Date of closure: 26th February 2023
Address (for reference only):
Mecca Bingo (Lost Halls)
9a Anlaby Road
Hull
HU1 2NR
The Cecil was one of the last great post-war cinemas to find a substantial second life as bingo, and it holds a genuinely impressive architectural pedigree. It opened on 28 November 1955 as the Cecil Cinema, on the corner of Anlaby Road and Ferensway, replacing an earlier Cecil Theatre destroyed by wartime bombing. Designed by local architects Gelder & Kitchen and built in just seven months for around £270,000, it won the RIBA Bronze Medal for exceptional merit and was the first cinema built on a new site in England after the Second World War. It seated 2,052, opened with one of the widest CinemaScope screens in the country at 57 feet, and boasted a restaurant, café, bar and a three-manual Marshall Sykes theatre organ nicknamed The Princess, which rose electrically from beneath the orchestra pit for performances.
The building’s transformation began in 1971 when the restaurant became a small cinema, and by 1972 the balcony had been split into two more screens while the stalls became Mecca Bingo, creating an unusual arrangement of bingo downstairs and cinema upstairs that lasted around two decades. The upstairs cinemas finally closed in March 1992 and were later used as a sports bar and snooker club, leaving Mecca as the last surviving part of the original complex. Mecca clearly still believed in the venue, giving it a £300,000 refurbishment in 2012, but the club closed for good on Sunday 26 February 2023, with a packed house and long queues on the final night. Bingo ended up outliving the cinema it was built alongside by more than thirty years, a fitting send-off for a building that started life as a symbol of cinema’s future in 1955.
Mecca Cecil is a fantastic night out. The staff are great especially Carly and Catherine. Nothing is too much trouble for Carly. She spends time chatting with customers and is always willing to listen. Catherine is multi talented: one night she is in the kitchen another running the bar on front of house and even calling the numbers, two fantastic members of staff who deserve to go to higher positions in the bingo world.
Now closed down, part of the mass Mecca cull February 2023