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Beacon Theatre and Gardens
91 Hampton Road Fremantle, cnr with Wray Avenue
The Beacon Theatre was a Fremantle cinema, tho, as its name suggests, it's almost in Beaconsfield.* It was built in 1937 (opened 17 August, with Small Turn) and closed as a cinema in 1961. After that it was a Stammers supermarket, with a pharmacy right on the street corner.
This was the Beacon after Stammers moved to East Fremantle (and were taken over by a large supermarket chain) when it was rented by Video Ezy, who later moved south, and then closed. The Port Community Church also held its meetings there: that is now further down Hampton Road. The building is now used as a medical centre, Ellen Health.
Heritage Council:
- Beaconsfield is named after a property known as 'Beaconsfield', located in the area in the 1880s. The name was officially adopted for the Post Office in August 1894. The origin is unknown, but is probably from the English town or after Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, created Earl of Beaconsfield in 1879. Heritage Council.
Paul Weaver, who used to work in the exhibition industry, has a well-informed page about the Beacon, here, from 2008, with a link to his panorama of the building.
References and Links
Notes in Fremantle, the newsletter of the Fremantle Society: March 1996: 1, 3-5, including a history by Yvonne Geneve, the President of the Art Deco Society of WA.
Max D. Bell, Perth: A Cinema History, Book Guild, Sussex: 20.
WA CinemaWeb page
An Art Deco Buildings blog has a page (which is where I got the photo above).
State Heritage Office page.
Another page related to the National Trust Register.
Appendix
What follows is the whole entry, unedited, for this former cinema from the ammpt (Australian Museum Of Motion Picture & Television Inc.) site - not as an act of copyright theft but as a backup. Websites often disappear for various reasons.
FREMANTLE
BEACON AND GARDENS, 91 Hampton Rd, Fremantle (Beaconsfield )
fremantle beacon 1981
After successes at the North Fremantle Town Hall and the Swan Picture Theatre and Gardens in Palmyra, Swan Suburban Pictures (James McKerchar and J. Veryard) built a new theatre and gardens in Hampton Rd at a cost of nearly £5,000. Designed by Samuel Rosenthal, it opened 17 August 1937 with Small Turn. The building permit was for ‘a stadium type theatre seating approx. 800’, and the gardens seating 500 were beside the theatre. Alterations were made in 1958, but it still closed in 1961 and was converted into a supermarket for Stammers Foodstores, its cinema origins still visible in the facade. In 1993 it was put on the market, and eventually sold, but, despite rumours of demolition and redevelopment, the gutted building remained on the site and was renovated in 1996-7, with parts of the frontage used for a chemist shop and then a video store. In 1999 a rumour was circulating that it was to be re-opened as a live entertainment centre, but in 2000 that had changed to a health and community centre.
Sources: Max Bell, Perth – a cinema history, The Book Guild, Lewes, Sussex, 1986, pp.20, 55
Vyonne Geneve, Significant buildings of the 1930s in Western Australia, Vyonne Geneve, June 1994, National Trust of Australia (WA)/ National Estate Grants Programme, vol.1
Public Works Department, Building approval 11 March 1937 (Battye Library 1459)
Kino, No.10, December 1984, p.10; no.45, September 1993, p.31; no.50, December 1994, p.35; no.53, September 1995, p.31; no.57, September 1996, p.31; no.62, Summer 1997, p.35; no.67, Autumn 1999, p.31; no.73, Spring 2000, p.35.
Max Bell, Perth: a cinema history, The Book Guild, Lewes, 1986 pp.20, 55
Vyonne Geneve, ‘The vulnerability of our Art Deco theatres’, Kino, no.28, June 1989, p.6
Interview (Mark Turton): James McKerchar (1978)
Photos: 1 exterior, Kino, No.10, December 1984, p.10 (Max Bell); no.28, June 1989, p.10 (Byron Geneve); no.32, June 1990, p.19 (Byron Geneve)
1 exterior, colour, 1981 (Bill Turner)
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 25 June, 2013 and hosted at freotopia.org/cinemas/beacon.html (it was last updated on 6 December, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.