West is Best!; or, what we can learn from Bournemouth

Abstract

This article demonstrates that the film presentations of British public hall showmen in the 1900s were often more elaborate and oriented towards middle‐class audiences, but much less well‐travelled, than is typically realized. It attempts to explain how one such show, West’s Pictures at the Shaftesbury Hall, Bournemouth, established itself as a semi‐permanent attraction, and argues that T.J. West’s activities reveal the need for a revised morphology of the emergence and evolution of the permanent picture theatre that acknowledges the complexity of both the cinema’s journey towards ‘gentrification’ and the relationships between provincial and metropolitan screen entertainment practices.