About the house
A single screen, one owner-operator family, and a 1974 closure the building never fully recovered from until 2013.
The Aurelia opened in November 1927 as a 900-seat picture palace on what was then the edge of town. It closed in 1974 — the same story most single-screen houses have: a multiplex opened nine miles away with parking, and the Aurelia’s owners could not make the numbers work on one screen against six.
The building sat mostly empty for almost forty years, used at various points as a furniture warehouse and, briefly, an indoor market. A community trust bought it in 2009 and spent four years on a restoration that kept as much of the original plasterwork, seating rake and projection geometry as the building would allow, rather than gutting it for a more efficient modern shell.
It reopened in 2013 at 612 seats — fewer than 1927, because modern seats are wider and fire code is fire code — with the original screen opening and a rebuilt version of the original marquee, sized to what actually survived behind the facade.
What we kept, and what we didn’t
We kept: the plaster ceiling (recast from one surviving fragment), the screen’s original masking geometry, and three of the marquee’s original four letter channels. We did not keep: the 1927 seating (too narrow for anyone over five foot six), the original nitrate-era projection booth (nitrate hasn’t been legal to project in decades), or the pipe organ, which was sold for parts in 1958, long before the trust existed to save it.