GRAND MEMORIES OF BRIGG CINEMA - THAT'S ALL FOLKS!

Brigg people in search of a grand night out visited the town's Grand Cinema over many decades in the 20th century.
It was located on Wrawby Street, close to the White Horse pub, and faced Queen Street.
A cinema was established in the late 1920s and lasted until 1965.
Like many in Britain, it was a victim of television becoming affordable to most households - offering another source of entertainment, including films.
Pictured above are crowds outside the Grand on Horse Fair Day, in August 1957. Horse Fair Paddock adjoined the cinema.
Some people in Brigg today will remember attending Saturday afternoon children's matinees during the early and mid-1960s - the American cartoons often proving more popular to youngsters than the main picture.
Local kids were often sad when the message That's All Folks! appeared.
However, a film starring pop group The Beatles drew a really big crowd not long before the Grand closed, with queues stretching around the corner into what is now Grammar School Road South.
The Grand - operated by the Star company for many years - also showed evening films, and we can recall being taken along to one of these sessions as a youngster to see Zulu, the 1964 film which featured Michael Caine.
The cinema generated welcome extra income by selling refreshments, dispensed by usherettes carrying trays from which they dispensed lollies, ice cream tubs and chocolate bars.
Right to the end in the mid-1960s the Saturday kids' shows drew good attendances, but we think cinema bosses only charged ninepence (4½p in decimal currency) or a shilling (5p) for admission. So the profit margin must have been small.
A lolly at 'half-time' (Zoom or Fab?) might have cost sixpence (2½p).
Getting rid of boisterous youngsters for an afternoon at modest cost was a bargain many Brigg housewives snapped up, week after week.
Post-closure, the disused building was eventually demolished in 1976, and pictures of its final days also feature here.
Glanford Borough Council later progressed with the Horse Fair Paddock grouped dwellings on adjoining land.
Even if the cinema had managed to survive into the 1990s, its owner(s) might well have faced a local government        compulsory purchase order to make way for the Brigg inner-relief road, linking Barnard Avenue with Wrawby Street as a new route for the A18 ahead of pedestrianisation.
The single-storey building now occupied by Renaissance Beauty Therapies looks more attractive today than it did in the 1950s, and the same might also be said about the frontage of the White Horse pub (revamped a few years ago by the JD Wetherspoon hospitality company).
In its latter years the Grand Cinema didn't look a picture.
Posters were displayed on the frontage to promote forthcoming films and Hollywood star Rock Hudson's likeness can be seen in the 1950s view seen here.
The majority of films were then made in full colour while TV was still making do in black and white, and there were only two channels - BBC and ITV.
Satellite TV channels were light years away; indeed, the first satellite, Russia's Sputnik 1, was not launched until October 1957 - two months after the scene at the top of this post was recorded.

The Grand Cinema, Brigg, in the mid-1970s - awaiting demolition.