The Old Riviera Cinema

Walk the Den and the building that stops you is the one with the Greek Doric colonnade at pavement level and an Ionic pediment over the windows. This is the centrepiece of Den Crescent: assembly rooms of 1826, later the Riviera Cinema, still Grade II listed and still the block that holds the seafront curve together.

Andrew Patey of Exeter designed it as public rooms, with a reading room, billiards and a ballroom said to take a hundred couples. Films were shown from 1912.

The Prince family ran hotel, restaurant and pictures from the 1920s, then rebuilt the interior in 1933-34 as a cinema of about 900 seats, opened on 16 July 1934.

They lived in a bungalow on the roof. In 1970 the auditorium was cut to around 520 seats and an amusement arcade went in on the ground floor. The last films ran on 26 March 2000.

After that the building was split. A two-storey penthouse block, now Riviera Apartments, went up where the roof garden and bungalow had been. The historic rooms below were leased in turns as restaurant, bar, café and, for a time, church and community use.

None of those tenancies lastingly reopened the auditorium. The Theatres Trust still records that space as disused. Pavilions Teignmouth, on the Den in front, now takes the town’s cinema and live events.

What you can do is look. The colonnade, the seven-window front and the later roof sit in plain view from the grass and the pavement. Paint on the historic shell has weathered; the penthouses above are separately kept. The side shops on the terrace and Den Road are not part of this building. There is no public tour of the old auditorium.

For anyone on the seafront, this is the building that explains the crescent: public rooms that became the town’s cinema, then a landmark whose best-known interior has been dark for a generation.