The lost cinemas of castle park: A cinemapping experience

Crofts, Charlotte

Abstract

The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park is a smartphone app which enables you to discover the hidden history of Bristol's cinema-going past, by using your GPS position to trigger context-specific stories whilst you explore what used to be the heart of Bristol's commercial district before the Blitz. You'll hear about some of the city's lost cinemas - including The Tivoli, where the first "moving pictures" were shown in 1896, The Bio-Pictureland, a converted Baptist Chapel, The Queens Hall, the first purpose-built cinema, The Dolphin with its screen bordered in blue velvet, The Gem a "fleapit" which later became an illegal boxing den, the huge "supercinema", The Regent, the seedy Europa - and one extant art-deco masterpiece, The Odeon, still operating since 1938.

Celebrating cinema-going through the ages, each cinema is brought to life with dramatisations, stories and memories, archive images and sound effects creating a nostalgic cinematic experience which interacts poignantly with the physical location as it is now. There is also the facility to find out what's on at a cinema nearby and add your own cinema memories and comments by using the Twitter function.

The app was developed out of the AHRC REACT Hub 'Know Your Place / CineMap Layer' 'Heritage Sandbox' scheme which resulted in the Cinemapping prototype - The Lost Cinemas of Castle Park will be made available as a published ap as a way to showcase the research for the 'Heritage Sandbox' launch in September 2012 to a wider audience and as a demo of how the rest of the Cinemapping App could be developed with further funding..

• Physical Artefact Type: Artefact
• Publication Date: Sep 28, 2012
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 7, 2019
• Keywords: Cinemapping, Know Your Place, locative media, pervasive media, film studies, cinema history, screen heritage, city strata, experience design, digital humanities
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/943517
• Publisher URL: http://itunes.apple.com/app/
• Related Public URLs: http://www.cinemapping.co.uk/castlepark
• Additional Information: Additional Information : Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), REACT (Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technology) is one of four UK Knowledge Exchange Hubs for the Creative Economy and is a collaboration between UWE Bristol (the University of the West of England ), Watershed and the Universities of Bath , Bristol , Cardiff and Exeter .