The Cinema Museum Has Four Months to Buy Chaplin's Workhouse

The Cinema Museum has four months to buy its own roof. On 18 August it launched a campaign — 'Buy Our Home', hosted on Crowdfunder — to raise £500,000 by December and secure the freehold of the Grade II-listed former Lambeth Workhouse in Kennington, the building where a young Charlie Chaplin spent part of his childhood.

The museum has been in that building for more than 25 years. It was founded in 1984 by Martin Humphries and Ronald Grant, it takes no public funding, and it is run almost entirely by volunteers. The collection covers over 130 years of cinema history — Victorian magic lanterns, vintage projectors, rare posters, usherettes' uniforms, cinema memorabilia — and includes what the museum says is the UK's only archive of cinema architecture.

Founders Ronald Grant and Martin Humphries: 'The Cinema Museum is far more than a collection of artefacts; it is a living archive of our cinema heritage.'

The threat is not new. Developers bought the building in 2018, and a preservation petition gathered more than 70,000 signatures. What is new is a figure and a deadline. At present the museum runs tours on selected days; it says owning the freehold would let it open to the public daily.

It is worth being clear what this place is to Londoners: it has won Time Out's Most Loved Local Culture Spot award, placing above Tate Modern. Co-founder Martin Humphries puts it more simply — 'I've never been to another museum [like it].' Four months, half a million pounds, SE11.