Sawston Cinema Archive Project

Peter Harmer outside the Community Centre

Local film-maker Peter Harmer has been working with the archive project team at our regular Thursday sessions to help us write and make a documentary about the history of the cinema.  Last week we interviewed local people about their memories of the cinema, and this week Peter showed us how to use our camera equipment to interview people.

The Foundation Stone

As part of our work on the archive project we have been researching the history of the cinema in Sawston. We found a web page that has a lot of information – you can read it here – and it says

The tradition of the benevolent employer was continued in the 20th century by H. G. Spicer (d. 1944), who bought the paper-mill in 1917. He and his wife gave land for the village college in 1930, and in 1932 built a theatre, later converted to a cinema and closed in 1963. (fn. 42) His wife helped to found the Sawston maternity and infant welfare centre in 1918, to which H. G. Spicer left £1,000. (fn. 43) By 1961 the firm of Spicers owned more than 100 houses in the area, and in 1971 it held two blocks of flats and money in trust for necessitous former employees and their dependents. (fn. 44)

Term has started at the Village College and we’re holding the first meeting of the archive project this afernoon. Julie Heathcote is leading a session about oral history, talking about how we can start to get information about the history of the cinema to use in making our film.

There are a load of us from the Village College, and some people who remember going to the cinema before it closed, all those years ago.

We’ve got our new website and you’re looking at it…

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Today we worked on website designs with Bill Thompson. We looked at existing websites to see which features we would like on our website. We then drew up some designs and presented these to the group.

Planning the site

Some of the suggestions for the ‘about this site’ were:

We are a group of students from Sawston Village College.  We are investigating the history of the cinema in Sawston and the memories that people can remember from their past.

We are going to put together a film of the memories we find and place some on our website.

(Brogan)

Hi.   This is one of the members of Sawston Cinema.  All of the members come from Sawston Village College.  We meet up on a Thursday.

We talk about the history of the Sawston Cinema, aka Spicers Theatre.  We have people from the earlier days of the cinema.  They tell us about what they remember.

(Thomas)

Site design

This project is all about bringing back the memories of the original cinema in Sawston.  We are going to interview those with memories and record them using both audio and video.  We shall then display them on this website.

(anon)

Talking about the site