Mexborough Empire Bingo – Swinton Road

Mexborough’s Empire Bingo occupied one of the earliest cinema conversions in this whole collection, and its story starts even before the building was a cinema at all. It began as the Olympia Roller Skating Rink in 1910, before being reconstructed into the Empire Theatre and opening on 19 June 1911, with an auditorium arranged over stalls and circle, designed from the outset for both films and live theatre. It survived into the talking-picture era with new projection and sound equipment fitted in 1929, and later received a substantial modernisation under the Star Cinema circuit in 1955, complete with a CinemaScope screen. The stage remained genuinely active too, hosting the local Amateur Operatic Company’s productions right through until 1962, after Mexborough’s own Hippodrome had closed decades earlier.

Bingo crept in from 1961 alongside the films, before the cinema use ended for good on 26 July 1962, when the building converted fully to bingo under the name Empire Casino. A serious fire in the late 1960s destroyed the old stage end of the building, which was rebuilt without a stage, leaving the venue purely as a bingo hall from then on. The customer-facing Empire Bingo name stucthrough several changes of ownership, with Top Ten Bingo acquiring the freehold in 2006 before Majestic Bingo took it over in 2014, confirmed by Majestic’s own 2019 property charge. It was still trading as of a November 2019 food hygiene inspection, but had closed by May 2021, when South Yorkshire Police raided the premises and discovered a cannabis farm estimated at around £2.18 million. The building itself survives, later marketed as an 8,950 square foot commercial unit, its history stretching from a roller rink through half a century as bingo to its rather ignominious final chapter as an old bingo hall repurposed for something considerably less legal.

Other Lost Halls In The Area

• Rotherham Coral Bingo – Doncaster Gate
• Rotherham Mecca Bingo – Corporation Street
• Hoyland Walkers Bingo – West Street
• Doncaster Mecca Bingo – High Street
• Sheffield Mecca Bingo – Flat Street
• Sheffield Mecca Bingo – Penistone Road
• Sheffield Mecca Bingo – Queens Road

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