La Charrette: The cinema built in a British back garden that closed with a world premiere
It’s sometimes easy to forget that, as humans, we do have a lot of free will to do whatever we like, but as we get older, we realise that those ideas we’ve long had floating around the backs of our heads might not be so crazy after all, like building a cinema in your back garden.
If you love movies, then what would be better than having access to a massive screen and a proper sound system to watch whatever you wanted in your own home? Going to the cinema is one of life’s few great joys, a place where you can immerse yourself in whatever you’re watching for several hours, shrouded in darkness and accompanied by the quiet rustling of other cinema-goers eating popcorn and basking in the shared experience of a movie.
But it gets expensive, so it’s natural to want to make your own cinema in your back garden that people can come and watch movies in, and while it sounds like a pretty far-fetched idea, this is what the Welsh Gwyn Phillips decided to do in the 1950s.
He loved movies, and having worked in a cinema as a teenager, he decided to take things a step further and bring a cinema to his back garden for village residents, building it out of an old GWR railway carriage from the 1920s.
Crowning it La Charrette, it became the smallest cinema in Wales, with just 23 seats, and you could find it in the town of Gorseinon, not far from Swansea. Phillips’ idea was a success, and not only did it allow for movie screenings whenever he wished, but it also allowed the village to come together, ensuring a sense of community as people gathered in Phillips’ back garden to watch movies.
He sadly passed away in 1996, so his widow ensured his legacy would survive, although the building, which featured lots of wood, was now decaying, looking like La Charrette was at risk of becoming lost to time, a relic of cinema-going no longer able to function. In 2007, it got ready to close its doors for good, but when you’ve got a cinema as interesting as La Charrette on the brink of collapse, you’re destined to find an eager cinephile desperate to save it.
And that’s exactly what happened, well, sort of; film critic Mark Kermode visited the cinema for a segment in The Culture Show the following year, and with the help of the Heritage Centre, they all helped to ensure that the cinema could be preserved as best as possible.
No longer could the cinema continue in the Phillips’ back garden, so instead it was disassembled and transported to the Gower Heritage Centre, where it is now used as a cinema and venue for hire.
Before it was moved, however, the cinema had a special send-off, which included a visit from actor and director Kenneth Branagh, star of Danny Boyle’s short film Alien Love Triangle, which had never been screened before, but, for the first time, it premiered at La Charrette, with its stars Heather Graham and Courtney Cox recording video messages for this very exclusive premiere.
It might not have been able to hold many people, but La Charrette was a real testament to the power of cinema as a uniting force, bringing together local movie lovers, family and friends in an unassuming back garden. Here, classic movies and new releases were shown, keeping the spirit of DIY cinema screenings very much alive.
