Can a 100-year-old cinema survive without a venue?

Have you ever heard the story of the Bold Street timeslip? It’s Liverpool, 1996, and Frank, an off-duty police officer, is shopping with his wife. While he stops to chat with a friend, she continues towards Dillon’s Bookshop, where they arrange to meet. After waving goodbye to his pal, Frank heads off up the street. As he walks towards the bookstore, something feels off, and he notices the sign has changed. What was once Dilions is now Cripps and instead of books in the window, there are old-fashioned handbags and hats. Stranger still, everything else in its vicinity, the people, their clothing and cars, all seem to be from the 1950s. With a growing sense of unease, Frank steps into the shop, only to watch reality snap back, the bookstore restored to its original form.

Frank’s story is a cult classic from the timeslip genre, a brand of urban legend in which people claim to have, for a few minutes, unintentionally travelled back in time. It’s not a concept I believe in, though I came close the first time I visited The Strand Cinema. Built in 1935, The Strand is Northern Ireland’s last remaining picturehouse. The building’s light blue and off-yellow art deco facade looks like it’s been lifted from Miami’s Ocean Drive and accidentally dropped against the perma-grey skies of East Belfast. The main entrance is crowned with a backlit marquee sign displaying the day’s features while a chevron linoleum floor ushers you past concessions and onto a threadbare carpet, best described euphemistically as “of its time”. The four screens are framed by velvet curtains, which look out onto rows of frayed velour seats that strain under your weight. Surrounding these are the merging sounds of the film you’re watching and whatever’s playing next door. Usually, it’s the hand dryer in the ladies’ loo.

It’s a brilliant building – the kind of place you’d go specifically for its quirks, its familiarity, its nostalgia. But it is flawed, and after a century of screening, with only minor refurbs, The Strand is in desperate need of the £6.5 million renovation it’s about to undergo. Over the next two years, the building will be sympathetically restored to its original form and its 1930s foundations brought firmly up to date. As Mimi Turtle, chief executive of The Strand told me, “Most of that money goes into things that you don’t see. We reached a point where our sewers were collapsing, and the wiring was at the end of its life. The building looked presentable superficially, but the infrastructure itself was falling apart at the seams.”

The fact that the building still functions a century after its inception is emblematic of The Strand’s resilience. In a city that’s seen hostility and fear, The Strand has been a constant source of optimism in the local community for five generations.

Others might see the renovation as a chance to power down, but The Strand has other ideas. While the building goes under the knife, the cinema will take up residence in a former Argos store in Connswater, a 1980s shopping centre recently dubbed “a shambles” by The Sun. While old reliables like Peacocks and Poundstretcher hang on for dear life, most other chains have folded, leaving 50% of the centre’s units vacant. In the gaps left behind by the failure of bricks-and-mortar capitalism, culture is stepping in. A Men’s Shed sits comfortably next to Bonmarché, while an artist-led gallery corners the main entrance, and a literacy charity neighbours New Look.

It’s a perfect spot for The Strand, and this temporary home provides not only an opportunity to connect with a new audience but also the chance to stay present in the minds of the community it’s served for so long. As Mimi Turtle said, “We just couldn’t bring ourselves to not continue the core parts of our programme that serve those higher needs beneficiaries; so the Silver Screenings for the elderly or the free kid’s films aimed specifically at low-income families.”

Reliability is what The Strand does best. Its programme has consistently centred around service and providing an accessible experience for many who depend on it. But, while the pop-up space proves successful in delivering its core programme, it isn’t without its quirks and challenges. Most damaging is perhaps the fact that The Strand has no autonomy over Connswater’s opening hours. Its doors close, along with everyone else’s, at 6 pm, so programming time is limited. Its single screen, although charmingly pulled together, holds only 40, limiting audience sizes. And while the space itself feels unique and novel, it doesn’t hold the same level of nostalgia that’s come to define the cinema over the last decade.

These challenges don’t seem to phase program manager Johanna Leech. “I think we aren’t afraid for things to look a bit scrappy, or for things not to work. I think we’re just here to try. You know, we’ve all come from this post-conflict society and there’s something ingrained in us to just go ahead and do it. So, we literally cut the old concession stand in half and stuck it here. We’ve brought the neon sign from the side of the building and it’s not the same, but it’s starting to come to life.”

The fact that this pop-up exists as its own space, feels ripe for experimentation. There’s liberation in this displacement. But it’s still new and from the wider team, I sense homesickness. For many of them, the old building quite literally runs in the family and their separation from the picturehouse seems hard to reconcile. There’s a sense of concern, an eagerness for renovations to be complete and a chance to return to the place they belong.

But in creating this Strand in miniature, they’re proving why the cinema has survived for so long – why it held out during the Blitz, withstood the Troubles and coped with a global pandemic. It remains a constant, unfailing in its ambition to offer good old-fashioned fun. While chain cinemas home-ify their offer with plush seats and cocktails delivered to your lap, The Strand steers away from replicating what the audience can easily access in their living rooms. Instead, it builds a programme around its films that foster community and connection. Whether that’s singalongs for the silver screeners, face paints for the kids, or cult classics for the grown-ups. It defies trends to deliver classic entertainment that is timeless.