Threatened Beatles cinema needs a Lidl help from its friends

The supermarket chain now controls the fate of Liverpool’s Abbey picture house – one of John Lennon’s favourite places

In the mid-1960s John Lennon wrote some lyrics that would eventually become the Beatles classic In My Life. He later described his rejected first draft, which name-checked places near his Liverpool home, as “the most boring sort of ‘what I did on my holidays bus trip’ song”.

In the original version, among the “places I’ll remember all my life” was the Abbey cinema in Wavertree. “In the circle of the Abbey, I have seen some happy hours,” he wrote. Fellow Beatle George Harrison was also a regular.

By 1979, the year before Lennon was shot dead in New York, the Abbey, a magnificent art deco edifice that could accommodate more than 1,800 people in its vast double-tier auditorium, had reached the end of its life as a cinema. Now a campaign has been launched to save the building amid fears that its owners, the supermarket chain Lidl, could seek to demolish it and replace it with a purpose-built store on the site.

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