The Odeon on Sandgate Road, Folkestone — originally opened as the Astoria Cinema in 1935 — served as one of the large-scale performance venues used by the Folkestone-Hythe Operatic and Dramatic Society (FHODS) in the years following the demolition of the Pleasure Gardens Theatre in the 1960s. With its grand Art Deco auditorium seating over 1,600 and a fully equipped stage, the Odeon provided one of the few spaces in Folkestone capable of accommodating ambitious operatic and musical productions until the cinema's own closure in 1974.

Background

The Astoria Cinema at 24–26 Sandgate Road was one of a chain of Astoria cinemas built and operated by an independent circuit in southern coastal towns. It was built on the site previously occupied by a high-class tea room and restaurant run by Carlo Maestrani, which had opened there in 1889. Designed by noted theatre architect Edward A. Stone together with Ewen S. Barr, the building was constructed in the Art Deco style, with vertical decorative grilles flanking the wide proscenium and interior decoration by Mollo & Egan. The auditorium seated 1,650 across stalls and circle levels. Notably, the building was not a corner site — it was built into an existing terrace of commercial properties on Sandgate Road, with Oxford Terrace running along the rear.

The Astoria opened on 20 April 1935 with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Gay Divorce. It was equipped with a Compton organ of three manuals and six ranks, opened by organist Leslie Holman. The building also featured a fully equipped stage 20 feet deep — a significant asset that would later make the venue suitable for live theatrical performances — along with a restaurant café containing a small dance floor and a fully licensed cocktail bar.

The cinema was taken over by the County Cinemas chain in October 1936, and County Cinemas was itself soon absorbed by Oscar Deutsch's Odeon Theatres Ltd. in 1937. It was formally renamed the Odeon from June 1940. During the Second World War, General Montgomery used the auditorium to address troops as they prepared for D-Day — a remarkable moment in the building's history that speaks to the venue's scale and centrality in the town.

Later operated by the Rank Organisation, the restaurant area was converted into the Sandgate Bar & Disco. The Rolling Stones played a concert at the Odeon on 17 May 1964, supported by The Applejack and Heinz — one of several major popular music acts to use the venue's live capabilities during the 1960s, alongside regular film programming. The Compton organ continued to be played on special occasions throughout this period.

The Rank Organisation closed the Odeon on 26 January 1974 with a James Bond double bill. The organ was subsequently removed and transported to the Netherlands. The building was later demolished, and a branch of Boots the Chemist now stands on the site — though the replacement building echoes the Astoria/Odeon's glazed tile faience façade in its design.

FHODS at the Odeon

A Venue Born for Live Performance

The Odeon was, in important respects, well suited to FHODS's needs. Unlike many of the venues the society used in this transitional period — town halls, civic chambers, church halls — the Odeon had been built with live performance explicitly in mind. Its 20-foot-deep stage, its proscenium arch flanked by decorative grilles, its tiered auditorium seating over 1,600, and its professional backstage infrastructure made it closer in character to a proper theatre than any other available space in Folkestone at the time. The Compton organ, still played on special occasions during the cinema's final years, added to the sense of the building as a living performance space rather than merely a picture house.

It was this combination of scale and theatrical character that made the Odeon one of FHODS's primary venues for large operatic and musical productions following the Pleasure Gardens' loss. The society's operatic programme — which demanded room for orchestra, chorus, soloists, scenery, and an audience large enough to make such productions viable — could not have been easily accommodated in smaller spaces. The Odeon, for all that it was primarily a cinema, offered the nearest available equivalent to the Pleasure Gardens' capabilities.

A Transitional Home

FHODS used the Odeon alongside other large venues — including Folkestone Town Hall and the Ritz cinema in Hythe — as part of a pragmatic, itinerant approach to large-scale production during the years between the Pleasure Gardens' demolition and the society's acquisition of the Tower Theatre in 2001. None of these venues was a permanent theatrical home, and all presented practical challenges: booking around cinema and other programming, adapting productions to spaces not primarily designed for drama or opera, and managing the logistics of staging ambitious work in hired venues without the infrastructure of a dedicated theatre.

The Odeon's closure in January 1974 removed one of FHODS's key options from the roster of available large venues. By this point the society's main base was the Little Theatre in Sandgate — a 104-seat converted church opened in 1965 — which was ideal for dramatic productions but entirely unsuitable for large-scale opera and musicals. The loss of the Odeon, following so shortly after the Pleasure Gardens, compounded the challenge of finding suitable venues for the most ambitious end of FHODS's programme and added further impetus to the society's long search for a dedicated, large-capacity home.

Significance

The Odeon's role in FHODS's history is best understood as a creative and logistical bridge: a venue that allowed the society to maintain its operatic tradition and large-scale ambitions during one of the most difficult periods in its institutional history. Between the 1960s and 1974, the Odeon was one of a small number of spaces in Folkestone where FHODS could stage the kind of work that had defined it since its foundation as the Folkestone Operatic Society in 1913.

The building's demolition left only Folkestone Town Hall and external venues such as the Ritz in Hythe to serve this function, deepening the society's dependence on spaces never designed for theatrical performance and reinforcing the case — ultimately realised in 2001 with The Tower Theatre — for a permanent dedicated home.

References

Odeon Cinema

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