The Old Odeon.

A Memory of Corby.

If you walked around the first corner to the Odeon you got a good view of the old Blast Furnaces that use to turn Corby's night sky orange. It never got dark in the Corby of my childhood. The Candle and all the steel and tube mills lit the night up.
The Odeon was Corby's only cinema in the sixties before the Civic Centre was built. I saw my first film there. 'The Wizard of Oz'. That must have been '61 or '62. Later I use to attend the Saturday morning film club for kids. I once won a singing prize during one of the shows. A book about Ned Kelly that I kept reading for years after. A gang of us used to walk to what we called the "Saturday morning flicks" from the Beanfied. Very few parents had cars then and no way were we going to waste any of our pocket money on a bus fare. The club was already going to cost us a bob each and a boy needs his money for essential things, like pop corn.
The road that the Odeon stood on had a lot of shops. I belive at one time it was Corby's main shopping street before the town centre was built. What we called the Old Village was just down the road on the Jamb. The buildings in the Old Village stood out in contrast to what was then the modern sixties build throughout the new and expanding town. Another contrast was when you walked over there, the building sites ended. Lincoln, Kingwood, Danesholme were all being built when I was a child. The house we lived in was only a few weeks old when my family moved in. We had moved, you will never guess, from Scotland.
I believe that the Odeon became a Bingo Hall after the cinema shut.
The new Civic Centre cinema was ok but it never matched the style of the Odeon. The Odeon seemed the real thing. A proper flicks with flea pits and all and a real live size stage. The first film I saw at the Civic was 'Where Eagles Dare'. Briliant.