History
The Tyneside building was conceived, designed and built by Dixon Scott, a local entrepreneur and the Great Uncle of film directors Sir Ridley and Tony Scott. Scott had travelled in the Middle and Far East, and his experiences influenced the décor of the first floor landing and foyer of the Tyneside building. Scott decorated the building with his own take on Art Deco, as influenced by his Eastern travels.
The Tyneside Cinema was opened as a news cinema, the Bijou News-Reel Cinema on 1 February 1937, and was commonly known as the News Theatre. Screenings would include a mixture of travel, sport, and news films, as well as cartoons.
In 1937, the cinema became the home of the Tyneside Film Society, the origin of the Tyneside Cinema itself which, by the late 1950s, had grown into the largest film society in the UK outside London. The cinema closed in 1975. A case for re-opening the cinema, then known as the Tyneside Film Theatre, was put together by the Tyneside Filmgoers Group.
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