Sitting on Godwin Street in central Bradford, West Yorkshire, the building now known as Bradford Live has one of the most layered histories of any entertainment venue in England. What began as the New Victoria in 1930 was purpose-built as a cine-variety theatre with 3,318 seats, making it the largest cinema outside London and the third largest in the entire country at the time. Only the Trocadero at Elephant and Castle and the Davis Theatre at Croydon were bigger.
A building ahead of its time
The New Victoria was constructed on the site of William Whittaker’s brewery and malting, which had closed in 1928. Designed by architect William Illingworth in a Renaissance Revival style, the building has copper-covered cupolas on two corners that complement those on the neighbouring Bradford Alhambra theatre. Built at a cost of £250,000 for Provincial Cinematograph Theatres, backed by the Gaumont British Picture Corporation, it was the first cinema in Britain to be purpose-built for sound pictures, or “talkies”, which had only been introduced to the industry in 1927. Alongside the main 3,318-seat auditorium, the original complex included a 450 square foot ballroom and a 200-seat restaurant. The auditorium was fitted with a stage, orchestra pit, and a Wurlitzer organ, giving it genuine versatility as both a cinema and a concert venue.
Changing names and configurations
In 1950 the venue was renamed the Gaumont, by which point both the Odeon and Gaumont circuits were controlled by Circuits Management Association Ltd., a subsidiary of the Rank Organisation. When Bradford Corporation moved to redevelop the city’s original Odeon in Manchester Road, Rank closed the Gaumont on 30 November 1968 for a major conversion. The building reopened on 21 August 1969 under the Odeon name, now operating as a twin cinema with auditoria of 1,200 and 467 seats, while the former stalls became a 1,000-seat Top Rank bingo hall. The ballroom, meanwhile, sat unused for twenty years before being converted in 1988 into a 244-seat third cinema screen. Various plans through the 1990s to expand the cinema screens further were drawn up but never carried out.