Genesis Cinema to be redeveloped to include student housing
Pandemic, strikes and cost of living force Mile End’s Genesis Cinema to redevelop its site into housing – but is our treasured cinema safe?
The independent Genesis Cinema in Mile End is in the first phases of redevelopment into student housing after what owner and manager Tyrone Walker-Hebborn described as ‘a really tough four years.’
Voted the UK’s best cinema in 2016, a combination blow of Covid, energy prices Hollywood strikes and a cost of living crisis have made running Genesis financially challenging.
Communications company Local Dialogue, who is presenting plans and gathering feedback on behalf of Genesis, told The Slice ‘We are looking to submit the [planning] application in early spring this year.’
Mock-ups of the potential re-development show the frontage of Genesis expanded to include six stories of student housing, in a complimentary style to the existing Art-deco building.
Plans are to move the cinema into the basement level of the building with a potential extra bar added into a new sub-basement floor. Lifts will be added for accessibility. The main entrance will remain on the ground floor, which will also retain its bar and cafe. Above will be 340 student bedrooms, with a combination of studio and shared flats.
The restructured Genesis will have four overall screens mimicking the current layout, with one large screen, two medium screens and a small one with sofas. There will be roughly 500 seats, a reduction from the current 762 – however, Walker-Hebborn says the reduced seats will be enough to meet typical sales. New kitchen and event spaces will both grow larger, meaning more space for the creative events that are increasingly in demand at Genesis.
‘We’ve been approached for years and years about selling the building, but we’ve never been interested,’ Walker-Hebborn explained, ‘We don’t want to put a massive tower block on there, I don’t want to do it to earn tens and millions of pounds, we want to do it just enough to keep things running.’
A significant share of Genesis Cinema’s profits is usually reinvested in maintaining the space, but Walker-Hebborn said setbacks have made this impossible for the past four years. He estimated that restoring the building to standard would now cost between £3-5 million.
Walker-Hebborn has been running Genesis for 25 years and is currently consulting architects, neighbours and cultural institutions like Heritage England before setting anything in stone. ‘The best way we can see forward is to provide student accommodation, which then relieves social housing pressure around us,’ he said.
No official contracts have been made with developers yet, but when it happens it will be a joint venture. ‘Genesis will still be there, I will still be owning it and running it, we’re just trading the air above it,’ he said.
If you liked this read The genesis of Genesis: from abandoned theatre to nation’s favourite indie cinema
