As part of its 90^th birthday celebrations in December 2021 and January this year, the Regent Centre opened doors for a backstage tour.

I went along to find out more about the Regent Centre, its history and its place in the Christchurch community over the past 90 years.

To begin, we were taken into the newly-refurbished auditorium, where we were seated ready to be told some of the Regent’s history.

The Regent was built in 1931 for local solicitor Thomas J Rowley, and opened on Boxing Day that year with a screening of ‘Taming of the Shrew’. At the time, it was not unusual for cinemas to be built as a speculative venture as, not only would it provide some employment, but also had the potential to be sold on for a profit to a cinema chain once established. The build cost £25,000, just one tenth of the cost of the build of the cinema on Westover Road around the same time.

When it first opened, the Regent seated around 700 patrons in the circle and stalls and competed directly with the Pavillion cinema at Bargates.

After five years, Portsmouth Town Cinemas took over the operation of the Regent, which continued until the cinema came into the hands of Shipman and King cinemas in the late 1960s. The new company carried out a major, and much-needed, refurbishment under the architects Seal and Hardy. The cinema was redesigned with clean lines, and a more deco style.

A short time later, the cinema was taken over by the Grade organisation, which merged with EMI and traded under the ABC cinema chain name. Unusually, the regent kept its name – most other cinemas coming under the ABC umbrella at that time were rebranded as ABC venues.

The Regent closed as a cinema in 1973, as the rising popularity of television drove down ticket sales. The last film shown was a double bill of ‘The Thief Who Came to Dinner’ starring Ryan O’Neill and ‘the Train Robbers’ starring John Wayne and Anne Margret.

At a time when other cinemas were being demolished, the Regent was saved by a growing demand for bingo, and was converted into a Mecca Bingo Hall, and remained as such until 1982. When Mecca pulled out, the Regent was bought by Christchurch Town Council, a trust was formed to run the building and thus began its current lease of life.

The Regent building is still council-owned, but is run by its trust, which takes responsibility for everything inside the building. Any profits made from a show or screening are ploughed straight back into the trust to continue developing and looking after the centre.

As well as the trustees, there is a staff of 12, supported by an army of volunteers, without whom the Regent could not run.

The Regent continues to go from strength to strength. 2019 was its most successful year to date, with 155,000 tickets sold – not far behind the total tickets sold for Bournemouth Pavilion that year. The profits funded the restoration of the auditorium and foyer, at a cost of around £400,000, bringing it back to the same style as it would have been in the 1960s after the Seal and Hardy refurbishment.

Nowadays, the Regent shows a mixture of films and live shows, and a trip backstage showed just how this has been made possible.

The original building has been extended at the back to provide dressing rooms and rehearsal space for visiting performers. A studio space – once used as an intimate cinema theatre – is not currently being used on a regular basis, but there are plans to make it a more usable space.

On stage, the scenery ropes have been replaced, and lighting bars are now managed with winches. The lighting is all managed digitally – the lights change direction and colour following commands from the lighting desk.

The electrics had to be replaced due to an arson attack when someone set fire to some rubbish in the alleyway next door to the theatre on one Friday 13 in 2010. Despite substantial damage taking out the electrics, the Regent was able to reopen after just five days.

Not many people visiting the Regent will know that there is a museum upstairs in the projection room. It opened in 2017 and, despite the limited space, has a comprehensive collection of vintage cinema artefacts including two fully working 35mm projectors, a side lantern, an automaticket machine and a selection of posters and photographs of long-gone local cinemas.

In the early days of cinema, working a projector was a highly skilled and potentially dangerous job. The projector would use a naked flame and the film would have been made from flammable cellulose, so fires were common. The projection room at the Regent is built entirely separately from the auditorium so, should there have been a fire, only the projection room would have been affected. Early films ran on reels that required changing every 10 minutes, and the sound had to be matched to the images. Later films were supplied on vinyl disks, each used only 40 times, which ran at 33 speed.

The most recent films, in contrast, are downloaded digitally and played through a digital projector.

The Regent Centre has played a large part in Christchurch’s history, and many people will have memories from the centre over the years. The trustees plan to keep that legacy going for many more years to come.

There will be more open days during the year, so if you would like to explore the Regent Centre too, go to www.regentcentre.co.uk to see the available dates and to book.