KEN LEE, Town Hall reporter, on how Croydon’s failed Mayor has been blindsided, again, by another major loss to the High Street
Blank screens: the Vue multiplex has operated 10 screens in the town centre since 2000
The latest hammerblow to Jason Perry’s bogus election claims that he has Croydon “back on track” and that “the Town Centre is coming back” arrived in voters’ inboxes yesterday, with the announcement that the Vue cinema in Grants, close to the Town Hall on Croydon High Street, is to close next week.
The 10-screen multiplex, with cinemas ranging in size from 88 to 396 seats, has been a feature of the entertainment centre since it opened in 2000.
Vue is behind the listed frontage of Croydon’s “other” department store, Grant’s, or what was once known as “the Harrod’s of south London”. The store closed in 1985, but the entertainment centre that eventually replaced it, after several years of the building standing vacant, helped to retain a vestige of town centre amenity, even after Allders closed and Westfield laid waste to the rest of the town centre with their development blight.
In the past, the 160,840sqft building has also had a Wetherspoons pub and Turtle Bay Caribbean restaurant. From April 9, all that will remain is a Nando’s, the Tokia Square Asian foodhall and a Nuffield Health gym.
The building was bought for £33million in 2015 – at the height of the Westfield hype about Croydon’s multi-billion regeneration – by Hermes Property Investment Management.
Hammerblow: Vue are closing their town centre multiplex one month before the local elections
But the building’s ownership changed hands this January, when MGI Holdings bought the property for an undisclosed sum. Inevitably, the Mayfair-based property firm says it will “reinvigorate its offering and reinforce Croydon’s position as one of London’s most dynamic suburban centres”. Like we haven’t heard guff like that all before.
Whatever MGI may have planned, it looks like a multiple run by Vue won’t be part of it.
In an email to regular customers sent yesterday, Vue wrote: “We’re sad to say that our Croydon Grants venue will soon be closing on Thursday 9th April.”
Putting a positive spin on things, the email continued: “But never fear, your next nearest Vue is just around the corner!” In fact, Vue’s Purley Way cinemas are 2½ miles away – so a decent stroll on an evening out.
Vue Purley Way, apparently, features the cinema chain’s “biggest, confiest and most luxurious seats ever”.
Which is all well and good, but the news is the latest pre-election blow for the hopes of hapless Jason Perry, with the closure exactly one month before polling day.
Given that Mayor Perry is a director of the Croydon Business “Improvement” District, he probably ought to have been on the front foot over Vue’s plans. The council has been silent over the significant closure, with the loss of jobs and the inevitable decline in customer footfall to the town centre as a consequence.
Tory Perry’s election propaganda has included claims that the town centre is on its way back, after Westfield opened six kiosks in the old Allders building. In 2025, five times as many businesses quit the Westfield-managed Whitgift Centre than new kiosks opened.
Happy punter: Jason Perry claims credit for six kiosks. But everywhere else, businesses are closing
And now the town centre’s multiplex cinema is shutting up shop on Perry’s watch, too.
This serious set-back follows Perry getting ridiculed by the High Court and having his money-spinning low traffic neighbourhoods shut down, while also overseeing a collapsed £22million property deal at Red Clover Gardens in Coulsdon. Meanwhile, there has been no significant progress since 2022 with Westfield’s “regeneration” of the town centre and Purley Pool, which Perry promised to re-open four years ago, remains closed and empty.
Mayor Perry and Croydon Council were invited to comment on the Vue closure. They had not responded by the time of publication.
The local MP, Sarah Jones, together with Labour’s mayoral candidate Rowenna Davis, have written to Vue and the building’s new owners.
“Croydon residents have been devastated to hear that Vue Cinemas are leaving Grants in our town centre,” Davis says in the letter.
“Your cinema has been a real centre for fun, community and memories in our town.”
Davis and Jones have requested an urgent meeting “to better understand your decision and see if there is any way in which we could support you to review it”.
But such belated intervention is unlikely to be enough to persuade the cinema operators to reconsider their decision to close.
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Good news for the David Lean Cinema
Speaking as a regular volunteer for the DLC, I would still argue that the closure of *any* entertainment and leisure venue in Croydon is bad news (not least because Vue offers an alternative selection of films to those screened at the DLC, including Urdu and Hindi films which aren’t traditionally provided at many venues that are easily accessible to Croydon).
That said, I would nevertheless urge and encourage you all to please support the DLC, especially as it will now exist as the ONLY major cinema venue within Croydon town centre. As well as an eclectic mix of World/European, British, art-house and classic films, the DLC does occasionally screen some of the big blockbuster films too (Project Hail Mary is scheduled for May).
A 2.5 mile “stroll” along the polluted racetracks btw Croydon town centre and Purley Way doesn’t sound much fun, but the old Grants site is a stone’s throw from George Street tramstop and a short tram ride to Ampere Way tramstop and walk from there looks a far better bet. Not that you would know it from Google, whose “directions to the Vue cinemas in Purley Way assumes that you are driving a fume-belcher there…?! Don’t they know there is a fuel crisis at the moment?
When Google gives you directions, you can choose whether you are going by car, public transport, bike or walking. It sounds like you have yours set to car.
How sad! You can’t beat the sound and vision experience of the cinema. Go and see Elv1s -youll be blown away
Sad – but alas it was always empty and looked tired. As much as I enjoyed going, what a waste of space (imagine the people-to-building-volume density!).
Perhaps in a few years the town centre would be better suited for a smaller, but comfier cinema with 2-4 smaller screens (Curzon/Everyman-esque). David Lean all well and good, but more of a civic-centre, art-house feel – Croydon Town Centre should have more than that. Purley Way can still cater to those who enjoy big multiplexes with popcorn on the floor.
In every version of Westfield proposals, there’s been a multiplex included.
Why would anyone believe whatever perry says?
I live in north Croydon, about equidistant on foot from the Grants and Purley Way Vue cinemas. I would never consider walking through the filthy garbage strewn North End, dodging the manic electric bikes, and trying to ignore the drunks to reach Grants, when I can walk through quiet streets to the Purley Way cinemas with their luxury reclining seats.
Yeh but… who goes to the cinema anymore? I think I last went 4 years ago. Used to go all the time. Streaming services have taken over.
I go a couple of times a week and the closure of this cinema, which is literally right on my doorstep, is a hammer blow for me. I’m devastated.
If we shop online, town centre shops close, they cannot stock everything (although Turtles did seem to) in all colours, sizes and designs.
Business rates in the town make shops unprofitable while warehouses and online suppliers have lower overheads.
We don’t want to watch TV according to the broadcasters’ schedules, so we stream, and can watch films on our own sofas, without driving, paying to park and walking through the town centre in the dark.
Takeaway meals arrive at our front doors after a few minutes deliberation on a laptop or phone, we consume wines, beer and spirits at home with friends.
We holiday abroad, so seaside resorts are struggling.
We are increasingly likely to have groceries delivered without visiting a supermarket despite free parking. Kids are socialising online, and their parents use WhatApp and other services to communicate with them and with their grandparents. Our society is changing. It is too late to go back.
I am part of this. I love watching on my phone while my grandchildren are playing on the beach in Spain, or competing at the tennis club or football pitch, or skiing down the piste in France. I love eating out, although many of my regular restaurants have closed.
We are changing the way we live and communicate. We have made these changes, and we like them. We don’t need a town centre any more. We meet neighbours at the village Co-Op, perhaps have a coffee with friends at the baker’s, or chatting to others while queuing at the fish-and-chip shop.
These insignificant little shopping sites need our support, and that of the local Council. If we don’t realise this, and don’t use them, they will close, too. It is up to each one of us.
At the moment, the centre of Croydon is dying and unpleasant to visit. It is up to us and to our Council to ensure the same doesn’t happen to Thornton Heath, Sanderstead, Forestdale, Waddon…..
“We don’t need a town centre any more.”
I was in the Princesshay/ Fore Street shopping district of Exeter this week. It has all the major brands – M&S, John Lewis, Boots, Next, Fat Face, Superdry etc etc etc – and any number of independents.
It was very, very busy with shoppers.
The population of Exeter is about a third of that of Croydon.
I was in the Westgate shopping centre of Oxford last week. It has all the major brands – M&S, John Lewis, Boots, Next, Fat Face, Superdry etc etc etc – and any number of independents.
It was very, very busy with shoppers.
The population of Oxford is about half that of Croydon.
Our town centre was doing fine until the hubristic dickheads at the council, Whitgift Foundation and Westfield decided that that wasn’t good enough and moved to ‘improve’ it.
Killing it stone dead.
The town centre wasn’t the problem, it was the idiots in charge of it.
The town centre’s retail provision relocated to the Purley Way. The councillors and council officers who allowed this to happen and so inflicted economic ruin on central Croydon have long departed
Yes. Shoppers priced out by parking charges and refusal to have free Sundays
Apart from both Exeter and Oxford both also having out of town retail parks and both making it quite challenging for motorists.
Indeed, Oxford is, arguably, the UK’s most anti-motorist town/ city going.
You mean “most pro-people”, surely?
Sigh… so Scream 7 will be my last screening there, after nearly 21 years of visits.
Scream again if Perry gets back in!
I have boycotted the cinema ever since they showed the blasphemous film “Bernadetta” on Good Friday a few years ago. The film features a nun using a statue of the Virgin Mary as a sex toy. As a church going Christian I would not wish to support such a place. If I want to go to the cinema these days I drive to Beckenham where I can park a few roads away from the Beckenham Odeon and pay much cheaper cinema prices. Croydon is also expensive to park & not as safe to wander around after dark than it used to be.
The 2021 film is in fact called “Benedetta”, and is loosely based on the 1985 non-fiction book “Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy” by Judith C. Brown.
The book is a study of the life of Sister Benedetta Carlini, a 17th-century Italian nun who was accused of lesbianism and other “immodest acts”.
Directed by Paul Verhoeven, the film has a 84% Rotten approval rating.
It was banned in Russia and was the subject of protests across the USA organised by the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property. The virulently anti-LGBT group oppose same‑sex marriage, abortion, and socialism.
You can watch it free online on Channel 4
It’s a great film.
Liked Vue Grants, but it was always nearly empty, because town centre is an empty pit
I would have gone many more times and used to visit Croydon shops every week, but was driven away by the sky high parking charges and lately by the hated mobile parking apps, which like many I refuse to use.
The council still hasn’t realised that reasonable parking charges would make it money!
Let’s hope Perry is nearly done
This whole place is a disgrace it needs bulldozing
It was obvious this would happen. I haven’t seen a movie there since Avengers Endgame in 2018. In fact, I haven’t seen a movie at a cinema since. You can get 80 inch TVs, 200 W Soundbars, 4K Blu-ray players and monthly 4K streaming services with a variety of content for your home, who’s going out on a rainy night. It’s just not financially viable to see anything at the cinema, unless it’s a blockbuster and if you’re not interested in those anymore, why would you go? I like new original, action thrillers for leading men and those movies are now on Netflix and Amazon Prime.
If The Wrecking Crew and War Machine can be streaming originals, the cinema becomes irrelevant. Finally, many people have complained about the upkeep of the cinema with lifts and escalators not working. And it’s a big space, that could be better used as a live music, cafes and comedy venue: that would instantly pack in people. And while I’m here, I hope the new owners of the Grants buy the St George’s Walk space opposite and build a much needed entertainment venue there as well.
Shortly to be revealed the plan to build another high rise block of flats a la Whitgift.