12 year old girl halts cinema demolition  

Lucy Seaward, an 12 year old girl from Market Harborough, Leicestershire has stopped a London based property developer form demolishing a disused pre-war cinema.  In August 2007 the girl along with her school friends started a campaign to stop the building from being demolished and retirement flats being built in its place. The petition which she started when she was 11 years old ended up being signed by over 8,000 residents culminated in former residents of the town contacting the campaign for New Zealand, Australia &
America with their support and memories of the towns’ cinema.   

“Market Harborough is not big enough to support a large multiplex, but it is big enough to support a smaller cinema so it seemed wrong to demolish the cinema we have and replace it with flats” comments Lucy.  The campaign which resulted also generated enquires from three cinema operators.  One of the cinema groups called ‘The Light’ proposed a multi-million pound 5 screen digital cinema complex on the site.  

Property company Alislane who are the current owners of the site however still pushed ahead with their plans for flats which were thrown out by a region-wide design committee as well as the local council planning meeting on Tuesday (January 29^th) after somebody spoke on Lucy’s behalf.  

“We really hope that this will make the owners think again about what they are going to do with the site. The plans for the new cinema look great and I would love to have a cinema in Market Harborough again” adds Lucy.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 9:40 pm and is filed under Harborough Cinema News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.