Eyes up
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The Clifton Bingo hall in Great Barr is to call time, along with “house”, “clickey-click” and other bizarre bits of slang, this coming Monday (23rd June), closing Gala the owners say, due to “the smoking ban, increased taxation and new laws banning big jackpot machines.” (via the Mail). I like bingo as a concept far more than as a game, but it’s doubly sad as it throws into question the future of a lovely piece of art-deco architecture (seen above in the BiNS calendar 2006).
Built in 1938, as a cinema, it’s Grade II Listed which means it’s safe from the bulldozers at the moment at least, but the commercial uses in this day and age for a building of its size and structure are few.
This particular area of North Birmingham has a fair amount of shops and pubs, but there isn’t a lot of entertainment around (as I remember from my youth) — what would be lovely would be if the council could buy it and open it up as a community space of some kind. Theatre space, art space, community hall for meetings, how great that would be.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 17th, 2008 at 4:36 pm by bounder and is filed under architecture, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Help improve our tagging - add some appropriate tags to this post:Tags for this article: architecture , bingo , birminghamuk , cinema , clifton bingo , Great Barr , North Birmingham , upyerbrum
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on 18 June 2008 at 10:40 pm Dan wrote:
It’s nice if a little tatty inside too. I’ve been dragged here a few times by my mother-in-law who goes a couple of times each week. She’s devastated
In seriousness this provides (or did provide) a valued community space which catered for an older demographic.
Hopefully another one will be found as well as a new use for the building. Personally I’d like to see it taken on by another Bingo operator.