Kentish Town’s new cinema saga

After two very sorry, damp years, Highgate Studios-based developer Vabel came to the rescue of the whole project, taking over the build and promising to make good on the cinema upon completion. A number of big name arthouse and indie operators were rumoured to be interested in taking on Kentish Town’s now long-overdue new movie theatre, exciting locals once more – and then Covid struck. 

“Before Covid, we’d been speaking directly to a number of smaller cinema operators,” says Jeremy Spencer, Creative Director and Founder of Vabel. “It was hard to find interested parties due to the small size of the space and the single screen, but we’d identified two contenders. One ended up not being commercially viable, and the other had committed to the scheme and we were in advanced talks when lockdown hit. They’ve since fallen away.”

Despite the eventual easing of the Covid emergency, the landscape into which high street businesses have since emerged is full of new challenges. For cinemas, the perfect storm of spiralling running costs, uncertainty over social norms and habits and the rise of straight-to-streaming blockbusters mean it is a huge risk to open anything like the lovely community screen locals once dreamed of. Alongside that, big indie player Curzon has gone and opened their five-screen railway arch multiplex half a mile down Kentish Town Rd.

Yet true to their word, Vabel have indeed designed and built all that’s needed for a cinema operator to move in and fit the place out, starting tomorrow, spanning a pit for the screening room to have tiered seating, and provision for an on-site café and bar as well as acoustic isolation to the floor and structure. 

“We are still very much committed to this becoming a cinema and seeing all our hard work realised,” says Jeremy. “With Kentish Town being our home, we’ve gone to great lengths to carefully restore this beautiful building and bring it up to modern standards. We are proud of what we have achieved, the quality of homes we have provided and its impact on the high street. But sadly there is still one very important piece that’s missing.” 

It was always going to be a struggle to realise the desired outcome here; a grand plan decided a decade ago in a very different economic and environmental climate. Perhaps, as some residents feared immediately, a boutique cinema was never actually going to work, but it’s clear that plenty of work has gone into trying. 

“We have put in so much time and effort to design and implement all the components to enable a cinema operator to come in and fit out the space,” says Jeremy. “We remain committed to finding someone who can bring the cinema to life, and have just relaunched our sales campaign hoping we can find an appropriate operator.”

So now the search is well and truly on, with the space just gone to market with Savills. You can see some renders of how it might soon look here.

If residents can once more revive the enthusiasm they showed back in 2014, demonstrate just how popular a cinema here would still be, and perhaps even help in the search to find that elusive boutique operator, too, then it may yet all fall into place in 2023. Got an idea? Email us and we’ll pass it on.

Camdenist will be following the progress of Kentish Town’s cinema with regular updates in our Weekly C-Mail, so make sure you’re subscribed (below) to receive those. Vabel are also going to be helping us bring Secret Feasts to Kentish Town this spring, with some exciting announcements to follow…