Multi-screen cinema scrapped from Cannock designer village plans
A multi-screen cinema has been cut from the plans of a new designer shopping village in Cannock, it has emerged.
The picture house had been planned for the Mill Green retail centre off the A5 but council leader George Adamson said today it had been removed from the project.
Bosses say they want to keep the way clear in case a cinema chain want to move in at some time in the future.
Councillor Adamson said: "We are desperate to get this retail village off the ground. It's a major application providing 800 jobs and we don't want anything to step in its way."
He said the multi-screen might go back on the plans in phase two of the building project but for the moment the priority is to put the plan forward as it now stands.
The news was welcomed by Graeme Cotton, who owns the Electric Palace in Walsall Road.
He said: "I'm delighted. We would have closed for sure had a big cinema opened anywhere else in Cannock. But it does make me wonder what else they have got up their sleeve."
The council has received interest from a cinema developer through a consultancy it employs jointly with Staffordshire County Council.
Mr Adamson indicated that if the multi-screen planned for the Mill Green designer village does not go ahead then the council would look at the possibility of a second cinema in the town centre.
He said: "We've got a cinema in the town and we don't want to damage that. It would be nice to have another at Mill Green where people could combine going shopping and watching a film but we don't want to hold this application up any longer - it's too important."
The multi-million pound Mill Green development will include restaurants and 130 designer-style shops.
The Electric Palace was the first purpose-built cinema in Cannock. The original 650-seater cinema was opened in April 1914, four months before the outbreak of the First World War, and was so popular it was extended twice in six years to accommodate 1,500 avid film-goers.
The arrival of television in the 1950s and more recently the growth of multi-screen cinemas and digital technology has seen many of the old cinemas shut.
Mr Cotton, aged 35, of Pye Green, Cannock, said: "As an independent, it's like David fighting Goliath."
