Arts group gets own home in former cinema

One of Cork’s leading arts groups is set to get its first permanent home in a legendary former cinema.

City officials confirmed last night that they have bought the former Lido Cinema in Blackpool for €57,000 and plan to use it to house Cork Community Art Link (CCAL).

The group, the driving creative force behind the city’s hugely successful Dragon of Shandon Halloween festival, has been trying for almost 20 years to find a permanent base.

They have occupied a series of unsuitable rented spaces over the years, and have been liaising with City Hall since 2008 in trying to identify a suitable premises.

Despite the difficulties, the group delivered one of the most successful arts projects in the city in recent years, the 2013 Voices from Shandon project, and played a key role in the city’s St Patrick’s Day parade, with up to 150 people attending weekly workshops over three months in the run up to the event.

Director of corporate services, Valerie O’Sullivan, told councillors last night that various property options had been examined over the years, but deemed unsuitable.

However, she said the former Lido Cinema in the heart of Blackpool was finally identified as being most suitable.

Negotiations started in 2011 but CCAL’s own attempts to buy it a year later failed. It was then the city decided to step in.

Ms O’Sullivan said the council’s acquisition of the property is in line with the council’s strategic policy of acquiring buildings which are of key historic and social value, and she said its use by CCAL, emerged as the optimum solution.

“Its use as a former cinema gives CCAL the space, ceiling height, access and egress required for them to carry out their work, in particular on large-scale productions,” she said.

The group, she said, has also demonstrated its ability to secure the financial and social support needed to become the appropriate custodians of the building.

CCAL is in receipt of Arts Council finding, of an arts grant from City Hall, and they generate earned income from other sources of some €168,000.

There was a broad welcome from councillors for the decision to buy the Lido and use it to house CCAL.

But Cllr Thomas Gould criticised the fact that city officials had not considered a submission from people in Blackpool seeking to use the building.

“We don’t want to stand in Art Links’ way but people in Blackpool are disappointed their submission wasn’t considered,” he said.

The Lido opened in 1931 and, along with the Ritz, the Savoy and the Collisieum, was one of several treasured cinemas in Cork city during the golden age of cinema. The council’s purchase if the Lido is its latest cultural investment in Blackpool. It previously rehoused Graffiti Theatre at Assumption Road, and the City and County Archives Service at Great William O’Brien Street.