The Palace Cinema, Longridge: the small independent

A market town cinema, no multiplex, and the one worth the drive for the building as much as the film.

The Palace Cinema is a small independent cinema at Longridge, a market town north east of Preston on the edge of the Ribble valley. It is the least corporate of the four cinemas in this directory and the only one that is not part of a chain or a complex.

Longridge itself is the reason the entry is useful. It sits at the foot of Longridge Fell on the road towards Clitheroe, and a trip there combines the cinema with the valley — Beacon Fell is on the same side of the district.

The other cinemas are Vue and Odeon in the city and The Flower Bowl at Barton.

Where the cinemas are, and why

A small independent survives by distance. Longridge is far enough from Preston that a multiplex was never going to be built to serve it and close enough that the town has an audience of its own, and that gap is the whole explanation for why one cinema of this kind is still here when almost every other Lancashire market town lost theirs. Scale follows from it: one or two screens, a schedule set locally, and none of the volume a chain needs to justify a building.

Longridge is the independent. It sits north east of Preston at the foot of Longridge Fell, on the edge of the country that runs up towards Bowland, and the town is the reason the cinema exists: far enough from the city that the multiplexes never took its audience, big enough to have one of its own. Independent cinemas that survived the multiplex era mostly survived on exactly that geography.

Getting there, and what else is out that way

This is a drive of seven or eight miles north east on minor roads, and the drive is part of the appeal — the last few miles are genuinely scenic. The same direction leads to Beacon Fell, so a walk and a film out of the city is a plausible day.

For the central options see Vue and Odeon.

What is nearby

Longridge sits at the foot of Longridge Fell, and the country north and east of it is the nearest genuinely upland landscape to Preston. Beacon Fell is a short drive further on, which makes a walk and a film a plausible single day out of the city.

On the way back the lanes drop towards the Ribble and the eastern nature reserves, so the return can be made a route, not a retracing.