Inside Gala Bingo Hall, Tooting
Now renamed Buzz Bingo, I took these photos a while ago when it was known as Gala Bingo. The Art Deco structure has had several transformations since it was built as the Granada cinema in 1931. The stunning interior was made to look like a Russian Orthodox church, and was designed by Russian stage set designer Theodore Komisarjevsky. As well as a cinema, the building has been used for theatre, variety acts and even a circus. By the 1960s the venue was popular with big acts, and the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bee Gees and Frank Sinatra all performed there.
Author of magic realism Angela Carter (1940-1992) remembers visiting the cinema as a child with the father in the 1940s and seeing such films as The Blue Lagoon (1949), though the film didn’t matter to her: “I scarcely remember the movies I watched with my father, only the space in which we sat to watch them”. The building was a formative influence for Carter: “to step through the door of this dream cathedral of voluptuous thirties wish-fulfillment architecture was to set up a tension within me that has never resolved, the tension between inside and outside, between the unappeasable appetite for the unexpected, the gorgeous, the gim-grack, the fantastic, the free play of the imagination…” (she wrote in some notes about the cinema just before her death). It was here she “fell in love with Rococo, unaware it was Rococo, or kitsch, or camp – I drank in the mix of style with a pure eye. It seemed purely wonderful. And I guess I fell in love with cinema.”
The cinema fell into disuse in the 1970s, and was threatened with demolition; luckily the structure was saved and is now Grade I listed, the only UK cinema to have that status. It has been a bingo hall since 1976.
We’ve played bingo there a few times, never winning anything but there was excitement, a strong sense of community and cheap food and beer. A good night out.
Previously on Barnflakes
Top ten London buildings
London through its charity shops No.17: Tooting