With the future of the Beckenham Odeon hanging in the balance, Owen Oakeshott — Chair of Friends of Beckenham Cinema — explains why it's an essential community asset, to be saved at all costs.
The Odeon on Beckenham High Street is the town's only cinema, and the one place in Beckenham where the whole town turns up — from toddlers at family screenings to older residents at the daytime Silver screenings.
Teenagers walk there with friends for their first film without an adult, and plenty of sixth formers have had their first job behind its counter. Residents have sent us dozens of stories. One woman came to the cinema from Crystal Palace in the late 1980s, liked Beckenham so much she moved here, and now, retired, walks to daytime films. A retired NHS couple told us it's the only cinema they can walk to, and the evening isn't complete without dinner nearby afterwards.
Its loss would be felt well beyond the building.
Opened in 1930 as the Regal, the Odeon is an art deco picture palace from the great age of cinema building, designed by the architect Robert Cromie and listed Grade II. The facade is still one of the High Street's landmarks, and almost a century on the building is doing the job it was built for. It needs to stay that way.
"We want a working cinema in the building, open to everyone"
Citygate Church bought the freehold in March 2025, and Odeon has announced that it will close at the end of November. Citygate has said it will apply to Bromley Council to change the building's use to a place of worship, returning it to a single auditorium. Odeon's lease ran until 2038; it says the closure follows a mutual agreement with the landlord, though how the lease came to end early hasn't been made public.
We aren't asking anyone to sell. Our case rests on planning: a cinema is a community facility, and Bromley's planning policies set a high bar before a town can lose one. Our campaign is about having a working cinema in the building, open to everyone. Who runs it matters less to us than that it stays a cinema. An independent operator could do it well, and so could a cinema sitting alongside other arts uses.
My favourite personal memory of the cinema is a recent one. On Saturday 10 October, straight after our gathering on the cinema steps, I took my five-year-old daughter to see Shaun the Sheep. It was her second viewing in two days, and the only bribe that had got her there at all. She'd made her position clear: "I don't want a boring photograph taken to help the cinema. I just want to watch Shaun the Sheep and eat popcorn." So while 150 people outside chanted "Save our screen!" to a chorus of honking traffic, we walked in, bought two tickets and a bucket of popcorn, and settled down. It felt gloriously appropriate, and entirely in the service of the campaign. The film's fab, too.
You can sign up for updates on the Save Our Screen website, where you'll also find the petition (so far signed by more than 11,000 people) and fundraiser, which covers the campaign's costs. The moment that will count most is when Citygate's planning application is published: at that point, Friends of Beckenham Cinema will tell you how to comment to Bromley Council.
