The suggestion that the Prince Charles cinema in London’s West End could be closed down was the least surprising news of the week. This sort of thing, fuelled by soaring property values, has been happening in Soho and its periphery for three decades now and shows no sign of relenting.
The Prince Charles isn’t strictly in Soho, being just south of Shaftesbury Avenue, but it has always felt like it belonged there, with the other left field, misfit and seedy enterprises that gave the place its character and reputation. It was built in 1962 but, on the edge of Chinatown, was just too far off the main drag of Leicester Square to ever really thrive. By the 1970s the Prince Charles was mostly screening soft porn: Emmanuelle and later Caligula. It wasn’t until April 1991 that it became what it’s now famous for being – an affordable repertory cinema, catering to students, film buffs and drunks.
When it relaunched that spring, it had an instant audience by charging just £1 entry when the norm was nearer a fiver. That first year I practically lived there, being both a budding film buff and budding drunk.
I recall one Sunday afternoon in 1995 watching in succession the Blue, White and Red incarnations of Kieślowski’s Three Colours trilogy. They are distinct and separate films about different people in different places but there are small moments when they overlap and a character from one film is glimpsed briefly in another. At these points the Prince Charles audience audibly gasped. It was an intense cinematic experience that had only been afforded by the kind of immersiveness the place specialised in: watching six hours of film at one sitting.
Its programming was a little bit arthouse, as above, as well as a little bit cult, but it was also populist. Where the National Film Theatre (as the BFI South Bank was known then) would put on films it thought you should see, the Prince Charles put on films it thought you’d want to see.
They encouraged audience participation so that at times, particularly for all-nighters, it was closer to being a nightclub than a standard cinema. There was themed dressing-up and singalongs to Rocky Horror and later The Sound of Music, Grease, The Greatest Showman. It was playful too: once they showed Groundhog Day twice in succession, as a double bill.
But for all the frivolity, it also took film seriously. In Jeremy Cooper’s 2023 novel Brian, about an obsessive London film buff’s cinema-going life, the central character always opts for the didactic sobriety of the BFI rather than the messier Prince Charles. But his one recurring gripe is that the BFI admits latecomers to disturb those already seated. At the Prince Charles, they would turn them away.
The cinema itself is distinct: rather than the normal downward slope from back row to front, the Prince Charles’s satellite dish layout means there’s a dip midway along the seats and those sitting in the further front rows find themselves unusually looking upwards at the screen. This added to its unique atmosphere. A smaller second screen was added in 2008.
It is now many years since I was a regular, but my generation handed over the baton to younger, more fleapit-friendly successors. The Prince Charles has remained a relatively cheap and enthralling night out. Standard entry is now £14.
A year ago, my youngest son was gifted, as his generation says, a Prince Charles membership. He has been seduced by film and he has now seen several arcane movies, including, for instance, the 1922 Murnau silent Nosferatu, which would have been inconceivable before. And there are plainly thousands more like him. I gather it’s generally busy.
Since I was his age, the number of venues in that part of town that have closed are legion. For live music, there was the Marquee Club on Wardour Street, the Astoria, the Borderline; then nightclubs like the Wag, the Limelight, the Milk Club, the Velvet Rooms, Madam Jojo’s. Disappeared cinemas include the fabulous Lumiere arthouse on St Martin’s Lane, the boutique Metro cinema on Rupert Street and, slightly further afield in King’s Cross, the legendary Scala cinema – lately celebrated in film itself, which I wrote about here. The Prince Charles could, it seems, soon join them. If it does, there won’t be any more repertory cinema in the West End.
Its statement this week read: ‘We are beyond disappointed that our landlords Zedwell and their parent company Criterion Capital have demanded the inclusion of a break clause in our new lease. This could leave us homeless with only six months’ notice should they receive planning permission to redevelop the cinema.’
It would be nice to think the Mayor of London might stir himself to do something
Zedwell runs hotels. Its nearest branch to the cinema, in Piccadilly, has single rooms from £216 – or £202 more than a ticket for a seat at the Prince Charles. Zedwell’s owner, Criterion Capital, is a major landowner in London, owning sites including the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus and the Criterion Theatre. Its CEO, Asif Aziz, is a billionaire. Last year, it purchased the YMCA building off Tottenham Court Road, the world’s oldest. It’s due to close next week. I used to go there too at one point, half a lifetime ago.
Every time these exchanges happen – when a cultural institution is closed to allow higher per-square-foot revenues from a richer clientele – something is lost. The very thing that makes people want to come to Soho at all is eroded in the process. And the area becomes a little less like itself and a little more like everywhere else.
It would be nice to think the Mayor of London might stir himself to do something other than promote kindness and warn about the carrying of both folded and unfolded e-unicycles on the Underground. But I doubt that he will.
And, of course, it may never happen. The management are understandably sensitive to any perceived threat, and their ‘save us’ campaign may yet succeed. A petition picked up more than 100,000 signatures within 24 hours. I’m going back for my first trip there for some time next week. Number Two Son has chosen it as his destination for a family night out for his birthday. I hope it won’t be my last visit – I really hope it won’t be his.
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