THE Art Deco lines of the building in our main picture are as unmistakeable now as they were when this artist’s impression appeared in the 1990s.

Some people who saw the image were saddened at the thought of the place becoming a pub, but others were simply glad that the structure was to be preserved.

The Savoy cinema opened in 1937 on the Regent Street site of what had been a clutch of rather nondescript shops.

It was one of many cinemas across the town, which included another, the Arcadia, further down Regent Street.

The operators of the Savoy were Associated British Cinemas, whose ABC brand was later applied in a name change.

The mass adoption of television in the 1950s and 1960s hit the cinema industry hard. Many people who previously visited several times a week now only did so on special occasions, such as when a blockbuster came to town.

Our smaller image is from 1978, the year when John Travolta and Olivia Newton John made Grease, the film just about everybody wanted to see. By that time, long queues outside cinemas were very much the exception rather than the rule.

Five years earlier, in common with many other cinemas across the country during the era, the ABC had closed for alterations, increasing the number of screens from one to three. In the mid-1980s came another change of name when it was acquired by the Cannon organisation.

The cinema once known as the Savoy remained open for another five years. Having weathered the rise of television and home video, its doom came as a result of another change in consumer tastes.

Out-of-town multiplexes offered the cinema-going public more choice then ever before in a single location, only a short walk from ample free parking facilities. Swindon’s opened at Shaw Ridge in the spring of 1991, with seven screens offering more than 1,400 seats between them.

The former Savoy, which had a similar number of seats in its single auditorium when it first opened more than 50 years earlier, closed shortly afterwards. According to a number of websites devoted to cinema history, the last films it screened were Godfather III, Three Men and a Little Lady and Green Card.

A number of campaigners, including then Thamesdown Borough Council deputy leader Jim D’Avila, had demanded to no avail that it remain open.

The building stood empty for a number of years until reopening in 1996 as Swindon’s first Wetherspoon’s pub - and the company returned its original name.