Odeon Haymarket
former cinema in London, England
The Odeon Haymarket was a cinema on Haymarket, London. Three cinemas occupied the site between 1925 and 1996, predecessors being Capitol Cinema (1925–1936) and Gaumont Haymarket (1937–1959). It became the Odeon Haymarket in 1962, before closing in 1996.
Capitol Cinema (1925–1936)
Built by Sir Walter Gibbons and opened in 1925, this was a large and ornate cinema in a Neo-Classical style, created as part of a development of an island site on this major London thoroughfare.
Designed by Andrew Mather (architect of many later Odeon cinemas), the cinema used theatrical norms of stalls and circle seating, together with a number of boxes. An organ was installed and used during intermissions. Total seating was 1,700. In May 1928, Walter Gibbons company General Theatres Corporation was taken over by Gaumont British Theatres.
The cinema is noted as the location of the first run of the first British 'talkie', Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail in 1929. In its basement the Kit Kat Club was located, one of the most famous London nightclubs of the Roaring Twenties (not to be mixed up with an older political club similarly named).
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7077681. Authority coordinates are 51.510, -0.131. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1925, 1996, 1936 and 1937.
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This entry incorporates text from “Odeon Haymarket” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.