LAST week, to commemorate the closure of the last cinema in the country to bear the name ABC, our From the Archive spread became an ABC of old ABC cinemas.

This week comes news that the Middlesbrough ABC, empty for a year, is set to be transformed into a three-storey venue, with shops on the ground floor, a large Chinese restaurant on the first floor, and then a cultural space on the top floor beneath the building’s landmark circular top.

The Northern Echo:

NEW FUTURE: The Crown – formerly the Elite and the ABC – may be about to get a new use

It is a remarkable, and bulky, building on the corner of Borough Road and Linthorpe Road. It opened as the Elite in July 1923 with 1,900 seats, and was the sister of the Nottingham Elite.

“I have fond memories of the Saturday morning pictures there,” says Harry Bunting, who describes himself as a Boro lad in exile in Darlington. “The place was always packed with noisy excited children who booed the villains and cheered the heroes.

“My favourites were the cowboy serials such as Hopalong Cassidy and Roy Rogers who always ended up tied to a railway line with a train fast approaching, but made a miraculous escape.”

The Northern Echo:

TOP CLASS: The Elite, on the corner of Linthorpe and Borough roads, in Middlesbrough. It was renamed ABC in 1964 and here a queue is forming to see ET, so we guess the picture was taken in 1982

Barry Chapman, of Norton, remembers the Elite during the Second World War. “My mother was a waitress there and when she was serving, I could nip in and have a free meal of mash, mixed carrots and turnips with what we would now call a beef burger,” he says. “There was even a Yorkshire pudding.”

In fact, Barry was in the Elite on August 4, 1942 - a day of immense drama. A lone Dornier bomber had eluded all the barrage balloons and dropped its bombs on top of Middlesbrough railway station’s trainshed. No one was killed, but the large trainshed was never rebuilt.

“Because I was in the cinema, I didn’t know it had happened so didn’t dash home,” says Barry. “My mum was worried stiff as she knew the town was bombed but not where.”

The Northern Echo:

BULL WYND: The entrance to the Central Cinema on the right with Darlington Market Place in the background

Lots of people have pulled us up on last week’s dubious dates, so hopefully we’ll be right this week when we say that the Elite was renamed ABC in 1964 and in Darlington, the Regal was renamed ABC in 1961.

Another ABC we featured was in Stockton, formerly the famous Globe venue, and there were others. “ABC Cinemas were also to be found locally in Blyth, South Shields, West Hartlepool and York,” says Richard Lacey of Ferryhill. “Incidentally, Newcastle briefly had two ABC Cinemas: the ABC Haymarket (opened in 1933) and the ABC Westgate Road (originally the Essoldo, bought from Classic Cinemas in 1974). The Haymarket cinema closed in 1984, and the Westgate Road one in 1990.”

The ABC in Raby Road, Hartlepool, was a good-looking 1930s cinema which is now beneath Morrisons supermarket car park. Curiously, Hartlepool had a second ABC: in 1942 the chain acquired a half-built cinema, called The Coronet, which had been started before the Second World War began. But before ABC could make progress, the empty shell was requisitioned by the Ministry of Food, which renamed it the Comet.

When peace came, ABC realised it didn’t need two cinemas in Hartlepool, and so the Coronet/Comet/ABC stood incomplete for some years before its demolition.

David Walsh, in east Cleveland, was a member of an ABC Minors club in the 1950s – it was a children’s club and we printed the words to its theme song last week. “The Minors badge was liberally daubed with luminous paint so that we all could glow like little fire flies in the dark auditorium,” he says. “But luminous paint was highly radioactive, and the badges were flimsy and fell apart easily, so I always wonder if we all came out with mild radiation poisoning…”