Community

Star and Shadow Cinema

Volunteer-run co-operative cinema, music venue and community space east of the city centre, with an 80-seat screen, community pricing and a Sunday cafe.

Warwick Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 1BB Visit website

Cafe open Sundays 12 noon to 4pm; the building otherwise opens for programmed events — see the website

@starandshadowcinema Facebook

About Star and Shadow Cinema

Star and Shadow is a volunteer-run co-operative that owns and runs its own building on Warwick Street, a short walk east of the city centre. There are no paid staff and no managers: the place is programmed and run by its members through working groups, open meetings and consensus decision-making, and anyone willing to volunteer can join after one of the monthly inductions. It began in the early 2000s with screenings at the Side Cinema, Waygood Gallery and Bookville between 2001 and 2005, then spent close to a decade as tenants of a building on Stepney Bank in the Ouseburn, programming films, gigs, parties and festivals until the landlord sold up. In 2015 the co-operative bought a derelict furniture warehouse on Warwick Street with a loan from Newcastle City Council, spent three years fundraising and rebuilding, and reopened in 2018. The conversion, by architects MawsonKerr, won the RIBA MacEwen Award for architecture for the common good in 2019.

Inside there is an 80-seat cinema with ten further spaces for wheelchair users, a 200-capacity music venue, a cafe, a library, a print room, a workshop and a garden, and the projection box still runs 35mm and 16mm alongside DCP. Programming is deliberately open to anyone prepared to help run the building, so the calendar mixes repertory and archive seasons with new arthouse releases, live music, club nights, silent films with commissioned live scores, a monthly film quiz, a free family film club and community groups from knitting to creative writing. In-house screenings use a sliding community-pricing scale with a genuine free tier, usually £7, £5, £3 or £0, although gigs brought in by outside promoters carry conventional fixed prices. The cafe opens to the public every Sunday from 12 noon to 4pm with organic drinks and vegan food, and a monthly community kitchen serves a pay-as-you-can meal. All areas are level access, there are two accessible toilets including a Changing Places facility reached by Radar key, and the nearest Metro stations are Manors and Jesmond, each around ten minutes' walk, with the number 1 bus stopping outside.