The Odeon Cinema in Nottingham first opened 1933 as the Ritz, it was designed and built for County Cinemas which also owned a chain of 29 other cinemas at the time. The cinema was built by the architectural partnership of Verity and Beverley who were popular cinema architects in the pre war years they, completed a total of 17 cinemas during 1930's. To oversee the construction of the Nottingham Ritz a local architect Albert J. Thraves was hired to assist the main architects. The cinema was constructed on a site stretching between Angel Row a popular shopping street and Maid Marion Way at its rear. Its narrow frontage on Angel Row disguised a large auditorium building hidden from the street. As with many cinemas of the time the building was equipped as a complete theater able to host stage productions on its large stage as well as showing films. The building was completed with a scenery fly tower at the rear which could hoist the scenery for stage productions and raise the cinema screen to safety away from the stage. The theater was also equipped with another popular feature of the age, a Conacher 4Manual/22Rank theatre organ. Which was designed by famous organist Reginald Foort. Who opened the cinema with this organ on December the 4th and introduced the cinemas first film "The Private Lives of Henry VIII" starring Charles Laughton.

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Odeon Cinemas bought out the controlling interest of County Cinemas in 1935 and became the companies sole owners in 1939. The cinema kept its original name until 1944 when it was re branded as an Odeon. By the 1950's the cinema had been selected as a venue for roadshow presentations, where selected films usually the biggest hollywood productions were presented as theatrical events, including not only the film but an orchestral overture and score for the intermission. Roadshow films tended to stay exclusively at the selected theaters for long runs sometimes as long as a year before they were widely distributed. In a town like Nottingham which once boasted a total of 25 cinemas it was a great honor to be selected as a roadshow theater. Hand in hand with the roadshow presentations, new film formats were developed to deliver hi fidelity windscreen formats. In 1958 the cinema was equipped with a pair of DP70 projectors and a new large curved screen for an experimental run of "South Pacific" using the AO Todd 70mm wide screen format. The successful run only lasted for 18 weeks after which the 70mm equipment was removed but it lay the foundations for the cinemas future and relaunch a few years later. The "South Pacific" roadshow presentation was also the last time the cinemas theater organ was used it was removed and broken up in 1964.

The cinema's stage had been relatively quite since the thirties but the birth of the swinging sixties brought a small revival. Pop groups began playing concerts to crowded theatres and cinemas throughout the country. The Nottingham Odeon played host to the Beatles on December 12 1961 while they still didn't have a record contract. The Rolling Stones played two nights at the Odeon in October 1963. The Beatles also returned in 63, playing two separate dates of the their UK tour. On May 23 they played the same bill as Roy Orbison and they appeared again on December 12. This flurry of activity did not last long and the Beatles were to be one of the last bands to play at the Odeon. It closed at the beginning of 1964 for a year long conversion which would create the UK's first twin screen cinema.

When the cinema reopened in July of 1965 the auditorium had been divided vertically into two modern curtained theaters. Odeon 1 on the first floor had been designed as a venue for roadshow presentations, it seated an audience of 925 and was equipped with the two DP70 70mm projectors. The auditorium was fitted with an AO Todd wide screen which was 33' wide, 14' high and was fitted around a deep convex curve across the front of the auditorium. Odeon 1 opened with a run of the "Sound of Music" which had been first released that March. Odeon 2 on the ground floor was equipped for the cinema's matinee presentations holding an audience of 1,450 with a 35mm cinerama screen, its first run was "Mary Poppins". The projection equipment didn't remain in the theater for long it was replaced by Cinemeccania Victoria X projectors in 1968 which were capable of projecting both 70mm and 35mm films which increased the cinema's versatility and allowing the launch of cinerama presentations which debuted with a showing of "Ice Station Zebra" in June 1969.

Although the Nottingham Odeon launched multi screen cinemas in the UK it's twin screens were able to keep pace with the audiences demand for choice, and by 1971 a third matinee screen Odeon 3 had been introduced by dividing off a section of the Odeon 2 auditorium on the ground floor. In 1976 the cinema needed to expand again the ground floor was then split into three screens, Odeon 2 seating could still seat 500 while the smaller Odeon 3 held an audience of 130 and Odeon 4 only 110. Since the cinema first opened a basement cafe/restaurant called the Carolia had entertained and refreshed the cinema's patrons. At the same time as the ground floor auditorium was being divided the Carolia was closed, donating some of its dining room space for the creation of the 101 seat Odeon 5 in the basement. A smaller bar area known as the Trent Bar located in the remaining basement space replaced the restaurant. Odeon 1 had survived intact during these renovations and could still regularly fill its seats, but by the 1970's the roadshow presentation had disappeared leaving its 70mm equipment underutilised. The last cinerama presentation shown at the cinema was a 70mm print of "Star Wars" re released in 1978 its huge AO todd wide screen would remain intact until the cinema closed. One last extension occurred in 1988 when the Trent Bar also closed so that its remaining public areas could be converted into the intimate 90 seat Odeon 6.

The Odeon changed very little during its last thirteen years, but the cinema industry had moved on. Modern out of town multiplexes with many more smaller equipped with surround sound in acoustically designed theaters, left the traditional town center cinema looking very dated. The Odeon chain passed through a number of new owners during the early years of the millennium and many of their traditional cinemas were closed to streamline the business, the Odeon nottingham was one of the first to go when its curtain closed for the final time on the 26th of January 2001, the last theatrical presentation had been "Castaway" staring Tom Hanks which was followed by the cinema's last film a documentary told the story of its historical 1964 conversion in to a twin theater.

By the time I visited the Odeon it had become quite famous within the UK urban exploration scene. Not that we knew many of its claims to fame at the time. Discussion of this neglected cinema had rattled on for over one hundred pages on one of the urbex forums with no one getting any nearer to seeing the inside the neglected building. When Nottingham was selected as the venue for one of our get togethers, very few of us in attendance weren't planning on an attempt at the Odeon during the course of weekend. Sure enough as most of us enjoyed a drink or two in the lace market Wetherspoons word reached us that two of our members had made there way inside. The following morning myself and a few other explorers decided to follow in their footsteps. As we entered the cinema we found ourselves at the top of a of stair which coiled downwards into the darkness, Obviously a cinema doesn't have many windows in its auditorium so the interior of the building as we descended from street level was enveloped in pitch blackness. The door we had entered through was the old stage door at the back of the building and after climbing down flight after flight of steps we found ourselves at the door way to the old theater stage. It was in a bad way, there were no longer any fine boards for actors to tread and under our feet were crumbs of concrete and plasterboard. It was hard to imagine that back in the sixties icons like John Lenon, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger had entertained screaming crowds in the ruined space around us.

The stage had been sealed off from the auditorium when the wide cinerama screen was installed, at the foot of the stage a curved base marked the gentle arc where the screen once sat. The screen had survived in place at the front of Odeon 2 until the cinema closed although it had been cut down when Odeon2 was divided. With the screen gone we could now see out into the auditorium, a vast space as gutted as I was when I saw none of the 1,400 seats remained in place. The auditorium had been stripped back to its bare walls with the partitions between the later theaters gone the auditorium was back to it's full size but it was impossible to picture the modern curtained cinema theater it once was. Scattered here and there a few mementos gave away the past of this empty cellar like space, a film real lay on the floor, the speaker horns from the 6 channel stereo system abandoned in a pile of scrap and tucked away in a corner a box full of seat back ashtrays that had been removed from the cinema seats when the Odeon voluntarily banned smoking in its theaters. The projection suite still stood intact at the back of the auditorium but it too was empty now, the only sign of its projectors was the badge of their manufactures still stuck to the wall.