27/05/2026
Ooops. We missed our birthday yesterday!
Campbeltown Picture House first opened its doors 113 years ago (yesterday). We'd love to hear your favourite experiences in the cinema or your favourite film that you've seen here.
Mine - watching Cinema Paradiso but also watching David and Jane Mayo watching Cinema Paradiso the day before they moved away from Campbeltown having done so much for this place. I may have shed a tear or ten.
Happy 113th birthday to the Campbeltown Picture House in Campbeltown, United Kingdom, first opened on this day in 1913!
The Campbeltown Picture House is one of the oldest purpose-built cinemas in Scotland and is the only operating Scottish cinema with an Atmospheric interior. It is classified as Category A by Historic Environment Scotland, placing it in the top 7% of Scottish listed buildings and marking it of national importance.
The cinema originally had an Art Nouveau interior, however in 1934 and the cinema’s original architect – Albert V. Gardner – was brought back to modernize the interior in an Atmospheric style, the theme being that of a Mediterranean courtyard.
The two small buildings in the auditorium on either side of the screen (on the left a Spanish mission style house, on the right a half-timbered castle building with pantile roof and castellated tower) became locally known as “the wee hooses”.
Atmospheric theatres were a popular phase of theatre design in the United States in the latter half of the 1920s. Auditoria were designed to feel like outdoor spaces, affording ticketholders the sense of watching a movie alfresco underneath a blue sky with fleecy clouds and twinkling stars, and irregular buildings and distant landscape vistas on the side walls.
Starting in 2014, the cinema underwent a major restoration coupled with an expansion to provide new facilities such as additional circulation space and a second cinema screen. The picture house reopened in December 2017.
The auditorium’s sky ceiling was painted-out brown in the 1980s. During the cinema’s restoration the sky ceiling was restored with a view of clouds as seen from the picturesque Machrihanish Bay, five miles west of Campbeltown.
More photos and info: historictheatrephotos.com/campbeltown.
Theatre website: campbeltownpicturehouse.co.uk.
