A cinema's next life is on stage

The former Granada cinema on Hoe Street has a new programme, but its earlier ambitions are still there in the architectural record. The Spaces describes ornate pillars, stairs and coffered ceilings remaining from the earlier interior: a building in which the entertainment was never confined to the screen. In May 2025, it reopened as Soho Theatre Walthamstow. The change puts live performance inside a place already shaped around the occasion of going out.

The Grade II* former cinema retains elements of Theodore Komisarjevsky’s Alhambra-inspired scheme, according to The Spaces. Those details give the building a history more precise than a general claim to vintage glamour. Its decorative spaces were part of a designed sequence, not incidental embellishments around an auditorium.

The Spaces links Komisarjevsky’s scheme to the Alhambra in Granada. The reference extends the cinema's name into its interior. It also makes the building an interesting setting for a theatre: an entertainment venue whose architecture already offered another place to imagine. That is an interpretation of its documented design, rather than a reason to treat the building as a replica of its inspiration.

The former Granada cinema closed in 2003, according to The Spaces. The operator's first-year retrospective confirms the new theatre's opening in May 2025, with Natalie Palamides' WEER beginning its programme. These dates mark a change in the building's principal entertainment use.

The recent renovation had to accommodate a different kind of production. Soho Theatre describes older decorative layers alongside new studio spaces, backstage facilities and performance infrastructure. The Spaces’ account identifies the inherited decoration; the operator describes the adaptation. The new facilities matter as much to this next chapter as the decoration, because a live programme needs somewhere to be rehearsed, prepared and performed.

That shifts the story away from a simple return to former glory. A cinema's next life on stage does not ask it to repeat its old programme. It asks what its architecture can contribute to another one. The decoration offers a setting with a particular history; the adaptation makes room for work that depends on people performing in the building, rather than appearing on a screen.

The strongest account of the reopening holds those two things together: a documented interior and a newly equipped venue. Neither needs to stand as proof of a wider transformation of Walthamstow. The building's next chapter has a more concrete beginning—a theatre programme in the former Granada, with WEER on stage in May 2025.