The importance of London’s lost cinema

King’s Cross in the eighties was the scabbiest, dodgiest, scariest and most alternative place in central London – and the crumbling Scala cinema was its beating heart. Memories of this long-shut venue are being revived by the imminent release of a feature-length documentary tracing its brief, colourful history.

The film is named after the cinema but its lengthy subtitle signals the kind of material it depicts: Scala!!! Or, the incredibly strange rise and fall of the world’s wildest cinema and how it influenced a mixed-up generation of weirdos and misfits.

This sounds an extravagant claim but it clearly was influential in the film world. Its original manager, Stephen Woolly, would go on to direct Mona Lisa, The Crying Game and Carol. And the documentary lists many other filmmakers who passed through as punters, among them current arthouse darling Joanna Hogg – and Steve McQueen, who would go on to win an Oscar for Best Picture for 12 Years a Slave.

The Scala had previously briefly existed off Tottenham Court Road before taking over a derelict cinema in King’s Cross in 1981 – and giving the venue the name it retains to this day. This rather grand art nouveau building at the bottom of Pentonville Road had been purpose-built as a picture house in 1918, originally a Gaumont, but it had also been a labour exchange, a porn cinema and a music venue – it was where the celebrated cover images of Lou Reed’s Transformer and Iggy and the Stooges’s Raw Power were photographed on successive nights in 1972.

It then enjoyed a brief, weird period as the world’s first and only ‘Primatarium’ – essentially something akin to a RainForest Cafe – but with live monkeys. It soon went bust.

The building was semi-derelict when the Scala moved in and they didn’t have any budget to renovate so it remained in that state of disrepair for the ensuing 12 years of monkey business. They opened with a screening of King Kong. The Scala specialised in films which you mostly couldn’t see anywhere else: the weird, the wild, the debauched.

I fancied myself as a bohemian in those days but I realise with hindsight that my tastes were at the tamer end of the Scala spectrum – I was typically drawn to mostly classic rep rather than the more typical fare which was often extreme; the film with which the cinema became most closely associated was Thundercrack!, a kind of pornographic companion piece to Rocky Horror. And there were many others in this vein: sex, horror and freakishness were staple themes.

The Scala was consistently degenerate – and borderline criminal. A moment that perhaps sums this up most neatly in the film comes when Ralph Brown, the actor best known for playing druggie Danny of Camberwell carrot fame in Withnail and I, who as a young wannabe ran the Scala’s cafe, recalls how he sold customers illegal amphetamines along with the carrot cake. Another usher running the box office took LSD and hallucinated that customers attempting to buy tickets were a menacing giant octopus – exactly the sort of thing one might expect to see on screen at the Scala.

And if the staff were on drugs, you can imagine the state of the audience. This was particularly the case during their trademark all-nighters, the regular horror incarnations of which were known as Shock Around The Clock.

I first went in the summer of 1986. I was visiting art student friends who lived in a squat in Stoke Newington and were Scala regulars. We paid something like £1.50 to cover both life membership and admission to an afternoon triple bill of Montgomery Clift vehicles. For a few weeks afterwards, I thought A Place in the Sun was the best film I’d ever seen.

And I enjoyed it so much that I went back the very next day, this time for another triple bill of low budget music films, the only one I can now remember being the Ramones vehicle, Rock’n’Roll High School. It was both brilliant and terrible. The other two were just terrible.

Over the years that followed, I went many times, the final outing being to see La Dolce Vita on a weeknight of torrential rain in spring. There were only two or three of us in the whole, huge auditorium – one of my most memorable cinema visits. The Scala closed permanently just a few weeks later, in June 1993.

In a typically provocative move, they had screened the film that auteur Stanley Kubrick had withdrawn 20 years earlier in the face of moral panic: A Clockwork Orange. This was the ultimate film it was impossible to see elsewhere. But owners Warner Bros had gone after them and the legal costs sunk the Scala for good. The last film screened on closing night was, again, King Kong.

I’ve been back to The Scala to see bands there since. But it’s a different beast now, like the area it occupies. Gone are the porn cinemas, the derelict buildings, the junkies, thieves and hookers which characterised eighties King’s Cross – and which were depicted in Woolly’s Mona Lisa. In their place have come head offices for Google, YouTube and the Guardian, with high-end shops and restaurants to cater to their staff.

London in the eighties and even into the early nineties felt, at least in areas like this, that it was still recovering from the Blitz. I can recall viewing a terraced house for sale a couple of streets away at around this time. It cost £75,000. Now it would be £1.5 million. Because the dereliction was all swept away by money – gentrified as we say – in the property boom of the late nineties and since.

Granary Square, the centre of this new, salubrious King’s Cross, with its illuminated fountains, was where, back then, there would be semi-legal warehouse rave parties that went on till dawn – and some of us would go on to the end of a Scala all-nighter to wind down. Today you pay £10 for a glass of Rioja on the same spot.

Now instead of gigs at the fleapit Astoria, we have the anaemic O2. Instead of gritty Upton Park, I watch West Ham at the cavernous but comparatively soulless London Stadium. And on it goes: like those Scala films that were both brilliant and terrible, London is demonstrably better but it’s also much worse.