In 1980, aged 17, I travelled up to London to see Eraserhead at the legendary Scala Cinema in Tottenham Street. This was the beginning of a journey that led me to regular cinemagoing, collecting film memorabilia and eventually converting my garage into my very own movie house.

The following October I got a job in London (commuting from leafy Buckinghamshire each day) and at lunchtimes I would shop in the original Forbidden Planet on Denmark Street where they housed a treasure trove of import magazines like CineFantastique and Fangoria, alongside UK mags like Starburst. But it was the weekly trade papers, Variety and Screen International, that I looked forward to most. These contained previews of films in development and glossy ads which I would cut out and pin to my bedroom wall.

Time Out magazine was my bible though. I would religiously go through the film listings and underline the ones I wanted to see, mostly at independents like the Scala, the Electric, Paris Pullman, Everyman, Essential and the Roxie.

When VHS emerged I rented my first video player/recorder and began recording films off-air and making my own video covers, utilising the pictures and ads from the assortment of magazines I purchased. I would cut out the ads and put them in files for easy access.

This lasted until the 90s when I converted to laserdisc/DVD and the sell-thru VHS market had basically meant I no longer had to spend hours making my own video boxes! I kept all the magazines I had until a divorce meant that I had to chuck most of them onto a skip as I no longer had space in my new accommodation.

Fast forward to 2021 and journalist Alan Jones, who I knew from Forbidden Planet, began a daily Twitter post about the films he’d seen on that particular day. I thought it would be a good idea to add the newspaper/magazine ad of the particular film to his post. This was met with a positive response from both Alan and the community that followed him.

The problem was, in most cases I didn’t have the ad! His posts began in the 1960s and ran through to the 1980s. So my addiction began. I started to source old Time Out magazines from eBay but at nearly £40 each this was never sustainable. I wouldn’t give up though. I bought a lot of Photoplay and Film Review magazines that were cheaper, Films and Filming and Sight & Sound. I would often buy magazines blind in the hope that there would be just one ad in them that I could use, scan and post.

Then I struck gold – a huge archive of Time Out magazines, ranging from 1970 to 1984, was up for sale on an online bookshop.  After shelling out several hundred pounds I spent weeks going through them all and creating spreadsheets of the dates and ads contained in each issue.  However, weeks later, Alan ended his Twitter posts and I was left pondering what to do. I knew there were people out there who loved seeing the ads but I wasn’t sure how to curate it, since Alan was dictating the film he saw and it was just left to me to find the relevant ad.

I posted a Tweet saying I would continue posting the ads if people wanted to follow me and I had the idea of posting on the anniversary of when films had been released in London.

Initially I just posted genre films as the community seemed to be more attracted to them. My number of followers was low, a couple of hundred, and I was about to pack it all in when film director Edgar Wright seized on an ad and reposted it, basically telling his near-million followers to follow my account! He’s told me he absolutely loves it. Numbers increased and at the same time I discovered an online newspaper subscription site that eventually became my source for when films were actually released in London, whilst adding various film ads that differed from the magazines I had. I then expanded the number of ads I posted each day to include a greater variety of films, not just the horror ones I started with.

Every day involves several hours of work; scanning new ads I have purchased recently, discovering a new ad with added pull-quotes (people seem to like these!), reading articles, checking dates, editing the ads so they look good enough to post.

I love the excitement of receiving a magazine I’ve bought on eBay and discovering a colour ad I’ve never seen before, or a unique ad for a one-off screening at say, the Scala, that nobody will have ever seen before.

The feedback from my followers is what motivates me to keep going. One person wrote to me that he is interested in the fonts used as he is a designer. Others just love it for what it is: a history of film-going in London over the decades.