True Colours

Welcome to the second set of photographs from inside the Regal during its restoration project!

Today I'll be showing you some photographs that reveal some original colour schemes from around the cinema.

First up are the walls in the auditorium. If you saw last week's wide auditorium shot then you'll remember that there were some discoloured patches on the back walls, behind the chairs. These haven't been made by the contractors; this is the way it was left last time it was repainted.

This close-in shot shows you some of the detailing of the paint. Directly under the yellow we see today was a browner colour. Underneath that is a deeper, more reddish-brown. You can also see that the outlining of the block structure with black lines was done on the previous light brown surface too. 

It's possible that the light brown colour was originally lighter, closer to today's yellow in colour, but was stained by cigarette smoke and dust in the auditorium. You can certainly see the dirt and staining on the mural in other places in the room.

You can see on those pictures too that they didn't quite manage to paint in all of the block joins with black lines. If you look at the wide shot from last week you might spot a couple more places where these lines are missing too.

These are two very exciting pictures of a water downpipe! They're from a part of the cinema that you've probably not seen before... more on that in another post. What they do show very well is the green colour of the original rainwater goods. All of the drainpipes would have been this colour of green originally; flecks of this colour are still visible on some of the repainted pipes, showing through the modern black.  You can see these pipes are rather dirty, but they're probably very close to the original colour; they're fairly well protected from the elements and probably haven't been bleached lighter very much by sunshine or rain.

That's it for today! Plenty more to come still...

We hope you're enjoying getting to see behind the scenes at the cinema during this exciting time. If there's ever anything you'd like us to keep an eye open for whilst we're in there snapping away do let us know - if we can take a photo of it, we will!