Vogue Knightswood 1

Originally The Boulevard

2 Knightscliffe Avenue, Knightswood

Opened: December 10th 1928
Closed: June 1st 1059

Number of screens: 1

Number of seats: 1140 (1928)
Number of seats: 1470 (1938)

The Boulevard on the corner of Great Western Road and Knightscliffe Avenue, Knightswood opened in December 1928.

William Beresford Inglis designer of the famous Rogano bar and restaurant not only designed the Boulevard but unusually, was also the owner for its first ten years.

The Boulevard was an "atmospheric cinema" in a Spanish American style, complete with hacienda windows on the outside and stained glass and ornamental balconies inside, as with most cinemas of the period, The Boulevard had an orchestra pit for live accompaniment. The exterior also featured large, ornate "poster panels" facing onto Great Western Road, a valuable advertising space.

By 1938, Inglis, tired of the pressures of running a cinema somehow imagined that a hotel would be easier to run and sold the Boulevard to Singletons, using the money to finance the construction of the Beresford Hotel in Sauchiehall Street. Some time later Inglis met George Singleton and now complained about the pressures of running a hotel!

Singletons brought in their house architect James McKissack to modernise the cinema although not without complaint, records of the time show objections by one "Thomas Somers and others" to the removal of the canopy above the front door.

Nevertheless, the alterations went through, creating an extra 330 seats in the process and the cinema reopened as The Vogue, Knightswood in February 1939 and was a popular cinema for the next twenty years before closing in 1959, a victim of the increasing popularity of television and customers' preference for a city-centre cinema.

The cinema was demolished and the site used as a car park for B&Q's Knightswood store, which in turn has now been closed and the site re-developed.