The Prince Charles Cinema, for those who don’t know, is not an arts cinema with those leather sofas where people bring you bottles of chilled white wine. Operating as a film house since 1969, it is famous for its all-night movie marathons (pyjamas and pillows) and its unusual levels of audience interaction, from “Sing-Along-a-Rocky Horror” to “Solve-Along-a-Murder She Wrote”, where punters raise miniature placards of Jessica Fletcher’s face at suspicious moments. At “Sing-Along-a-Wicker Man”, a screening of the Seventies film, the audience joined arms for the burning of Edward Woodward and sang “Summer Is Icumen In”. Under every seat was a paper bag containing a red liquorice bootlace, to be eaten at the moment the missing girl’s “naval string” was found hanging on a tree.
The Prince Charles, beloved of Quentin Tarantino, has its roots in London’s long tradition of freaky cinema. It should certainly be what they call an “asset of community value”, being the only place in London where you can catch a mainstream movie you missed, or take your child to see Home Alone as part of its sell-out December season, a staple of Christmas for people who cannot afford The Nutcracker.
At the end of January, the company that owns the cinema’s freehold – run by the 58-year-old billionaire Asif Aziz, once the subject of a Times piece that asked if he was “the meanest landlord in Britain” – demanded a six-month break clause in the lease, which could leave the cinema homeless. On 7 February, the world’s first YMCA – on nearby Great Russell Street – also bought by Aziz, was closed after a desperate attempt by locals to save it. The Prince Charles Cinema started a petition in response to the threat to its future, which received 150,000 signatures in 24 hours.
The first reaction, among everyone I know, was something familiar to Londoners – what I like to call the metaphorical packing of the bindle: “Right, that’s it. It is time to leave, like Dick Whittington: there is nothing left for us here.” The second reaction was: where is Sadiq? Why isn’t Labour speaking about this rapacious gutting of London’s heartland, which began when Boris Johnson was mayor? Aziz bought the Trocadero in 2009 and closed it down, converting the 19th-century building into 700 sleeping cocoons without windows, some of which are as small as 7m sq (the Zedwell Hotel Piccadilly Circus). In the summer months, these budget cocoons retail at £203 per night.
Aziz acquired the freehold for the Prince Charles in 2022 for just £13m. It is listed under a company that, in November 2024, changed its name to Zedwell LSQ Limited, and the firm’s accounts now state that the property “is being redesigned to be used as a hotel”. Any such development will be referred to the Mayor of London. But Aziz is a canny operator. He has been pictured smiling with Sadiq Khan when his charitable organisation the Aziz Foundation funded the Ramadan Nights festival, and his company is one of the supporting partners that make up “Team London” in the Mayor’s Opportunity London scheme, a collaboration with property developers and “business improvement districts”. How much do partners pay to be involved? City Hall wouldn’t tell me.
The copy on the Zedwell Hotels website celebrates the history of the places that have been destroyed. There is a page about the Trocadero mentioning the four theatres it housed. “Sadly… we have been reduced to a blog portal that informs you about the similar places you can visit,” it says, oddly. Then, even odder: “London is among the top places in the world where one can see the ancestral way of life intact…”
This kind of talk embodies the slide into mindless acceptance that accompanies London’s property development: the sense that everything has its time. But I am not nostalgic about the Prince Charles Cinema, a venue which sold 250,000 tickets in 2024. Every show I have attended there in recent months has been sold out, while I have often been the only customer at screens in the multiplexes next door.
I asked the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, for comment and her office said they can’t speak out on a matter between the cinema and its landlord. A spokesperson for the Mayor told me, “City Hall is currently in touch with the operators of the cinema to explore what we can do to support them, and encourages all parties to come to the table to find a resolution.” Aziz’s foundation has funded £77,000 worth of internships in the offices of Labour MPs: a conflict of interest for the party, perhaps?
But what is a culture secretary, or a mayor, or a state for – if not to intervene? To expect intervention is not naive. It is absolutely possible to change planning policy, regulations, tax breaks and power dynamics with developers, but where is the political will? You won’t get Labour criticising any London building work, I keep hearing, given the need for new homes and the state of the rest of the country. To which I’d say: we need special attention – because no city in the UK has developers with the same flagrant disregard for its own culture as London.
As the journalist Jim Waterson pointed out at the end of January, the Prince Charles is one of the few places remaining in the West End of London with a deep meaning to Londoners, not tourists. My friends and I were students at the University of London 20 years ago. Soho was our student union, the BT Tower our way to work out where home was. There was a late-night bar built in to a brothel on Archer Street; the Africa Club in Covent Garden, its rum and Coke served by an elderly couple; the tiny blues bar in Denmark street built in a 17th-century forge; heavy metal at the Intrepid Fox, nights at the Astoria, Popstars, the Metro, the Borderline. The centre of town was the spine of our cultural experience, its little vertebrae knocked off, one by one, as the Instagrammable temples of consumption replaced them. But, as I say, this is not about nostalgia.
My friends and I still head to the West End like homing pigeons whenever we want to feel alive. We move through the streets feeling the buzz, the comfort and the energy – even while the high, dark buildings seem to whisper, “We have nothing to offer you. We are reduced to portals that inform you about similar places you can visit. Can you see the ancestral way of life intact?”
I’ve watched as tourists stare at the giant screen outside the Outernet, which destroyed part of Denmark Street: one Sunday afternoon it showed eBay items you could point your phone at and buy on the spot. But sometimes, when I’ve drunk at the Royal George, the tiny little comedy pub opposite that has survived all the changes, I’ve told myself: they haven’t destroyed it all – you can still see plays and shows in the West End…
You can still see plays and shows. That’s how the mind is slowly recalibrated by the actions of London’s developers, and the failure of the state to stand in their way: towards loss, apathy and passivity. It is not enough to say that the Prince Charles is an anomaly, that it was only a matter of time.
[See also: The costs of Labour’s growth boosterism]
Listen to the New Statesman podcast
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 12 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Reformation