Black Lion Re-opens - With Its Own Cinema

THE BLACK LION pub on Chapel Street in Salford will be re-open this month and the people behind its launch have some big plans.

The 130-year-old pub, which closed last year, will become a self-funding café, pub, live music venue and cinema.

“It’s cool, but a little rough around the edges, which makes it more interesting."

The idea is that by day, the pub will be a mix of locals and freelancers with laptops and sipping coffee. By night, the upstairs space will host live music and bring the latest in British cinema to thinking adults.

The project is being steered by three partners - landlord Barry Phillips, and Future Artists founders Jenny Inchbald and Mark Ashmore.

The trio have ambitions of making the Black Lion the UK’s first Internet Protocol Cinema – where films will be streamed to audiences in the pub on a big screen, via an online host. Inchbald claims this means almost no printing costs for the filmmaker, and this saving can then be passed onto the punters.

“We want to give people a sense of ownerships over cinema,” she said. “We feel as there’s a market out there for people who aren’t getting the choices they want from the multiplex.

"You've got the Cornerhouse but they only really show European films. We'll be concentrating on British cinema."

Mark Ashmore and Jenny Inchbald

There will be no public money backing the project – the arts space upstairs is being run as a co-operative and the cinema will rely on ‘plenty of coffee and beer being drunk downstairs’ if the long-term plan of providing a full HD cinema and waitress service upstairs is to be realised.

Inchbald said it would be ‘two months or so’ before enough money is raised to fund their own cinema screen, but in the meantime the pub will rent equipment.

The first screening will be ‘Invisible Circus: No Dress Rehearsal’ – a feature documentary about squatters set in Bristol.

Inchbald believes Chapel Street and the surrounding area has the potential to be “what the Northern Quarter used to be.”

“It’s cool, but a little rough around the edges, which makes it more interesting,” she said. The partners are working with the Save Salford Campaign to try and make the pub a success.

Performance poet John Cooper Clarke has already filmed part of a documentary about his career at the Black Lion and has agreed to return with a stint of gigs once the venue is up and running.

“Do I think it will work?” says Inchbald. “We hope so, but we need people to come and support it by spending money and having a drink.”