No.34 Tom Lawes
Electric Cinema
Last year: n/a
Category: Arts and Culture

Britain’s oldest working cinema, the Electric in Birmingham’s Station Street, will celebrate its 100th anniversary in December, thanks to the devotion of its managing director Tom Lawes.

A musician, film buff and self-taught film director, Tom bought the ancient picture house in a sorry condition in 2004 after its previous owners gave up the ghost, and invested £750,000 in restoring it. It was, he admits, “on the face of it an incredibly stupid thing to do”.

However, his plan was not only for the cinema to continue the role it first began on December 27, 1909, but to provide himself with live-work space. As a composer for television – his credits include the theme music for All Quiet on the Preston Front – he had outgrown his studio in Kings Heath and planned to create a state-of-the-art facility over the cinema, with a flat above that. The studio also attracts work which helps to sustain the cinema through its leaner weeks.

The cinema has undergone a chequered history, with a major Art Deco rebuild in the mid-1930s, much of which had been lost by the time Tom took over. At various times it specialised in newsreels, art films and blue movies. In the early 1920s George Bernard Shaw sought refuge there when he got bored with rehearsals for his epic Back to Methuselah at the Birmingham Rep, which opened a few doors along Station Street four years after the Electric.

With a bar modelled on the one in The Shining and luxurious leather sofas at the back of the house, The Electric has staked out a style of cinema-going distinct from the multinational multiplex. Tom Lawes’ brave and original achievement was acknowledged in the 2008 Creative Birmingham Awards, at which he was presented with the Outstanding Business (Birmingham) Development Award.

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