Going to the cinema was the single most important pastime in 1930s Britain. Cinemas boasted ‘some eighteen to nineteen million attendances every week’, with ‘nine hundred and three million cinema tickets … sold in 1934’. ‘From flea-pits to fairy-palaces’, cinemas were everywhere. The picture-palaces were styled as Grecian temples, Spanish villas, baroque mansions and art deco ocean liners. One patron described the Astoria in Finsbury Park as a Moorish paradise: ‘the air was faintly perfumed … overhead one could see what appeared to be a night sky with stars twinkling’. Going to the cinema, then, was not just about seeing films. In recent decades a number of studies have explored the multi-sensory nature of the movie-going experience, especially its tactile, olfactory and aural dimensions. Jeffrey Richards pioneered the empirical, case-based approach to writing the cultural history of interwar cinema-going in his monumental The Age of the Dream Palace (1984), which not only discussed the significance of the films themselves to the 1930s generation, but also drew on his own personal sensory memories of cinemas – ‘most of all one remembers the feel of the faded plush, the distinctive smell of disinfectant and orange peel, the cheer that greeted the lowering of the lights’.

The notion of the cinema as a physical environment defines many literary descriptions of going to the movies during the 1930s and also figures prominently in critical writing about film. Elizabeth Bowen's 1937 essay ‘Why I Go to the Movies’ is exemplary of this tendency to emphasise the ambient qualities of cinemas. It is not only, or even not so much, the films themselves that exercise such a powerful appeal on audiences. In Bowen's account, the two-dimensional world on screen is not necessarily the main event: ‘I go because the screen is an oblong opening into the world of fantasy for me; I go because I like story, with its suspense; I go because I like sitting in a packed crowd in the dark, among hundreds riveted on the same thing.’ Bowen's account emphasises not only the pleasure offered by the alternate reality of the film, but also the sensory experience of a ‘packed’ cinema which is not subordinated to the fantasy world on the screen, but interacts with it.