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The Ambassador, East Avenue

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Registered: January 2012
Posts: 537

Located in Hayes, Middlesex, today part of west Greater London, on East Avenue close to the junction with Botwell Lane. The Ambassador Theatre was built for a local company Hayes Ambassador Ltd. which was actually part of the London and Southern Cinemas Ltd. chain. It opened on 19th December 1938 with “This Man is News” starring Valerie Hobson, who made a personal appearance. By the time it opened, London and Southern Cinemas had been taken over by the Oscar Deutsch chain of Odeon Theatres Ltd.

Designed by architect F.C. Mitchell, the Ambassador Theatre had a tall fin tower on the centre of its facade. Inside the semi-stadium styled auditorium, seating was provided for 989 in the stalls and 528 in the raised section at the rear. There was a highly ornate ceiling, decorative grilles beside the proscenium, designed for an organ chamber, but no organ was ever installed.

Like all other theatres in the Odeon chain, it was later taken over by the Rank Organisation. It was never re-named Odeon, and the Ambassador Theatre closed on 10th June 1961 with Jimmy Edwards in "Nearly a Nasty Accident" and Walter Macken in "Home Is the Hero". The cinema stood empty and unused until 1969, when it was demolished and a GPO telephone exchange was built on the site, today it is a British Telecommunications Centre.

· Date: Mon August 18, 2014 · Views: 2,361 · Filesize: 68.1kb · Dimensions: 720 x 489 ·

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10.00

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Marian

Registered: April 2012
Posts: 450

Tue August 26, 2014 15:56

Rating: 10.00

When I went to the Ambassador as a youngster, I used to sit with my parents, sister and Grandma in these seats. There was the special atmosphere of quiet darkness with the torchlight being shone to show us to our seats by the usherettes. Once the film was being shown, it caused quite a disturbance if latecomers needed to get to the middle seats. Those who had settled into their places then had to all stand up to let the latecomers past finding their way by the beam from the usherettes torch. Then there was the clattering noise of the seats as they sprung back. Once everyone had sat down again, attention was back on the film again until the interval, when everyone went through a similar process to buy a Walls or Eldorado ice-cream, or a Kia-ora orange drink. :-)

Merelbeke, Belgium

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