A Spotlight on Sherborne Cinema
by Alex Parnham-Cope | Amplify Stroud
May 2025
Nestled in the heart of Kingsholm, Gloucester, Sherborne Cinema offers a cool and inviting escape from the hustle and bustle of city life. Draped under velvet curtains and adorned with hand-painted art deco murals, golden embellishments and bewjelled chandeliers, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stepped back in time.
And, in some ways, you have. The building was originally The Friends' Sherborne Street Mission Room, built in 1880, a whooping 145 years ago this year. During Gloucester’s industrial heyday, it was a hub for the local working-class community, hosting activities and events including children's picture screenings. When much of Kingsholm was demolished and rebuilt in the mid 20th century, the building survived as Christadelphian Hall.
In 2012, cinema aficionado Mark Cunningham bought it and, in an astonishing labour of love, spent several years refurbishing and restoring the interior to convert it into the prized community hub it is today. The painstakingly detailed decor and retro-fitted fine furnishings cleverly disguise Sherborne's very recent history, only opening its doors to the movie-going public 10 years ago.
Mark SmithBBC News, Gloucestershire
Fiercely independent and proud to serve the local community, Sherborne’s ethos is all about keeping the cinema experience as affordable and accessible as possible. You won’t be forced to fork out the best part of a tenner for a box of popcorn here. In February this year, Mark was awarded the Mayor’s Medal for his “outstanding services to the city of Gloucester.”
Now celebrating a full decade since they first switched the projector on, Sherborne are as keen as ever to offer a little bit of everything to moviegoers, whether they’re part of the close-knit Kingholm community or have travelled from across the country to experience the movie magic. Amplify Stroud sat down with Shawn Reed, Sherborne’s Assistant Manager, to find out more.
It’s the whole ethos of the building, really. The whole premise is that it's supposed to be inclusive for everybody, affordable for everybody to come along. So you can come here and you can get a ticket and a bag of sweets and a drink and it not cost you more than 10 pounds, which you can't really do at a lot of places.
It was made for families to have an affordable option. We run it as low a cost as we possibly can, which is why we only make 40 or 50p on a bag of sweets.
Because we're not there to make lots of money, and all the money that’s generated goes back into keeping the cinema running. We're here to show films to people. So as long as we make enough to do that, that's the most important thing, really.
And I think that's what you get with any independent [business], is they're there to service the people of the area. Primarily, it was done to serve the people who live in Kingsholm and the surrounding areas. But we find that people travel from a little bit further now to come to the pictures because it's an affordable option for them, or just a nice experience.
We try and show as many different types of films as we possibly can. We've only got one screen, so there are limitations, obviously.
We try and show something during the children's holidays; we also try and show something that appeals to an older audience throughout the day. So British independent films always do quite well here. People are quite passionate about supporting the British film industry.
And then we'll mix in the evening, whether we'll show the latest blockbuster, a Marvel film or something like that, or we've done a few horror films. Primarily, it’s new releases, although we do some re-releases of classic films.
It's just encouraging people to come along. It's not expensive. You can come here, not spend a huge amount of money and have an enjoyable evening. It’s all about the experience. But also, there's a claw that people want to go out and do things, they don't want to be at home all the time. You know, we've had enough of that.
So that's what you're trying to sell, is the experience, and the fact that people can come and support an independent business and [we’re] not taking advantage of people. And people are passionate, as passionate about this building as the people who work here. [And that] always helps as well.
It culminated in an evening that fell on the anniversary, where we invited Mark, who's the owner. He's not in the building as much as he used to be, so it was nice to have him here and not having to worry about how everything worked. And some of his friends and family were here.
We were full with the general public, we had a nice presentation for him, and people got the chance to say thank you to him. He was awarded the mayor's medal for services to Gloucester, which I think he was a bit sort-of taken aback.
He's very much a person who isn't in the limelight at all. He's always in the background, which you find with people who work in cinemas and stuff like that, is that they're very much the person behind the curtain, rather than the movie stars and the people on the screen are the ones that get all the acclaim. But there's lots of people who work in the cinemas to make the experience as nice as possible.
It was really, really nice. And we screened Cinema Paradiso, which was one of his favourite films. And that was a really nice opportunity, not only for him to sit in the cinema and watch one of his favourite films. But it is such a beautiful film for people to come here and be able to experience it, and it to be full, you get that buzz of the atmosphere.
So it's nice to be involved in those things and remind people that we want to be here for another 10 years and carry on, which would be brilliant.
We're always excited about new films here. In the long run, we would love to be able to put another screen in, which would mean that we can show twice as many films as we can. We’d have the flexibility to do things like subtitled screenings, it would make SEN screenings a lot easier.
So that's the plan, it’s a long way down the line, but we're sort of starting to put the things in place. It would be very similar to this, in that Mark would design it, as he did 10 years ago. And so it would have the same sort of feel.
What people really, really love about this building is that it's small, comfortable, and welcoming. And with that second screen, it'd be really cool to have the ability to maybe have a little stage and do some Question and Answer screenings, or maybe theatre or comedy, and try and expand out a little bit.
But the main thing is making sure the cinema is in a position where it's self-sufficient. Because a year and a half, two years ago, there were murmurings that Mark was going to have to close the building. And it was almost a ‘last hurrah’ when he asked the few of us to come in and just see if we could give it one last sort of go at making it sustainable and keep it here. Which is done at the moment, which is brilliant. So it's quite it's nice to feel that it was in a position where it might not have been here anymore, and now it's thriving, to an extent.
We are aware that the cinema industry is so up and down. People always talk about the death of cinema, but it's still here now, and people still enjoy going. It feels like the industry's sort of starting to get back on its feet. I don't know how that feels from the outside, but from the inside, I think there's a lot of positivity about the way cinema is going.
Sherborne Cinema is located on Sherborne Street, Gloucester, GL1 3BY, just a short walk from the train station and city centre. Free parking is available, and the venue is wheelchair accessible. You can find all their film listings and more information on their website.
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