[title]
One of London’s most popular cinemas has big plans to safeguard its future.
Genesis Cinema, Mile End’s chic but bargain-priced five-screen picturehouse, is planning to add student accommodation to its site – and potentially add a second cinema to its portfolio.
Genesis has been in talks with Queen Mary University to add between 2-300 student units to its site and plans have now been submitted to make the plan a reality. The current building on Mile End Road will be torn down and rebuilt, with a temporary new premises sought while construction is ongoing.
‘This is a five-year plan, so it's early days,’ says Genesis owner Tyrone Walker-Hebborn, ‘but we’re looking for other sites to either operate temporarily or make into another Genesis. So when we open this one up again, we'll have two cinemas – we’ll be a mini chain. That's the dream.’
While optimistic for the future, Walker-Hebborn points to a fall in box-office takings and a less steady slate of new releases, post-pandemic, as drivers behind the decision.
‘We've always been approached by people wanting to buy it and turn it into residential, which has never been my thing,’ he says. ‘But we've always been thinking about what we can do to realise a bit of cash to keep us going, and a developer proposed a scheme where we could take the building down, dig down and put a cinema back in place underground and on the ground floor, and then put student accommodation in the rest of the building.’
The new-look Genesis will transform into a four-screen cinema on the ground and basement levels, with student housing above. ‘You'll walk in and feel like it's Genesis straight away,’ says Walker-Hebborn. ‘I love this building [and] we're making it fit for purpose for the next generation.’
Without a rebuild, Genesis’s owner estimates that a full refit of the existing cinema would cost between £3-5 million.
‘[Instead], we get a much more modern cinema and we can then tailor it to what we know works for us,’ he tells Time Out of the plans, ‘with a bigger events space, because events are what's kept us going’.
As for the second site – either temporary during the rebuild or a permanent second Genesis cinema – Walker-Hebborn says that he’s keen for it to be in London. ‘Maybe just on the periphery,’ he says.
Walker-Hebborn, who has run Genesis for 25 years, describes the plans as ‘very community based’, noting that increasing house prices and rents in Tower Hamlets have driven the demand for new student accommodation.
‘We'll [be] getting the cinema back and also providing social housing in the form of affordable student accommodation,’ he says. ‘Which is just great because I don't want there to be loads of people who don't live here buying it and then not living [in it].’
‘I'm hoping it'll be five years until we reopen.’