My current project at the Local Studies Library, as some of you may have gathered, is to identify all the Victorian places of worship in Bradford. I should like to have each as a map location, or a contemporary image, or both. The LSL has a large collection of maps, photographs, and directories which should provide the information I need, even though I anticipate that the project will occupy much of the year. Inevitably my research has thrown up some oddities.

I knew that there was a Methodist chapel and Sunday school in Bridge Street, near where Bradford Interchange is situated today. Opposite was once the first Quaker Meeting House in Bradford which shows well in the next map from the early nineteenth century.

The Meeting House had been demolished by the time of Fig 3, a detail from the first 25” OS map of 1890. The Bridge Street Chapel was described as a ‘Wesleyan Association Chapel’ and later a ‘Free Methodist Church’. I’m not sure if the change of name reflected any doctrinal distinctions. At any event it was founded in the 1850s and closed in 1910.

The above1915 OS map detail reveals the transition of the chapel to a ‘Picture House’, otherwise called a ‘Bijou Theatre’. Initially I found the century old conversion from chapel to cinema a puzzling one. I’ve learned from Goeff Mellor’s invaluable The Cinemas of Bradford (1983) that the conversion produced the Picturedrome. The illustration of the converted chapel at the top of the article is taken from this work.

I have subsequently found that Colin Sutton has a website on the lost cinemas of Bradford with a good deal of additional information:

Bradford Cinema History – Home Page (bradfordtimeline.co.uk)

The Picturedrome had 700 seats, and the first film shown was entitled An Outlaw’s Sacrifice. The cinema’s name was changed to the Astra after 1949. The premises closed in 1956 and were demolished in 1959; the site was finally incorporated into a road widening scheme. What I need is a specialist on the archaeology of cinemas to explain more the transition process more fully!