Michael Chambers on founding London’s Garden Cinema

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Michael Chambers fell in love with movies when he was six years old, but it wasn’t until he sold his legal publishing business that he could fulfil a life-long dream of owning a cinema of his own. When we meet in the bar of the Garden Cinema, the two-screen venue he opened in Covent Garden, central London, in March 2022, the pleasure its 81-year-old proprietor takes in its collages of film stars, Art Deco styling and moody lighting is palpable. The stylish bar is regularly tagged in influencers’ Instagram posts — free advertising, he shrewdly observes.

Several members of Chambers’ family were involved in the movie industry. He laughs when he remembers his mother’s career advice: “Whatever you do, don’t go into the film business.” She had good reason to be cautious: Chambers’ father and uncle, both directors, struggled to make a steady income, while his parents-in-law worked hard to keep the Phoenix Cinema in north London going.

Yet the memories were powerful. Chambers remembers his father, who spent the war directing propaganda films for the Ministry of Information, taking him to see a Marx Brothers film season at the Everyman in Hampstead when he was six. By his teenage years he had become a regular at the Everyman, relishing the introduction to filmmakers such as Ingmar Bergman. 

Chambers loved going on set when his father was making a film, but his uncle encouraged him to study law instead. “But after three years, I thought, ‘Do I want to go on like this for the rest of my life?’ The work didn’t give me the pleasure of developing something.”

In 1969, he started a non-fiction publishing house, Orbach & Chambers, while still working as an in-house lawyer for companies such as Monsanto and STC. Spotting a gap in the market, he created a legal recruitment business, Chambers and Partners. Both businesses did well — better than his foray into the music business, when he founded a recording company and managed a reggae band. “The music industry was full of grubby businessmen who didn’t care about the music . . . they would stab each other in the back. I decided this wasn’t the business for me.”

His recruitment and legal publishing companies were doing so well that in 1999 he bought the building next door to his original Smithfield offices, near London’s ancient wholesale meat market, for his growing staff. The new building came with a glass-roofed post room, which he transformed into an art gallery.

When he moved in 2010 to a new office building in Parker Street in Covent Garden, it lacked the street frontage for another gallery but did have a large basement. “I walked around this absolutely boring underground space that had no light. And I thought: instead of having still pictures, I’ll have moving pictures.” Architects Burrell Foley Fischer worked out how to fit in a two-screen venue, and the Victorian-era coalholes were perfect for drinking nooks.

Having sold his business in 2018, Chambers had the cash to bankroll the construction work and was set to open his Garden Cinema two years later. Then Covid struck. Lockdown gave Chambers and his small team of programmers time to work out how the cinema would attract and build an audience.

“There’s a lot of pressure for indie cinemas to think they should be behaving like chain cinemas, and we don’t have that pressure. What we’ve done here isn’t necessarily a blueprint, but it does come back to the fact that we hire people who love movies and we only show films we think are great. There are a lot of films we don’t show because we didn’t love them — like Everything Everywhere All at Once and The Whale.

“We’re also doing well partnering with film festivals like Safar, and the Chinese Cinema Project, holding Q&As, live music and poetry recitals.”

Chambers knows that in order to tempt people away from home, a cinema needs to offer more than just a screen. The programme is eclectic and includes not just the latest art films but retrospective seasons, live events and themed festivals. Membership, at £20 a year, comes with discounted tickets; it already has 10,000 members. Each month, they are invited to suggest films they’d like to see.

With its relatively low running costs, The Garden Cinema is in a far better position than the UK’s art-house cinema chains — a third of audiences have not returned post-pandemic. The British corporation Cineworld, which owns the Picturehouse chain, filed for bankruptcy last year. “People have got used to staying home and watching the streamers,” Chambers notes. “The niche cinemas have moved towards mainstream blockbusters. They may find that if they return to core art-cinema programming, they can pull their audiences back in.”

Chambers has abundant energy — despite using a stick to walk, he cycles from his home in Hampstead to the cinema in Covent Garden most days. The next step in his ambitious plan is to open a third, larger screen on the ground floor and turn the rest of the building into a production centre with sound stages and editing facilities. “I’d like it to be a place where people make films upstairs and then we show them downstairs. You never know what will happen when you start a business, but you can tell when you are on the right track because doors open, they give you opportunities.”

He was not expecting to break even for three years at least, so he’s pleased that they are already not far off balancing the books. “From a business model, a third screen would definitely help us move into profit territory, but even without it, we will get there before the end of next year.”

Chambers is waiting on the planners’ go-ahead for his expansion but, in the meantime, he’s made his own directorial debut with a short drama that he also wrote. It’s taken more than 60 years for him to go against his mother’s advice about not working in the film business, but it appears to be paying off.

thegardencinema.co.uk