.... Before multiplexes swept everyone up and forced many of the small venues to close, picturehouses offered a more bespoke and intimate form of movie-going, in close proximity to individual neighbourhoods. The revival points to a desire to recapture this social function. Ironically, it is a reversal of the pattern currently unfolding in developing-world countries like India, where cinema-going used to be rooted in the single-screen picturehouse, but is now switching over to the multiplex.

In the west, meanwhile, driven by a hankering for a more “personalised” consumption, we have come full circle, back to the bourgeois, early 20^th-century origins of the picturehouse. The first wave was built in the 1910s, in suburbs built for the new urban middle classes some 20-30 years previously. Cinema, and the imaginative licence to roam it offered, was part of the spectrum of new freedoms. The second wave of larger, more ornate buildings – art-deco palaces to house the products of Hollywood’s Golden Age – arrived in the 1920s and 1930s. By then, however, many of the neighbourhoods in which they stood were in economic decline (Kentish Town and Deptford, certainly; even Crouch End languished in postwar doldrums). But cinema was already on the way to becoming the great popular art form of the 20^th century, feeding the fancies and frustrations of the metropolitan hordes.

However sincere the current fetish for the bygone glamour, brass fittings and old Pearl & Dean fanfare might be, those days aren’t coming back. Publicly exhibited cinema is not the force it once was: there were 903m cinema visits in the UK in 1933; in 2011, with a population nearly 40% larger, just 172m. But perhaps the 21^st century picturehouses – instead of being a middle-class retro affectation – can reclaim their places at the heart of their communities and still exert meaningful social influence.

Mingard says he took great care to approach residents as forthrightly as possible about Deptford Cinema. The name, contrary to appearances, took several meetings to decide on, and was chosen for its air of plainspoken accessibility: “You know what you’re going to get, and you’re know you’re invited.” Lines of communication are all-important, he says. “If you only ever put stuff out on Twitter, that’s fine, but only a certain type of person will come. Another kind of person will respond to a flyer put through the door, something given to them in person or a conversation on the street.” ....