How the Electric Cinema became a Notting Hill icon

On 23rd February 1911, a small revolution took place in West London. One of the first purpose-built cinemas in Britain opened on the site of a former timber yard in Notting Hill. Originally called the Electric Cinema Theatre, it was also one of the first buildings in the neighbourhood connected to the mains. That evening, crowds lined up on the Portobello Road to watch a silent film called Henry VIII.

However, it was not the first cinema in London. That honour belonged to a theatre on Regent Street, which opened in the mid-Victorian Era. In 1896, it showed a short film by the Lumière Brothers: the first motion picture performance in Britain. But, rather than a converted theatre, the Electric was designed exclusively for films.

That design was the work of an architect named Gerald Seymour Valentin. Though motion pictures were a new technology, he constructed the cinema in the Edwardian Baroque style, to resemble a theatre or gallery. Its main hall was decorated with classical details and contained enough space for six hundred people.

The cinema was named after the Electric in Birmingham, which had opened the previous year. Neither cinema had sound facilities, instead showing silent films accompanied by piano music. The Midlands branch of the Electric closed in early 2024, but until then it was arguably the oldest purpose-built cinema in Britain.

The late Edwardian period was the beginning of a cinema boom. The Phoenix in Finchley and the Ritzy Brixton both started around the same time as the London and Birmingham Electrics, and the Empress Picture Theatre in Islington opened a few years later. However, because motion pictures were still a novelty, these were modest operations in the suburbs, as opposed to the grand venues that would one day populate London’s West End.

To begin with, things went badly for the Portobello Road cinema. During the First World War, a bomb was dropped from a Zeppelin onto nearby Arundel Gardens. In response, an angry mob decided that the Electric’s German-born manager was signalling to the German raids from the roof and tried to attack the cinema.

Then, with the development of ‘talking pictures’ in mid-1920s, small theatres like the Electric had to compete with massive venues in Leicester Square and Tottenham Court Road. By the 1930s, Portobello Road was becoming run down, its market attracting rag-and-bone men and bric-a-brac dealers. Although renamed the Imperial Playhouse cinema, the venue was known to most locals as ‘the bughouse.’

However, during the Second World War, the popularity of the cinema rose once more. Up to 4000 people a week would attend the evening viewings, despite the disruption caused by the Luftwaffe bombing raids.

In the 1960s, the venue’s name was changed once more to the Electric Cinema Club. Its films were mostly independent or avant-garde, reflecting the bohemian reputation of the neighbourhood. Then, in 1984, the owners proposed to replace the cinema with an antiques market, until a petition was organised to save the Electric. The 10,000 signatures protesting the decision included celebrities like Audrey Hepburn and Anthony Hopkins.

By this point the Electric was a Notting Hill icon, but it was still forced to close several times over the next decade. Eventually it was bought by a consortium hoping to create the first black-owned cinema in the country, promoting African and Caribbean culture.

The Electric is now owned by Paul Simon, a retail entrepreneur who began his career trading from a market stall on Portobello Road. He not only restored the Edwardian façade, but brought back the elegant interior. When you consider the other cinemas in the neighbourhood that have been turned into flats – the former Essoldo cinema on the King’s Road, or the former Odeon cinema on Kensington High Street – it’s remarkable that the Electric has survived for more than a century.

Nobody knows what the future holds. The pandemic and the popularity of streaming has hurt many cinema chains. But there are few viewing experiences to compare with stepping off the Portobello Road into the Electric’s vintage interior, settling into one of their armchairs with a drink on the side table, watching the lights go down and the room begin to dim. Then the music plays, the screen comes to life, and your imagination soars.