The movie trail

Here is a place which has many significant links with the world of cinema. Ground-breaking technical developments took place here in the pioneering days of cinematography.

Epoch-defining films (as well as an Oscar-nominated one) have featured Bradford as their main location. And now the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television brings visitors to the city by the thousand.

So it made a lot of sense for the Council's City Centre Management team to get together with the museum and the Bradford Film Office and plan a walk linking some of the many sites connected with cinema in and around the city centre.

The Cinema Heritage Trail booklet was written by the late Geoff Mellor, the local film and cinema historian to whose memory it is dedicated.

Here's a truncated version of it to help you while away an hour or two in central Bradford, beginning and ending at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television.

If you fancy doing the full version of it, and learning a lot more about the Bradford cinema scene than I can possibly include here, get hold of a free copy of Cinema Heritage Trail from the museum, libraries or Bradford Council information offices.

1 Begin in the foyer of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television. Aptly, on this site used to stand The People's Palace where on April 6, 1896, the first cinema performance in Bradford took place as the last item on the bill, following 11 music-hall acts.

2 Walk out of the museum and, with the police headquarters ahead, take the descending path to the right of the statue of J B Priestley then turn left to walk towards the Alhambra. Priestley's glorious novel The Good Companions, about a travelling concert party, was filmed twice: once in 1932 and then in 1957. Priestley also wrote the scripts for two Gracie Fields films - Sing As We Go (1934) and Look Up and Laugh (1935).

3 Cross the bottom of Little Horton Lane to pass the War Memorial, scene of an irreverent soft-shoe shuffle performed by Tom Courtenay as Billy Fisher and Bingley-born Rodney Bewes as his best mate Arthur in the 1962 film version of Keith Waterhouse's Billy Liar. John Schlesinger directed and the film also starred Julie Christie as Liz, the free spirit, who in one scene is pictured smiling up at the statue of Queen Victoria, just behind the memorial.

4 Cross the road to the Alhambra, location for another Tom Courtenay film, the Oscar-nominated The Dresser (1983), in which he co-starred with Albert Finney.

5 Walk up the left-hand side of the Alhambra past what is now the Alhambra Studio but was originally the Bradford Picture House, built in 1916. It showed silent films with an orchestral accompaniment until 1933, when it became the last cinema in city to be converted to sound films.

6 Continue up Morley Street and cross Chester Street at the top, going through a gap in a wall on the right and up some steps into Southbrook Terrace. Near the far end, at No 2, lived electrical engineer Cecil Wray (between 1896 and 1911). Wray designed the Kineoptoscope - a simple apparatus which, when attached to any magic lantern, enabled 50ft lengths of film to be screened. Later, in partnership with optician Cecil Baxter, Wray produced a combined camera and projector which was exported to Japan, helping that country to establish its own cinema industry.

7 Walk on to the end of Southbrook Terrace, cross the road with care and turn right, walking down past a row of restaurants and a newsagent's shop on the left to an empty site. This was where the Empire Music Hall once stood, built in 1899 behind the Alexandra Hotel. Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Jefferson (later Stan Laurel) and W C Fields appeared on stage here before their film careers took off. The music hall suffered a fire in 1916 and reopened in 1918 as a cinema, continuing to show films until 1952 when fire struck again and finished it off.

8 Continue down the hill to Prince's Way and turn left to pass the entrance to the Odeon Cinema. This is part of what was once the 1930-built "New Vic", designed by Bradford's own cinema architect, Alderman Walter Illingworth. With a seating capacity of 3,130, it was exceeded in size only by the Trocadero at London's Elephant and Castle and Green's Playhouse in Glasgow. The New Victoria, later known as the Gaumont, also featured live acts - among them The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

9 Cross Thornton Road and walk up Godwin Street beside Sunwin House, turning left into Sunbridge Road then left again into Southgate. The shop front and door facing you, at the bottom of the steps, was the location of the undertaking firm of Shadrack & Duxbury where Billy Fisher dreamed (and occasionally worked) in Billy Liar.

10 Return to Sunwin House main entrance and cross Sunbridge Road to continue up Godwin Street on left to No 55. Here was where those major figures in the history of British cinematography, the Riley Brothers, marketed their magic lanterns and cinema films and made a range of movies between 1897-98 with titles such as The Queensbury Tunnel and Rugby Football Match (filmed at Valley Parade).

11 Continue up Godwin Street, cross Westgate at the top, and turn left up there to the Boy and Barrel pub and James Gate - an important location in Room at the Top, the film of Bradford-born John Braine's 1950s novel (there is lots in the booklet about this). Continue up James Gate and turn right down James Street then left in Godwin Street and right into Darley Street. Where M&S now stands there used to be the 1,600-seater Savoy Cinema - the first in Bradford to screen talking pictures.

12 Walk down Darley Street and turn left into Kirkgate, which features prominently in Room at the Top (the entrance to the flat used by lovers Joe Lampton and Alice Aisgill is located at 2 Mann's Court, on the right). The Newcastle Building Society next door used to be a cafe. It was there that Joe sat and watched Alice as she passed by, heading for the flat.

13 Then continue down to bottom of Cheapside, turn right, cross end of Market Street, stop and look towards the Midland Hotel. Here was Watkin Alley and Argus Building (a previous home of this newspaper). It was on this site, just before midnight on June 22, 1897, that cinema pioneer R J Appleton projected on to a white sheet stretched across Watkins Alley film of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee procession. He had been to London that day to film the event and processed the film in a special dark room on the return train. It was watched by a Bradford audience of 10,000 in Forster Square.

14 Turn right along Broadway and walk to Centenary Square, passing on the way Britannia House (former site of the Electric Theatre Deluxe).

15 City Hall has featured in several TV series and was a location for Room at the Top. Opposite, on the site of Provincial House, stood the Mechanics Institute, home to some of the earliest film shows in Bradford. Town Hall Square, directly in front of City Hall, is where George Henderson took moving pictures of steam trams in 1896 - one of the first recorded instances of outdoors film locations. Nearby was the Kinetoscope Parlour owned by Fred Issott. The Parlours originated in America in 1894. They were individual booths where people could watch moving pictures for about 20 seconds at a time.

Return to National Museum of Photography etc, have a good look round, pick up a Cinema Heritage Trail booklet for information I haven't space to include here, and do the full tour when time permits.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.