On your right, look for the long cream-and-pale facade with curved horizontal lines, a central canopy, and the blue plaque by the main entrance.
This opened on the second of May, nineteen thirty-six, as the Savoy - a streamlined cinema built in under nine months for the A-B-C chain, designed by William Riddell Glen in the International Modern style. Nearly two thousand seats: six hundred and ninety-six in the circle, twelve hundred in the stalls, and an orchestra pit because it was meant to work as both cinema and theatre. In other words, Northampton didn’t build a picture house here. It built an event.
By then, the boot and shoe town we met in Market Square had been through strike, mechanisation and factory discipline. Friday wages still landed in working hands, though, and many of those hands came here. Shoemakers, outworkers, shop assistants, apprentices - people who had spent the week in glue, leather dust, machine belts and piecework - came to Abington Square for glamour, song, film stars and a seat in the dark. A different soundtrack from the lap-stone, but still part of the same week.
The building sits on the old site of Northampton Grammar School and later the Technical College, so one kind of instruction gave way to another. Latin verbs out, Fred Astaire in. The opening gala screened Broadway Melody of nineteen thirty-six, and the interior was dressed to impress, with decorative plasterwork and grilles by Clark and Fenn. There was even a Compton theatre organ here, opened by Wilfred Southworth and kept for twenty-four years before its chambers were turned into dressing rooms for touring acts with larger entourages and, one suspects, larger opinions.
And then, of course, the Beatles. They played here twice in nineteen sixty-three. The first visit, on the twenty-seventh of March, caught them still climbing - supporting Tommy Roe and Chris Montez with a six-song set. By the sixth of November they came back as headliners, performing ten songs including All My Loving, She Loves You and Twist And Shout. The blue plaque marks both nights. One photograph taken that evening by Nicky Haslam became the first picture of the Beatles seen in America when U.S. Vogue published it that December. Northampton, very casually, helped export Beatlemania.
This stage also hosted the Rolling Stones. P-J Proby caused a national flap after his trousers split here in nineteen sixty-five, which is either rock-and-roll scandal or very poor tailoring in the wrong town. Given where we are, I suspect the audience had notes. The Stones returned that same year with Satisfaction in the set and enough crowd pressure outside to need a heavy police presence.
The Savoy became the A-B-C, then the Cannon, then lost the fight with the multiplex age and closed in nineteen ninety-five. It sat dark for five years, half ghost, half headache, before reopening in the early two thousands as a multi-purpose venue. Locals still mostly call it the Deco, because once Northampton gives a place a name, it tends to keep it.
So this is not a break from the town’s working story. It’s what happened after the bench, after the whistle, after the week’s money hit a pocket. The soundtrack widened. Three streets on, the knife and machine take over again. Walk to Lower Mounts, gateway to the Boot and Shoe Quarter; it’s about seven minutes.
