SOUTHEND has just one cinema where you can still watch a film, but dotted around the town are other, older buildings, some forlorn, some still thriving, that once played a more glamorous role on the high street, back in the heyday of the silver screen.

The heritage of old cinemas in the town has been highlighted by Eastwood writer Roy Dilley, in Southend’s Palaces of the Silver Screen. The book, reviewed in Memories last week, tells the individual stories of the picture palaces that once thronged Southend’s streets.

Roy’s life work, the book is a celebration of these fabulous buildings, but also a lament. The majority have been casually destroyed, and the destruction continues. The latest casualty was the old Empire Palace in Leigh Broadway, demolished in 2009 just a few months short of its 100th anniversary. The future of others also looks dubious.

This week, Memories takes a tour of the survivors and looks at the stories behind them, as researched by Roy over a period of more than 30 years. Roy hopes that by raising consciousness of these structures the town may come to value them more. “As usual, people are waking up to their heritage when it is almost too late to save any of it,” Roy says. “But there is still time.”

The tour starts at the west end of town, in Leigh, a hotspot for old cinema buildings. The Corona, opened in 1929, is an example of the sort of the lavish, no-expense-spared approach taken to cinema design. “People didn’t have the comfortable, well decorated homes they have now,” says Roy. “Ornate decoration was one of the selling points for cinemas. They weren’t called dream palaces for nothing. They were deliberately designed to be places of wonder. Cinema owners competed to provide the most lavish surroundings.”

The Corona went one stage further, flattering its local audience by evoking Leigh and its maritime history. Starting with a giant electrically-illuminated cockle shell on the facade, the theme of fishing and fishermen was woven into every aspect of the interior. Plaster crabs, cod, lobsters and seagulls could be seen around the auditorium. Above the proscenium arch sailed two model Elizabethan galleons, a reminder of the role Leigh played in fighting the Spanish Armada.

The Corona closed in April 1959. It is now a snooker hall in Leigh Road. The heaving curtains and the screen have long gone, but Roy says some of the plasterwork decoration survives inside the building.

Around the corner, in Maple Avenue, is a more modest old movie house, Henry’s Hall. It was designed, built by and named after a local carpenter and builder. Henry Bridge harboured an urge to dress up in a tuxedo, and become a showman. He even constructed a balcony on the front of the building, so he could be seen with the mayor on opening day. However, he only managed to get the rector of Leigh, the Rev R.S. King, who opened the cinema in 1912.

Henry’s Hall could not compete with its larger rivals. In 1923, it ceased operation as a cinema. Its subsequent uses, first for baking then dry cleaning, left the building virtually unaltered. The site is now ear-marked for demolition and replacement by a block of flats.

Moving east, Roy’s tour passes the entrance to the old Astoria cinema in Southend High Street. From its opening in 1935 until its closure and demolition in 1997, this remained Southend’s most prestigious picture house. Legendary names such as Laurel and Hardy, the Beatles and Roy Orbison performed on its stage.

Although the cinema building is gone, the entrance, with its three distinctive giant fanlights, remains in place as the gateway to Essex University’s Southend campus.

In Alexandra Road is a building that can only partially claim cinema status. The site of a Victorian music hall, it was rebuilt after a fire in 1896, becoming the Empire theatre. It reopened as the Rivoli cinema, in 1920. In 1998, it reverted to a theatre, becoming the New Empire. This mish-mash history has created a mish-mash building. Roy has even located remnants of the Victorian music hall at the rear of the building.

The Plaza cinema in Southchurch Avenue, with its pert little dome, is still intact. Opened in 1929, closed as a cinema in 1959, the Plaza was always an also-ran, reduced towards the end of its life to surviving on a diet of “continental films”, a euphemism for soft porn. It should have been a prime candidate for demolition, but it was saved by an act of God. In 1990, it was taken over as a centre for the Christian Fellowship Church.

The Plaza’s future is secure, but the future of Shoeburyness’s Palace theatre hangs in the balance. The Palace has a uniquely distinctive frontage like a giant ice-cream scoop. “Cinemas always tried to attract attention with their facades,” says Roy, “and nobody could pass the Palace and fail to notice it.”

The Palace closed in the same year as the Southchurch Plaza and the Leigh Corona, 1959. For years, it served as a camping shop, but now awaits conversion into flats.

“There is some hope the frontage can be preserved and incorporated into the new building,” says Roy.

These are the survivors. You could make a parallel tour around the haunted sites of the lost cinemas. For instance, Halfords in London Road, Westcliff, stands on the foundations of the stunning Metropole (subsequently Essoldo, Classic, and Cannon), an amazing Art Deco pile with one of the finest sets of theatre curtains in any British cinema.

Building the Royals shopping centre involved the demolition of not one, but two, cinemas. They were the Rank Organisation’s theatre, the Ritz, which also contained one of Southend’s top restaurants, and the old Pier Hill Bioscope building, which later became a coach station.

The west side of Warrior Square boasted Roy’s favourite among the lost Southend cinemas, the Strand (subsequently Southend Essoldo). It was approached in an unusual way, down a narrow tunnel running between the square and the High Street. “This deepened the sense of magic and excitement involved in a visit to the pictures,” as one old cinemagoer recalled. It opened in 1911.

This line-up provides a mere taster of the cinemas that once crowded Southend’s streets, at a time when the very existence of the moving picture was wonderous.

Times change. The days when a town could support a cinema every few blocks passed away long ago. But Roy believes we have entered another new age for cinemas, the age of preservation.

To make his point, he cites another location in town, roughly marked by the junction of Victoria Circus and Southchurch Road. Here stood the 170-seat Gaumont Palace, built in 1909, and for many years the grandest building in Southend after the Kursaal. The Gaumont was demolished in 1958.

Roy says: “Preparation work had just begun on the Cliffs Pavilion at the time,” says Roy. “Instead of all the delay and huge expense involved with building the Cliffs, they could simply have restored the Gaumont, and given the town a magnificent, historic theatre right at its centre.”

The 21st century, though, is the age of recycling, a principle which extends to buildings as well as garbage. “Southend’s old cinemas can be adapted rather than demolished,” says Roy.

“We’ve lost most of them. It makes good sense to look after the ones that are left.”

l Southend’s Palaces of the Silver Screen by Roy Dilley is available from the Book Inn, Leigh, Waterstone’s bookshop, in Southend High Street, and Southend Museum. Recommended price £15.