Viva Brighton Issue #81 November 2019

INSIDE LEFT: BRILL’S BATHS, 1929
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It’s January 1929, and information pertaining to
the imminent demise of this beautiful building –
designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, no less – is
writ large on a billboard on the wall.
‘Brill’s Baths’, reads the poster in the middle of
the image, ‘this exceptional site to be let on lease’.
Brill’s, at 75 East Street, had been open since
1869, named after Charles Brill, who masterminded
and funded the project. Its main feature
was a circular ‘Gentlemen’s Bath’, at 20 metres
in diameter the largest indoor pool in Europe,
filled with seawater pumped in from Hove. There
was also a reading room, a billiard room, a barber
shop, and a viewing gallery seating 400 people.
By 1929, however, leisure tastes had moved on
and the baths were losing money. The site was
bought by Associated British Cinemas, the building
was demolished, and an art deco cinema – the
Savoy Cinema-Theatre – was built in its place.
The project cost £200,000 and the building
wasn’t immediately popular, nicknamed ‘the white
whale’. It was a top-spec operation with a Westrex
sound system designed to showcase the new
‘talkies’: the first films shown were Loose Ends and
Not So Quiet on the Western Front. The complex
also housed two restaurants, two cafés, a dance
hall and an underground car park.
The Savoy enjoyed mixed fortunes in its 69-year
career as a cinema, as its plush Oriental-inspired
interior gradually grew tatty and tired. It was hit
by an incendiary bomb in the war (the show went
on); it was smashed up by Mods and Rockers in
1964; and it changed hands several times, being
renamed, in turn, the ABC Cinema, the Cannon
Cinema, the Virgin Cinema, and then the ABC
again, before closing in 1999. The building is
now run by Stadium Capital Holdings as a ‘mixed
leisure development’ with a casino, a bar, a nightclub
and a restaurant, mainly geared towards the
tourist market.
This photo, sourced by Kevin Wilsher from the
James Gray Collection, shows a selection of interesting
billboard posters, including a number for
other Brighton theatres including The Regent,
The Palladium and The Hippodrome. Top of the
bill at the latter establishment is a show entitled
26 Wonder Midgets; the Palladium counters with a
screening of The Sinister Man, a German-directed
silent movie adaptation of the Edgar Wallace
story. Alex Leith
With thanks to the Regency Society for letting us
use this image from the James Gray Collection.
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