Date of closure: 2008
Address (for reference only):
Mecca Bingo (Lost Halls)
474 Anlaby Road
Hull
HU3 6QR
The Carlton is a cracking example of a lavish 1920s suburban cinema turned bingo hall, and one of Hull’s genuinely special lost buildings. It opened on 9 September 1928 as the Carlton Picture Theatre, designed by Hull architects Blackmore & Sykes, with 1,671 seats behind a theatrical arched entrance frontage topped by a distinctive globe. The real spectacle was inside, with an elaborate green-and-gold sliding dome made from Venetian glass and packed with concealed lights, alongside Roman marble mosaics and painted plaster panels, giving it a far more luxurious feel than most suburban picture houses. It even had its own Fitton & Haley organ, later moved to Hull’s Cecil Theatre where it was destroyed in wartime bombing. The Carlton itself survived the war largely unscathed and remained little altered for nearly forty years before its cinema career ended in April 1967.
Unlike some conversions, there was no messy transitional period of cinema and bingo sharing the building. The downstairs seating was simply removed and replaced with tables and chairs, and the Carlton became a Mecca Bingo club almost immediately, retaining its enormous auditorium, balcony and much of its external character in a conversion generally considered sympathetic. That gave the building a near-perfect split of roughly 40 years as a cinema and 41 as bingo, with local historians crediting the bingo boom of the era with saving the building from demolition altogether. The Carlton Mecca finally closed in 2008, and the building has stood largely empty ever since. Proposals emerged that year to convert it into 43 apartments while retaining the Art Deco façade and demolishing the auditorium, but by 2009 it was already being described as disused, and it remains one of Hull’s great lost bingo venues, dome and all.
