A walking tour of Art Deco Cambridge

We’ve all been there. I myself have fallen for regular visits to the honeypot, stumbling through the double-swinging doors into that hazy room where the pints flow cheap and the manically retro-patterned carpet produces a kaleidoscopic kind of drunkenness. A location more frequented than the city’s prestigious libraries, The Regal Wetherspoons has become the local watering hole for many. However, like hedonists too eager to enter Nozick’s pleasure machine, perhaps we rush into this Edenic pub in ignorance. On a rowdy Wednesday evening, with the midnight toll of Revs drawing closer, I imagine few pause to glance at the architecture which forms our familiar Spoons. For who would stop outside the Regal and not enter in? None, I suspect, but those faced with the dire situation of a forgotten ID, or the rookie error of not quite scraping the 11pm last entry.

“Divert your eyes away from the Wetherspoons sign, and you might notice the stylised columns and streamlined, geometric windowpanes”

Yet there is beauty to this building, even if blurred by your beer-goggles. Though host to a consumerist chain pub since 2000, the exterior of 38 St Andrews Street is scattered with remnants of its original Art Deco design. Divert your eyes away from the arresting neon of the Wetherspoons sign, and you might notice the stylised columns and streamlined, geometric windowpanes still surviving almost 90 years after the establishment’s first construction. Opened in 1937 as The Regal Cinema, the building’s façade is one of bold glamour and exuberance: a hangover of decorative flair from the Roaring Twenties. Today, the Picturehouse Cinema resides above the pub, where the 1937 screen once showed features of Swing Time, starring the Hollywood legends Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. It now continues the same line of entertainment, but at the painfully swollen cost of a 21st century cinema. Crumbs of the cinema’s first boom as a commercial entertainment site are scattered in the premise’s modern-day usage. Albeit interiors entirely revamped, one can still go to the ‘talkies’ in this Art Deco artifact of a building.

And St Andrew Street is not the only location where curious vestiges of the Art Deco period hide away in Cambridge. Further relic is to be found on Market Hill. Where Marks and Spencer now stood was previously The Victoria Cinema, constructed in 1931 with the characteristic proscenium details of the time. Walk a swift three minutes to Hobson Street, and you will find the ghost of another bygone cinema, constructed at an even earlier date of 1921. Trimmed with common motifs of exotic luxury, a sharp, white exterior of glazed tiles is pastiched by the Egyptian influences which were revived during the 1920s.

“Opulence was fed to the masses in the form of the Art Deco cinema. Through design, the every-day customer could experience commercial leisure with aesthetic luxury”

Cambridge’s proliferation of old 1920s’ and 30s’ movie theatres, all retaining their original architecture, is a reminder of the epoch’s significance in translating high modernist style into the commercial architecture of Britain. Opulence was fed to the masses in the form of the Art Deco cinema. Through design, the every-day customer could experience commercial leisure with aesthetic luxury. The splendour and taste which embodied the Jazz Age was brought into the grandiose silhouettes – the chevron windows and geometric ornamentation – of the high-street building.

While effort has been made to restore the original form of the St Andrews Street architecture, news last year of the Cambridge City Council’s intentions to demolish the Hobson Street cinema led to controversy. Locals were divided: some in support of tearing down a now crumbling and disused location, others distraught by the possibility of a historical relic being wiped from the city. Perhaps this potential deconstruction is a reminder of lost architectural treasures which are often ignored in a city already bursting with Grade 1 listed buildings. It is not only in our prestigious colleges of centuries-old limestone, but on the high-streets which we pass every day, walking to Sainsbury’s or stumbling home from the club, where a history of artistic design can be spotted.