Former Cosy Cinema

Former Cosy Cinema, 6 Conway Road, Colwyn Bay

This is the site of the first chapel in Colwyn Bay, Capel Cyntaf. The rear wall of the chapel can still be seen, if you walk along the back alley between Penrhyn Road and Station Road.

When the Welsh community built their new chapel, Engedi, in Woodland Road West, the renowoned local architect Sidney Colwyn Foulkes was commissioned (c.1925) to design a building with a small, bijou cinema on the ground floor. The building included offices above, which became his own office. His secretary, Audrey Lee, used to listen to the film being shown below her office while she typed. 

For a while this cinema and the Princess Cinema, on Princess Road, were in common ownership and had only one projectionist, who would run up and down Penrhyn Road to change the reels of film in both cinemas!

The three-row balcony can still be seen inside the present hardware store. The screen was suspended on the inside of the front wall, so that as you entered the cinema you looked directly at the audience.

The Llandudno & Colwyn Bay Electric Railway ran along the road outside the cinema. Film watchers inside heard each passing tram!

The cinema closed in the late 1950s and has been a shop ever since. The current occupier, Matthews & Son Hardware, is a traditional ironmongers’ shop.

In 2017 a granite “postcard” celebrating Sidney Colwyn Foulkes’ work was installed on Colwyn Bay prom.

What you could watch at the Cosy Cinema:
During the Second World War, in August 1940, the film being shown was Night Train to Munich, starring Rex Harrison and Margaret Lockwood. Later in the same month it was Arouse and Beware, starring Wallace Beery and Dolores Del Rio.

With thanks to Graham Roberts, of Colwyn Bay Civic Society, and John Bird

Postcode: LL29 7HS    View Location Map