Volunteers at the Lichfield History Access Point assist in research ranging from family history to Lichfieldian curiosities. The team can be found upstairs from the library on Tuesday and Thursday mornings: swing by and make use of their expertise!

It’s always very satisfying when we can find answers to our visitors’ questions, so it was great to help a new resident of the Regal Cinema – which will be more familiar to more recent residents of Lichfield as the Kwik Save supermarket – find a photo of the building in its heyday as a cinema, as well as during its later history. Having shown him a number of the HAP books on Lichfield local history and its notable buildings, we found several photos in ‘Lichfield Then and Now’ by Ralph James, pub. 1988. It did take some thorough searching, though: the book is rather accurately subtitled ‘A somewhat haphazard collection of old photographs of yesteryear and their modern equivalent’. It is not a huge tome, fortunately.

The photos provided a glimpse of how the building looked when it was first built, and we learned that at that era it also included a cafe, tobacco shop, and hat shop. The book also shows a photo of the cinema after its conversion to Kwiksave.

Moving on to the Internet, PastTrack also came up trumps, with a photo of the Cinema, dated 1933, a year after its opening, and showing the Cinema lit up and advertising the film ’42nd Street’.

A second photo also shows the building during the 1930s, and clearly shows its Cafe, Tobacco Shop and Hat Shop.

Additional information with the photos informs us that ‘the Regal was part of the ABC chain and closed in 1974. A few years later it became a Kwik Save supermarket but after the company went into administration in 2007 the building lay empty and increasingly derelict until 2018, the building is now [September 2020] being renovated into apartments. Only the facade remains from the original cinema building.’

All in all, it was an enjoyable and productive search for our visitor, and for ourselves. We do love to be able to help people find answers to their questions, and learn more about local history in the process.

The HAP Volunteers