Interesting Finds: The Last Picture Palace Seats Inside the Story of Brighton’s Lost ABC Cinema

By Chris Harris

Interesting Finds: The Last Picture Palace Seats Inside the Story of Brighton’s Lost ABC Cinema

There is something strangely emotional about old cinema seating.

Not antique furniture in the traditional sense. Not polished mahogany or aristocratic country house pieces. Cinema seats were built for ordinary people. Thousands upon thousands of them. Yet somehow, when they survive, they carry more atmosphere than almost anything else.

Recently, I bought a pair of original British cinema seats at auction in Brighton. The auction house believed they may have come from the old ABC Cinema in the city, and after researching them properly, I think that theory is probably true.

The first clue came from the cast iron aisle ends. Moulded into the ironwork is the name “Procede”, a British manufacturer of commercial cinema and theatre seating during the great age of British picture palaces. That instantly ruled out reproduction furniture or modern decorative copies. These were genuine auditorium seats designed for heavy daily use in a proper cinema.

Then came the design itself.

Everything about them screams interwar British cinema architecture. The heavy cast iron standards have stepped Art Deco shaping with almost architectural lines. The back panels are veneered plywood framed by elegant tubular metal edging. The armrests are broad, chunky and industrial, built not for delicacy but for durability. Underneath, the seats still retain their original weighted sprung mechanism which automatically returns them upright when you stand up.

That mechanism alone tells you a lot about how cinemas once worked.

In the great picture palaces of the 1930s, space was money. A thousand people or more might need to leave quickly between screenings, so seats were designed to fold upwards automatically to clear the aisles. Modern multiplex seating often feels disposable by comparison. These older seats feel engineered. Overbuilt. Designed to survive decades of use.

Mine still work perfectly.

Sit down and the seat lowers effortlessly beneath you. Stand up and it silently lifts itself back upright like a loyal old servant that has spent ninety years doing exactly the same job.

Even the seat numbers survive underneath. Number 244 and number 245. Somewhere, generations of Brighton cinema goers once booked those exact seats. Couples on first dates. Children watching Disney films. Wartime audiences escaping reality for two hours beneath clouds of cigarette smoke and projector light.

That is the strange power of salvaged cinema seating. Unlike most antiques, these pieces are tied directly to human experience.

And Brighton’s ABC Cinema was no ordinary local cinema.

The building originally opened in 1930 as the Savoy Cinema, one of Britain’s huge super cinemas, lavishly designed to compete during the golden age of filmgoing. Later absorbed into the ABC chain, it became one of the South Coast’s major entertainment venues. These were not merely places to watch films. They were cathedrals of escapism.

At their peak, British cinemas were designed to overwhelm people. Vast foyers. Sweeping staircases. Chandeliers. Uniformed attendants. Plush carpets. Organ music before the feature began. Going to the cinema was an event.

And the seating reflected that ambition.

Commercial cinema seating had to combine comfort, elegance and industrial practicality. Manufacturers like Procede are specialised in this exact balance. Their seats were built from cast iron because it was virtually indestructible. The sprung mechanisms were designed for constant repetitive movement. The plywood backs reduced weight while maintaining strength. Every detail had a purpose.

Ironically, many of these seats survived only because cinemas declined.

By the 1960s and 70s, Britain’s enormous single-screen auditoriums were becoming uneconomical. Television had changed everything. The great cinemas were subdivided, modernised or demolished altogether. During refurbishments, thousands of original seats were ripped out and discarded. Only a fraction escaped into salvage yards, reclamation auctions or private collections.

That is why surviving pairs like these are becoming increasingly difficult to find.

What I particularly love about mine is the tension between industrial design and glamour. The seats have been recovered at some point in an extraordinary pink cut velvet style upholstery with metallic backing and oversized scrolling floral motifs. It is theatrical, slightly decadent and wonderfully over the top, which somehow feels entirely appropriate for old cinema seating.

The upholstery is not original, but in a strange way that almost improves them. Cinemas constantly evolved. Seats were repaired, recovered and updated over decades. Layers of change became part of their history.

These were never really chairs in the normal sense. They were part of architecture. Bolted permanently into vast auditoriums. Fixed in endless regimented rows beneath glowing EXIT signs and cigarette haze. Remove them from the cinema and they become something else entirely. Sculpture perhaps. Industrial design. Memory made physical.

That is why people love them now for home cinemas, bars, restaurants and creative interiors.

They carry nostalgia without trying too hard.

Most antique furniture was designed to impress. Cinema seating was designed simply to disappear into people’s lives while extraordinary moments happened around it. First kisses. Terrifying horror films. Newsreels during wartime. Saturday morning serials. The first colour films. The first cinemascope epics.