Cinemas

When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s there were four cinemas in Southall which were very much a hub of social life: The Odeon on the Uxbridge Road, the Gaumont on South Road, the Dominion on the Green and a smaller, more fleapit type of place, called the Gem, which was between the Green and the Station. I used to go to 'Saturday morning pictures' for children, mostly in the Gaumont. Hundreds of us would queue up, pay whatever small amount (it was probably sixpence, the ubiquitous 'tanner') and go in to see some kind of mini-feature, a serial, something like Batman, and I vaguely remember on-stage entertainment of the 'Uncle Bob' variety. Later I went to see 'Rock Around the Clock' in the Gaumont and had to take an adult to get in ... a managed rite of passage. So far as I remember the Gem was an on and off kind of place, I don't remember going there. Today, in a different time and place, something like it might become an arthouse cinema. All three of the others were palaces in the neo-Egyptian or Greco-Roman style, with huge auditoreums, balconies and plush seating. Depending on what was on we would go to any of them and also over to cinemas in Greenford Greenford or Hownslow. There were the usual usherettes with uniforms, trays and torches, very much like a Hopper painting and the rituals in the back rows etc. In the 1960s the Odeon became a bowling alley and the hangout for mods from miles around. Outside was a slip-road on which would be lines of Vespas and Lambrettas, with chrome and arials sporting fur tails.