This venue operated from 1911 through to 1983 under various names, including Bijou Electric Empire, Bijou Select Palace, Prince’s Electric Theatre, Prince’s Cinema, Prince’s News Theatre, Jacey Cinema, and Brighton Film Theatre, the latter as part of the chain of regional film theatres supported by the British Film Institute, with art-house programming, (fulfilling much the same function as the Duke of York’s did from the early 1980s onward). However, audiences remained disappointingly low, and the BFI withdrew their funding at the end of 1978.

It was purchased and re-launched as Cinescene in 1979 by Mr Myles Byrne. Having pioneered often ‘risqué’, but equally often award-winning or challenging, European film screenings at the Continentale in Kemp Town from the early 1950s onwards, he maintained the ‘art house’ approach at Cinescene. 

Filmgoers of a certain age will have fond memories of the somewhat deaf and doddery old couple who ran the front-of-house operations for the next few years; alas, the quality of their tea and cakes was rarely equal to that of the films. The venue still lost money, however: indeed, the word around Brighton in 1982 was that it had only been kept going that year by the unexpected box office success of The Draughtsman’s Contract, which played for six straight weeks despite the fact that the reels were supposed to have been delivered to the Duke of York’s rather than the Cinescene, and that Byrne refused to either return them to the distributor or pay the rentals. A year later it finally closed, standing empty for half a decade before enduring the ultimate indignity of conversion into a ‘film-themed’ Burger King.

The last film screened was The Ploughman’s Lunch (1983) by Richard Eyre.

Following the route, a blue plaque at 20 Middle Street marks where William Friese-Greene opened a film laboratory in 1907. He had briefly been in partnership with Esmé Collings and is credited as being ‘the inventor of cinematography’.

The Hippodrome is on the other side of Middle Street.