Crollywood: When Croydon had its own version of Hollywood
Before Hollywood existed, too
Welcome back to Londonist: Croydon Edit. Piloted by Londonist editor and Croydonian Will Noble, it's about all things in the borough of Croydon. This edition is exclusively for paid subscribers.
‘THE RAGE OF LONDON! THE WONDER OF THE AGE!’ exclaimed an ad in the Croydon Times in 1896, announcing a showing of ‘living photographs’ at the Horniman Hall.
It heralded a cultural revolution—the dawn of a new type of theatre. With the Lumière Brothers screening L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat at what is now the Regent Street Cinema, and the impresario Robert Paul doing the rounds with his ‘Theatrograph’ projector, cinema was about to shake up the world—and Croydon was hungry for the new medium. You can tell just how hungry it was, by reading Allen Eyles and Keith Skone’s book, Croydon Cinemas, which shows that already by 1915, the borough had a staggering 21 picture houses. But Croydon wasn’t content with just showing films; it also wanted to make them, and swiftly nurtured its own version of Hollywood… and before Hollywood really existed, too.
Three major studios made up Croydon’s pioneering scene: the Clarendon Film Company (established in 1904), the Rosie Film Company (1906) and Cricks and Martin (1908, although the firm was around from 1904 as Cricks & Sharp).
I’m not going to pretend the output of these studios was on a par with a lot of today’s movies (after all, filmmaking hadn’t been around for five minutes), but they genuinely have their moments. Take Rescued in Mid Air, a farcically charming piece by Clarendon, in which director/trick photographer extraordinaire Percy Stow sends a lady (or, it would seem, a dragged-up man) into the ether with an explosion, has her soaring through the skies clutching an umbrella (a la Mary Poppins), then rescued from a church steeple by a crackpot inventor in a steampunk yacht.