Palaces of the Imagination: Part 1. The Globe

The Penylan was a cinema in Albany Road, Cardiff, that opened in 1914 showing silent films. On conversion to ‘Talkies’ in 1931, its name was changed to the Globe.  It was demolished in 1985.

The building though small – it sat 500 – was presented in a pretty, neo-classical style. It was surmounted by a dome that could be opened on fine evenings to let out the patrons’ smoke. By the time I went there in the 1960s, it showed mainly art-house films, and was the cinema of choice for Cardiff’s student population. I remember the elegance of the narrow auditorium, the slender, gravity-defying balcony and the loveliness of the gilt plasterwork. It was faded and peeling, but it had all the allure of a building that though built-to-purpose as a cinema, had its roots in the traditions of the old theatres and music-halls.

At some point in my early teens I was taken to the Globe by a young man I’d met at drama club. Gareth was about six years older than me and had a car, and it was exciting to be picked up by him from my home in Newport and whisked away to Cardiff for an adventure. There was a heady whiff of romance in the air, though I wasn’t quite sure what that might entail. He had written poetry for me, which was unexpected and head-spinning, and to this day I have an art book that he brought to me as a gift, with an inscription and his name on the title page.

We saw a double Jean Cocteau programme. Orphée (1950) and La Belle et la Bête ( 1946). The experience was revelatory. Everything on the screen left me weak at the knees. This was the single defining moment of what I would later reach toward creatively, though of course I didn’t know that at the time. I don’t mean by this that I came away from the experience yearning to be a film director. At that point I was still unclear about what I’d be, in all senses. But the seed was planted, the desire to build worlds of my own that had the power to hold and enrapture, as I had been held and enraptured by the experience of the films. Watching Cocteau’s masterpieces shimmering in the darkness of that palace of the imagination, left me yearning to be a maker.

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