just to add a bit of trivia my mother used to tell me when i was a kid about when she worked in the Cosy Cinema in Colwyn Bay, and i used to trot along to the Rhos Playhouse (fleapit) on a Saturday Morning to watch episodes of Flash Gordon etc, I remember also seeing the film The Longships (i think it was called) there. I also remember standing outside the Savoy in Llandudno with my mate trying to get an adult to take us in with them to watch Lawrence of Arabia an A category film.
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 renowned local architect Sydney 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.
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 cinema closed in the late 1950s and has been a shop ever since. The current occupier, Matthews & Son Hardware, is a traditional ironmongers’ shop famous locally for holding what seems an impossibly comprehensive stock for such a small building.
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.
