Kensington The old picture house, Thorne

Chapter 4 of 7 · November – December 2011

Taking it apart

Demolition, dust, the last of the auditorium

The tiles came off. The southern wall came down. The projector room went boom. We stripped the old picture house back to brick and memory so there would be room for a family to live here.

  1. 3 November 2011

    ...and we're off!

    So, DSR demolition got everything sorted with the council, Roger Williams sent out all the notices, and the scaffolding started to go up on Tuesday. By Thursday, half the roof was off, and tomorrow, the rest should be of

  2. 5 November 2011

    panoramas of stage and gallery

    This is the gallery seating (apparently the cinema could seat 1,000 people)... ....and this is the screen / stage....

  3. 5 November 2011

    The tiles are off!

  4. 6 November 2011

    The projectionist's perspective

  5. 10 November 2011

    Demolition of the southern wall

    I've got to say, although the auditorium was always up for demolition, and the conservation people said it didn't add anything to the area, I did feel a little sad that we were destroying part of a building that served t

  6. 16 November 2011

    Demolition progress

    Wow! The guys from DSR don't mess about do they? The roof is now completely off, the side walls have come down a level (we're leaving 3m of the side walls for our garden, and building the rest of it with brick reclaimed

  7. 16 November 2011

    What are we doing?

    Seems like I've been asked this question a MILLION times over the last few days, in all contexts! Right now, there's so many aspects to this answer, and I want to record my thoughts on this now, so we can look back and s

  8. 23 November 2011

    The projector room goes boom!

    It's sad that it wasn't practical for us to keep the original projector room, but we need to rebuild it and add a new roof on. There will be coloured glass windows in the south wall inspired by the original projector hol

  9. 26 November 2011

    Sir Kev is our new best friend!

    Loads to talk about but we're all a bit overcome with it all at the moment, so we're going out in Leeds tonight with our family to get back to normality! So, to summarise, the whole gallery seating came out, and I was pe

  10. 27 November 2011

    Smokin!

    There was 'no smoking' stencilled onto the rewind room wall (where they used to rewind the old films) - not surprisingly! Then we smoked the place, and all we found was this....

  11. 27 November 2011

    Terrazzo

    Friday morning, me and Rich are in the hallway, and he kicks the dust (which is about an inch thick all over), and sees a weird pattern on the floor. He scrapes away more, and we realise we've found something. We were pl

  12. 4 December 2011

    Progress

    Barry and his son Darren and the rest of the DSR guys have been working tirelessly on site to complete the demolition work, the first phase of our building plan. The stairs and internal walls have all come out, as has th

  13. 8 December 2011

    Phase 1 - demolition - DONE!

    So, DSR finished their demo work this week, knocking back the building ready for us to start building up and out. The last job they did was to remove the footings of the gallery seating. MY GOD! They knew how to build th

  14. 8 December 2011

    Views from the entrance hall

    My sister, Bron came and took some photos of the house and Kate...

  15. 22 December 2011

    Stripped back

    So, I did my first few honest days work on site over the last few weeks, which is why I've not posted anything up here! I took a couple of weeks off work to get stuck in. This was by no way a commercial consideration! Th

  16. 23 December 2011

    What a blast!

    Wow! For me, this was the day that would reveal whether this was all a mad idea, or a brilliant risk. We've been looking into how best to remove the paint from the front of the building to knock it back to the original b