Few areas of London are quite as charmless as Leicester Square, a once glamorous West End location now best known for having a big M&M’s shop in it. Indeed, last year, when Londoners attempted to keep tourists away from all the nice restaurants by leaving fake glowing reviews for bad ones, the only logical lure was the square’s notoriously disappointing Angus Steakhouse.
However, there has always been one holdout, one scrap of Leicester Square that, despite it all, has managed to single-handedly uphold the spirit of the place. The Prince Charles Cinema, open since 1962, may very well qualify as the greatest cinema in the world. A repertory theater beloved by the likes of Quentin Tarantino (who called it “everything an independent movie theater should be”) and Paul Thomas Anderson (who would pop in to check out dailies while shooting Phantom Thread), the P.C.C. prides itself on its bracingly diverse presentation slate.
This past week, it’s shown four David Lynch films. Next Wednesday there will be a director’s cut of Robocop. There is a single day in a couple of weeks where in the space of a few hours it will show Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour, Todd Field’s Tár, and 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla movie. It shows all-night movie marathons. It shows sing-along screenings of Grease. It shows solve-along episodes of Murder, She Wrote. In other words, the Prince Charles Cinema is the place you go when you need to remind yourself that London is still an O.K. place to live.
Yet this might not be the case for long. Last week, the P.C.C. announced that it is under threat of closure. The cinema’s lease is up in September. Its property-developer landlords, Zedwell LSQ Ltd.—run by Asif Aziz, a man who is either “Mr. West End” (his words) or “the meanest landlord in Britain” (The Times of London’s words)—want to jack up the rent above market rate and introduce a break clause, giving the P.C.C. just six months to vacate if Zedwell decides to redevelop the site. The cinema argues that the clause itself is proof that redevelopment is inevitable.
The Prince Charles Cinema is the place you go when you need to remind yourself that London is still an O.K. place to live.
And so the Prince Charles Cinema has launched a petition, designed to urge Zedwell to treat it fairly and—more importantly—remind everyone of just how beloved it is. In that regard, the petition has exceeded all expectations. Within three days it had more than 130,000 signatures, with film-industry big hitters such as Paul Mescal, Jason Reitman, and Edgar Wright (who called it “the beating heart of Leicester Square”) joining the cause.
The news has become a line in the sand for Londoners.
For years now, the city has slowly given way to ugly, soul-less gentrification. The Astoria, host to countless legendary concerts, was demolished to make way for a train station. Battersea Power Station is now a shopping center so devoid of character that it feels like an airport terminal.
The thought of losing something like the Prince Charles Cinema to yet another anonymous, mixed-use, investor-led development has been a wake-up call.
A writer for The Telegraph called the P.C.C. “the perfect cinema.” Someone else, at the Evening Standard, threatened to start a riot if it closes.
If nothing else, the place has an extraordinary history that deserves to be protected. In the 1960s, the Beatles first dropped acid in what is now a room for projectionists. In the 1970s, it became a porn cinema and boasted the longest run of Emmanuelle screenings in the country, showing it for three years nonstop. It also used its Chinatown-adjacent location to its advantage, causing near riots by inviting Jet Li and Jackie Chan to screenings.
It shows all-night movie marathons. It shows sing-along screenings of Grease. It shows solve-along episodes of Murder, She Wrote.
In 2010 it presented all 121 episodes of Lost in a four-day marathon, complete with sleeping bags and paramedics (of the 100 people who signed up, just 21 made it all the way to the finale). John Waters used to greet audiences with a recorded message in which he’d growl, “Turn off your cell phone, asshole.”
Kevin Smith, a regular visitor, once vocally grouched that the cinema seemed to prefer Quentin Tarantino to him. The very next day, the cinema responded by screwing a framed picture of him to the inside wall of a toilet cubicle. It remains there to this day.
So there are many things that would be lost were the Prince Charles Cinema to close. The film industry would lose one of its greatest champions. London itself would lose a bit of its soul. But also, Kevin Smith would lose a commemorative toilet. Is that really something anyone could live with?
Stuart Heritage is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. He is the author of Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)
