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Cinema Museum

Everything about going to the pictures that nobody thought to keep, in the workhouse Chaplin was sent to as a boy.

Photo by Anonymous Unknown author, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Ronald Grant and Martin Humphries started this in 1986 out of their own collections, and what they have is the part of cinema history that usually goes in a skip: projectors in every gauge ever manufactured, art deco seats, ushers' uniforms from the 1940s and fifties, tickets, ashtrays, popcorn cartons, a million photographs, some seventeen million feet of film, and the Mitchell and Kenyon films shot between 1899 and 1906.

Since 1998 it has occupied the administration block of the old Lambeth Workhouse, which is where Charlie Chaplin was sent as a child when his mother could no longer keep the family. The building belongs to the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, which said in 2017 that it would sell on the open market; a campaign backed by Ken Loach gathered more than fifty-two thousand signatures, and the charity was given time to try to buy the place instead.

Where
2 Dugard Way, SE11 4TH
Nearest station
Elephant & Castle · 5 min walk

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