The Regent Street Cinema at the University of Westminster started life as a grand 19th-century lecture theatre in what was then called the Royal Polytechnic Institution. It can credibly claim to be the birthplace of cinema-going in Britain. As a plaque unveiled to commemorate a ‘Century of Cinema’ in 1996 states:

The Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, were pioneering French photographers and inventors based in Lyon. In February 1895 they patented their ‘cinématographe’ – a hand-cranked, three-in-one device that could shoot, develop and project moving pictures.

On 28 December that year the brothers caused a sensation when they premiered ten very short films to a paying audience at the Grande Café in Paris. Titles included the prosaic Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory and Baby’s Breakfast (Auguste Lumière and his wife Marguerite feeding their infant daughter, Andrée) as well as arguably the first ever screen comedy The Sprinkler Sprinkled (hilarity with a hosepipe).

You can watch the whole show on YouTube.

As at the first screening in Paris ten films were also shown in London though the programme differed slightly. No one ever really fled in terror at the sight of Arrival of a Train in a Country Station but seeing photographs move for the first time was mind-blowing. This is the Polytechnic Magazine’s write-up a few days after the press show:

There were 54 people in that first public audience, watching images blown up to what would have seemed a massive 6 feet by 4 foot 6 inches on a screen 60 feet away from the cinématographe apparatus. The historical record is inconclusive whether or not there was piano accompaniment to the films.

Auguste and Louis weren’t present at the Regent Street screenings. Their father Antoine travelled throughout Europe making deals with potential exhibitors and in London hired a fellow Frenchman, the magician, acrobat and all-round vaudevillian Félicien Trewey to run the show. (You can see Trewey in a handful of Lumière brothers films including Transformation by Hats and Photographer).

A recollection by Trewey reminds us how flammable film stock was back then. The nascent Regent Street Cinema very nearly went up in smoke:

Unsurprisingly the Lumières had a hit on their hands and the show transferred to the Empire Music Hall in Leicester Square where it became a continuous fixture on the bill for 18 months.

In 1936, an era of talkies when 20 million people in the UK were going to the cinema each week, the Polytechnic hosted a 40th anniversary celebration with Louis Lumière as guest of honour. Cecil Hepworth, one of the founders of the British film industry, made a toast that referenced the short duration of the Lumière brothers’ films: “Half a minute? How much some of us in the trade long that some of the ten thousand footers took less! Your half-mínute was a flash of geníus.”

There will be opportunity to celebrate British cinema pioneer Robert Paul elsewhere on Memory Palaces but it would be remiss not to mention that on the same date as the Lumières’ Regent Street press show, 20 February 1896, he demonstrated his own ‘Theotrograph’ at Finsbury Technical College. There is a mural on the stairs at Picturehouse Central showing Lumière brotrhers, with a small Robert Paul added that sums up how he might have felt towards his better-known French rivals.