Halifax De Luxe

One of the great delights of that stage in life known as retirement is that you can – within reason – do what you want and go where you want to. There does not need top be an objective to a journey nor a point to an activity. You can get on the first bus that comes along and get off wherever you want to. And if it is raining outside – or, like me, you are full of cold – you can do it all from the comfort of your nearest computer or smartphone screen. So let me tell you about the visit I took this morning to Halifax’s Theatre De Luxe.

It all started with something I saw in the newspaper. Every so often I like to pick out a year at random and then delve into the newspapers of a particular date in that year. That took me to the Halifax Evening Courier of the 4th October 1937. Such old newspapers are a bit like the Victoria Coach Station of the imagination – there are so many tangents you can follow, so many paths leading nowhere in particular, so many pointless buses to catch. What caught me eye was an advert for a cinema I had never come across before – the Roxy De Luxe Cinema on Northgate, Halifax.

Within a year of my October 1937 advert being printed the cinema had closed for ever and within thirty years the building – and those surrounding it – had been demolished and replaced by the Broad Street Car Park. Theoretically, I must have passed it on the bus each day as I made my way to school, but I have no memory of it.

Whilst the Roxy De Luxe Cinema had a relatively short existence, the building itself had a fascinating past. It had two previous cinematic personas – as the Cinema De Luxe and the Theatre De Luxe – and before that it was part of the neighbouring Northgate Hall, having been built in as part of a development by none other than Miss Anne Lister. Other than being a cinema, the building, at one time or another, has been an assembly hall, a casino, a temperance society meeting hall and, appropriately enough, a brewery office.

Having discovered the 1937 advert, I suppose I could have downloaded and watched a copy of the 1936 film Yellowstone. Instead, however, I went in search of a bit of Halifax history, and enjoyed myself thoroughly.