Odeon Haymarket
The Odeon Haymarket, preceded by Capitol Cinema (1925–1936) and Gaumont Haymarket (1937–1959), was a single-screen cinema with 600 seats, located at 50 Haymarket, London, and running from 1962 to 1996.
Three cinemas occupied this site between 1925 and 1996.
Capitol Cinema (1925–1936)
Built by Sir Walter Gibbons and opened in 1925, this was a large and ornate cinema in a Neo-Classical style, created as part of a development of an island site on this major London thoroughfare.
Designed by Andrew Mather (architect of many later Odeon cinemas), the cinema used theatrical norms of stalls and circle seating, together with a number of boxes. An organ was installed and used during intermissions. Total seating was 1,700. In May 1928, Walter Gibbons company General Theatres Corporation was taken over by Gaumont British Theatres.
The cinema is noted as the location of the first run of the first British 'talkie', Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail in 1929. In its basement the Kit Kat Club was located, one of the most famous London nightclubs of the roaring 1920s (not to be mixed up with an older political club similarly named).
