The Electric Palace Archive

The Electric Palace is one of the oldest, least-altered, purpose-built cinemas in the world to survive complete with its silent screen, original projection room and ornamental frontage still intact. It was built in 1911 by the showman Charles Thurston in the port town of Harwich on the East Anglian coast.

The cinema lasted until 1956 after it struggled to remain open in the wake of recent disastrous flooding in the area and of other larger competing cinemas opening nearby.

In 1972 the cinema was saved from demolition when it was spotted by historical architect Gordon Miller, who instantly identified its historic value, eventually getting its historic status officially recognised as a Grade 2 level building. A trust was formed and years of planning and development was implemented by a team of dedicated and enthusiastic volunteers from the community to save the Electric Palace and restore it to its former glory as a working cinema for the people of Harwich which it has been for over 40 years now.

Recently a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant was awarded to the Electric Palace for an archivist to organise the archive and to work in cooperation with an Education & Outreach Officer to engage with the local community to help tell the story of the ‘Palace’. We have been working hard building the archive up ‘from scratch’ and are now at a point where we are about to move into a larger archive space so that we can accommodate volunteers to help us catalogue and digitise the archive to open it up to the public and researchers alike.