Published: 16 January, 2014
By DAN CARRIER

THE art-house Renoir cinema – a bastion of quality big-screen entertainment for the past four decades – is set for a facelift.

Owners the Curzon Group have applied for planning permission to radically update the venue, set in the basement and ground floor of the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury.

If Camden Council’s planning department give the go-ahead, its current two screens will be converted into six smaller theatres, and plans seen by the New Journal show wholesale improvements will be made to the foyer areas. New seating will replace the famously austere setting that film-lovers currently enjoy. 

Originally called the Bloomsbury Cinema, reels were first run in 1972 by American cinema Walter Reade.

EMI took it over in 1974 and it became the EMI International Film Theatre in January 1977 – with a remit to screen foreign language movies. By the 1980s, it had been again taken over, this time by the Gate group, who introduced a second screen. 

Artificial Eye came on board in 1986 and since then it has been known as the Renoir (pictured).

Current owners the Curzon Group declined to comment.