Sittingbourne Mecca Bingo – High Street

This one’s got a genuinely unusual past. The building opened in 1937 as the New Century Cinema, a proper Art Deco picture palace with 1,593 seats (1,077 in the stalls, 516 up in the circle) and a curved corner façade that still gives the game away today. It later traded as an Odeon before cinema use ended in 1968, when the building became the Vogue Bingo Club. But rather than a clean switch, the conversion happened in stages: a small 111-seat cinema opened in the old restaurant in 1971, followed by a 300-seat cinema in the former circle in 1972, while the original stalls carried on as bingo underneath. It’s a rare example of a building running cinema and bingo simultaneously for years before Mecca Leisure eventually took over the bingo side for good.

Because only the stalls became the bingo hall, Mecca inherited a mid-sized club rather than a giant, seating around 800 with roughly 200 Mecca Max terminals added later. Decades of refurbishment stripped most of the original cinema character from the interior, leaving a fairly standard Mecca layout of open bingo floor, raised calling stage, bar and diner, and slots round the perimeter, with lower ceilings than you’d expect from a cinema conversion since the circle had long since been sealed off from the stalls. Sat right on the High Street beside St Michael’s Church, it was reportedly the busiest bingo hall in the Swale area, pulling in around two thirds of local bingo visits. But declining attendance eventually caught up with it, and the club has now closed permanently, ending almost six decades of bingo in the building dating back to its Vogue days.

Other Lost Halls In The Area

• Chatham Buzz Bingo – High Street
• Chatham Coral Bingo – Fullagers Yard
• Faversham Regal Bingo – Preston Street