Can a 100-year-old cin­e­ma sur­vive with­out a venue?

Have you ever heard the sto­ry of the Bold Street times­lip? It’s Liv­er­pool, 1996, and Frank, an off-duty police offi­cer, is shop­ping with his wife. While he stops to chat with a friend, she con­tin­ues towards Dillon’s Book­shop, where they arrange to meet. After wav­ing good­bye to his pal, Frank heads off up the street. As he walks towards the book­store, some­thing feels off, and he notices the sign has changed. What was once Dil­ions is now Cripps and instead of books in the win­dow, there are old-fash­ioned hand­bags and hats. Stranger still, every­thing else in its vicin­i­ty, the peo­ple, their cloth­ing and cars, all seem to be from the 1950s. With a grow­ing sense of unease, Frank steps into the shop, only to watch real­i­ty snap back, the book­store restored to its orig­i­nal form.

Frank’s sto­ry is a cult clas­sic from the times­lip genre, a brand of urban leg­end in which peo­ple claim to have, for a few min­utes, unin­ten­tion­al­ly trav­elled back in time. It’s not a con­cept I believe in, though I came close the first time I vis­it­ed The Strand Cin­e­ma. Built in 1935, The Strand is North­ern Ireland’s last remain­ing pic­ture­house. The building’s light blue and off-yel­low art deco façade looks like it’s been lift­ed from Miami’s Ocean Dri­ve and acci­den­tal­ly dropped against the per­ma-grey skies of East Belfast. The main entrance is crowned with a back­lit mar­quee sign dis­play­ing the day’s fea­tures while a chevron linoleum floor ush­ers you past con­ces­sions and onto a thread­bare car­pet, best described euphemisti­cal­ly as ​“of its time”. The four screens are framed by vel­vet cur­tains, which look out onto rows of frayed velour seats that strain under your weight. Sur­round­ing these are the merg­ing sounds of the film you’re watch­ing and whatever’s play­ing next door. Usu­al­ly, it’s the hand dry­er in the ladies’ loo.

It’s a bril­liant build­ing – the kind of place you’d go specif­i­cal­ly for its quirks, its famil­iar­i­ty, its nos­tal­gia. But it is flawed, and after a cen­tu­ry of screen­ing, with only minor refurbs, The Strand is in des­per­ate need of the £6.5 mil­lion ren­o­va­tion it’s about to under­go. Over the next two years, the build­ing will be sym­pa­thet­i­cal­ly restored to its orig­i­nal form and its 1930s foun­da­tions brought firm­ly up to date. As Mimi Tur­tle, chief exec­u­tive of The Strand told me, ​“Most of that mon­ey goes into things that you don’t see. We reached a point where our sew­ers were col­laps­ing, and the wiring was at the end of its life. The build­ing looked pre­sentable super­fi­cial­ly, but the infra­struc­ture itself was falling apart at the seams.”

The fact that the build­ing still func­tions a cen­tu­ry after its incep­tion is emblem­at­ic of The Strand’s resilience. In a city that’s seen hos­til­i­ty and fear, The Strand has been a con­stant source of opti­mism in the local com­mu­ni­ty for five generations.

Oth­ers might see the ren­o­va­tion as a chance to pow­er down, but The Strand has oth­er ideas. While the build­ing goes under the knife, the cin­e­ma will take up res­i­dence in a for­mer Argos store in Connswa­ter, a 1980s shop­ping cen­tre recent­ly dubbed ​“a sham­bles” by The Sun. While old reli­ables like Pea­cocks and Pound­stretch­er hang on for dear life, most oth­er chains have fold­ed, leav­ing 50% of the centre’s units vacant. In the gaps left behind by the fail­ure of bricks-and-mor­tar cap­i­tal­ism, cul­ture is step­ping in. A Men’s Shed sits com­fort­ably next to Bon­marché, while an artist-led gallery cor­ners the main entrance, and a lit­er­a­cy char­i­ty neigh­bours New Look.

It’s a per­fect spot for The Strand, and this tem­po­rary home pro­vides not only an oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­nect with a new audi­ence but also the chance to stay present in the minds of the com­mu­ni­ty it’s served for so long. As Mimi Tur­tle said, ​“We just couldn’t bring our­selves to not con­tin­ue the core parts of our pro­gramme that serve those high­er needs ben­e­fi­cia­ries; so the Sil­ver Screen­ings for the elder­ly or the free kid’s films aimed specif­i­cal­ly at low-income families.”

Reli­a­bil­i­ty is what The Strand does best. Its pro­gramme has con­sis­tent­ly cen­tred around ser­vice and pro­vid­ing an acces­si­ble expe­ri­ence for many who depend on it. But, while the pop-up space proves suc­cess­ful in deliv­er­ing its core pro­gramme, it isn’t with­out its quirks and chal­lenges. Most dam­ag­ing is per­haps the fact that The Strand has no auton­o­my over Connswater’s open­ing hours. Its doors close, along with every­one else’s, at 6 pm, so pro­gram­ming time is lim­it­ed. Its sin­gle screen, although charm­ing­ly pulled togeth­er, holds only 40, lim­it­ing audi­ence sizes. And while the space itself feels unique and nov­el, it doesn’t hold the same lev­el of nos­tal­gia that’s come to define the cin­e­ma over the last decade.

These chal­lenges don’t seem to phase pro­gram man­ag­er Johan­na Leech. ​“I think we aren’t afraid for things to look a bit scrap­py, or for things not to work. I think we’re just here to try. You know, we’ve all come from this post-con­flict soci­ety and there’s some­thing ingrained in us to just go ahead and do it. So, we lit­er­al­ly cut the old con­ces­sion stand in half and stuck it here. We’ve brought the neon sign from the side of the build­ing and it’s not the same, but it’s start­ing to come to life.”

The fact that this pop-up exists as its own space, feels ripe for exper­i­men­ta­tion. There’s lib­er­a­tion in this dis­place­ment. But it’s still new and from the wider team, I sense home­sick­ness. For many of them, the old build­ing quite lit­er­al­ly runs in the fam­i­ly and their sep­a­ra­tion from the pic­ture­house seems hard to rec­on­cile. There’s a sense of con­cern, an eager­ness for ren­o­va­tions to be com­plete and a chance to return to the place they belong.

But in cre­at­ing this Strand in minia­ture, they’re prov­ing why the cin­e­ma has sur­vived for so long – why it held out dur­ing the Blitz, with­stood the Trou­bles and coped with a glob­al pan­dem­ic. It remains a con­stant, unfail­ing in its ambi­tion to offer good old-fash­ioned fun. While chain cin­e­mas home-ify their offer with plush seats and cock­tails deliv­ered to your lap, The Strand steers away from repli­cat­ing what the audi­ence can eas­i­ly access in their liv­ing rooms. Instead, it builds a pro­gramme around its films that fos­ter com­mu­ni­ty and con­nec­tion. Whether that’s sin­ga­longs for the sil­ver screen­ers, face paints for the kids, or cult clas­sics for the grown-ups. It defies trends to deliv­er clas­sic enter­tain­ment that is timeless.