thoroughfare.
The structure continued to change. After an eighteen-month closure due to a fire in 1929, it reopened with a new Wurlitzer organ, a Western Electric sound system, and its first talkie, Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool. In 1929, when the entire industry was rushing to make the switch, The Regent became one of the first Brighton theaters to wire for sound. It later acquired CinemaScope in the 1950s and 70mm projection capability in 1962. Every improvement was a reflection of a movie theater that was still striving to be the greatest version of itself after decades.
When you read that Cabaret was the last movie to be shown there on April 14, 1973, it’s difficult not to feel something. The following year, the movie theater closed and was demolished. Boots the Chemist now operates out of the Queen’s Road location. Nothing in the street suggests what there was; neither a memorial scale to the loss nor a plaque that would be noticeable to a casual observer.
In the 1970s, Britain demolished numerous structures similar to this one, frequently concurrently announcing the construction of a more modern and useful structure nearby. The owners of the Regent were concentrating on the West Street Kingswest development. Progress, or something similar, had different ideas.