Date of closure: 2003
Address (for reference only):
Mecca Bingo (Lost Halls)
7 High Street
Doncaster
DN1 1ED
This one is a proper piece of cinema history, and a genuine loss. The building opened on 28 September 1914 as the Picture House on Doncaster’s High Street, designed by E. H. Walker as a prestigious picture palace with a Tudor Revival exterior concealing a fashionable Egyptian-themed auditorium, complete with sphinxes and winged lions around the screen. It seated around 1,222, had its own café, a resident orchestra for the silent era and a second-hand church organ played by resident organist Bobby Pagan. It also holds a genuine first for the town, showing Al Jolson’s The Singing Fool on 5 August 1929 as Doncaster’s first talking picture, having been taken over by Associated British Cinemas that same year.
By the 1950s the building’s narrow original proscenium struggled with new CinemaScope technology, and ABC eventually built a replacement cinema on Cleveland Street. The Picture House closed as a cinema on 28 October 1967 and reopened as a Mecca Bingo Club just six weeks later, on 12 December 1967, meaning Mecca inherited a 53 year old picture palace with much of its character still intact rather than a blank shell. It ran as a bingo hall for around 36 years, before the Egyptian style auditorium, the most architecturally striking part of the whole building, was demolished around 2003 to 2005. The original foyer did survive, and by 2016 was in use as a hairdressing and beauty salon, but the vast space that had hosted silent films, talkies, ABC cinema and decades of Mecca bingo is gone for good.
