Can Cambridge Pledge-makers help find a much-improved solution for town and gown alike with the old Hobson Street Cinema building?
You can read the article here. This follows the refusal of Cambridge City Council to authorise the comprehensive redevelopment of the cinema for offices back in November 2024 following significant representations from a number of organisations including Cambridge Past, Present, and Future.
If you want to help lobby for an improved solution to bring the site back into public use, you can:
- contact your city councillor or MP
- get involved with Cambridge Past, Present, and Future – the local organisation part of the national Civic Voice movement.
What the BBC Cambridgeshire article said
“[The developer], who bought the former Central Cinema in 2011, wanted to replace the building with space for 300 office workers and a community area.”
Which is interesting given the videos I have made about it in the 2010s:
I incorporated the above into this blogpost back in 2021
In my public question of 2017, I doorstepped the landlord’s agent whose address was on the billboard outside the cinema. Hence finding out and telling the city council about it.
“I was disappointed to find out the landlord was not interested in selling, and is not interested in letting out the building for anything other than high value retail”
PQ from Antony Carpen (me) to Cambridge City Council’s West-Central Area Committee 07 December 2016
The value of the cinema (assuming no other property assets are included) seems to fluctuate between £9m-£10m according to the Companies House papers that list the two people featured in the article. You can watch the video of their presentation to the City Council’s Planning Committee for the redevelopment of the cinema, noting this profile from St Catherine’s College too.
The last word was left with the city council
“A Cambridge City Council spokesperson said: “The development of the site need not involve the level of harm and extent of demolition proposed to the conservation area. We hope the applicants will work with the council to explore alternative options.”
Above – BBC Cambridgeshire 15 Dec 2024
I hope alternative and significantly improved options are forthcoming, because no one wins while the building remains in this state.
“Can politicians or even business people come up with something different?”
I’m seeing more publicity around the Cambridge Pledge (https://www.cambridge-pledge.org/) project that Innovate Cambridge has launched. This could be something that the business people involved could use as their test case. Can they get together and come up with a solution that can save as much of the historic parts of the building, create a much larger community space – such as a shared ‘town-gown’ hub that previous generations of students at the now sadly closed Cambridge Student Hub called for. (I told them about this building during some of the voluntary project mentoring I did for them in the late 2010s – they too were rebuffed by the landlord’s agents). Had any of us known that the landlord was a fellow at one of Cambridge’s colleges, they might have used their college and university networks to help negotiate a solution.
Therefore it’s up to Cambridge’s business communities to stand up and be counted, and make the pledge that more and more of them are signing up to, succeed where us community and student activists, and politicians (noting previous ministers chose to disempower local councillors) have not.
In the meantime, Parliament’s website has confirmed that a ministerial statement on devolution in England will be made on Monday 16 December 2024 – i.e. tomorrow afternoon. Which should be interesting as we should find out the future of our county, city and district councils.
Above – from Parliament’s ‘What’s on’ page for 16/12/2024
Whatever ministers come up with, I hope it contains powers that enable councils to protect and even in extremis, take ownership of such heritage buildings at risk (and enable them to raise funds via wider taxation powers to help restore them/bring them back into public use). Because that’s not the only local historical building at risk.
Above – the Romsey Labour Club appears to have changed hands as well. Anyone know who owns it now and what their plans are?
In the meantime, the next 18 or so hours will seem like forever! For those of us local government nerds anyway!
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The Cambridge Town Owl 