Woolton Picture House's secret saviour has arrived

On a wet January morning in 2024, I paid a visit to Woolton Picture House. Peering through dusty windows while a colleague of mine kept a look out, I climbed over bushes, scaled walls and dangled my camera over ledges to get a better view. I was trying to establish what was happening inside after it had closed back in 2020 — and not get arrested while doing it.

First opened in 1927, Woolton Picture House is the oldest independent cinema in Liverpool. For decades, it had been a beloved community asset; people gathering outside its ruby red doors each weekend. When the pandemic struck, it quickly fell into disrepair, and in the subsequent years residents raised over £24k to reopen it. Despite this its doors remained bolted, with little information given about what happened to the donated cash.

Residents got suspicious — were its owners, a father and son property developer duo, leaving it to ruin so it could be knocked down and turned into flats like so many other historic assets in the city? Had they simply pocketed the fundraised money? Despite multiple attempts to contact them over the years, I was never able to establish their MO. 

Now, two years on from when I first wrote my story about Woolton Picture House, I’m standing outside under very different circumstances. No longer can I see weeds sprouting from the ceiling, or rat droppings and cardboard lining its back door. Instead, there’s been a fresh coat of paint and I’m welcomed inside. 

Despite being abandoned for the best part of five years, the cinema is in pretty good nick. Rotted carpets have been pulled up to reveal unweathered wooden planks, and the damp on the walls has dried up. While there’s a musty smell permeating the building, it’s exciting stepping into it — having heard dozens of stories about its grand sloped floor, I finally get to climb my way to the top, reaching a wooden bar stocked full of soft drinks and new Woolton Picture House merchandise. 

The cinema has been granted a new lease of life, thanks to a community interest company formed to save it: Woolton Cinema CIC. Headed by the founders of Liverpool’s Royal Court theatre — Kevin Fearon and Gill Miller — the CIC has spent the last 12 months running a city-wide fundraising effort to restore it. Director and volunteer at the CIC, Ian Christie, agrees to meet me at the cinema at 9am on Wednesday morning.

He explains that Kevin and Gill first got the idea to revive the cinema after a night out at The Pickled Olive pub early last year. Cutting through Mason Street on their walk home, they stopped outside the Picture House and looked at each other. They’d spent the best part of a decade transforming a dilapidated gig venue into the bustling Royal Court theatre. Was it time for a new passion project?

It wasn’t just the booze talking. A few weeks later, Kevin and Gill got to work tracking down the owner of the Picture House: property developer Kenneth Carmichael and his son, Richard. They’d taken over the cinema in 2006 after its previous owner, the beloved cinephile Mr Wood, had passed away. For years, residents had struggled to get a hold of Kenneth and Richard — their company address was a PO box in Garston, with no email or phone number to reach either directly.

Despite this, Kevin and Gill heard back quickly. Kenneth was happy to meet them for a coffee, and when he sat down with them he had just one query: would the pair promise to keep it as a cinema? It was a surprising question — the picture painted of him over the years has been one of a scheming property developer, waiting for the collapse of a community asset. The reality was quite different: after both personal and family illness, he and his son had been unable to manage the mounting work required to maintain a 1920s cinema, Ian says.

After assurances from Kevin and Gill, Kenneth agreed to sell it to them for £450k. He also agreed to hand over the £24k that was fundraised to save the cinema back in 2020. Since then, Kevin and Gill have been working to establish a proper plan for the building, totting up repair costs, essential maintenance and figuring out how they would get their hands on the cash needed to buy it.

They formed Woolton Cinema CIC in February 2025, and had little trouble finding a group of people willing to become directors and help them with the workload. In October, the cinema opened for a series of one-off screenings to help fundraise — including a 12 Days of Christmas special with viewings of It’s A Wonderful Life and White Christmas. 

Efforts kicked up a notch in January this year. In order to buy the building, the CIC needed the cash by 8 May to exchange contracts with Kenneth. With just a fortnight until the deadline, Ian says they were around £50k short. “I was thinking we'll do it, but by the skin of our teeth,” he says, “and we'll have to do some jiggery pokery around the numbers.”

But in the eleventh-hour, an anonymous donor swooped in. That mystery benefactor offered to purchase the building outright, and give it back to Woolton Cinema CIC on a long lease. This, along with over 2,500 donations made by the community, means the CIC had more than enough cash to keep the cinema going. 

“The community support just blew us away,” Ian tells me, recalling that one local businessman donated £100k at the flip of a coin, while others parted with hundreds of pounds of their wages. But the real interest lay with the “anonymous donor”. Who are they?

“We went after about half a dozen high net worth individuals,” Ian explains. “The plan was that we'd get towards the end of the campaign, and if we were £20k short, we were hoping that somebody would go ‘Alright, here you go’”.