Brighton was home to some of the grandest cinemas in the country between the wars with The Astoria, Regent and Savoy each able to house a couple of thousand people.

At the other end of the scale were local cinemas such as the King’s Cliff in Kemp Town which only had room for 350.

It was commonly called a flea pit yet it evoked fond memories from many cinema goers such as Maurice Packham who lived nearby.

He says: “Well I remember my boyhood days when, on a Saturday afternoon, we queued up clutching our four pences in Sudeley Place.

“Of course the programme included a serial, each episode ending with the hero in a seemingly inescapable situation ‘to be continued next week’.

“I remember Richard Talmadge being flung off the roof of a skyscraper to an unavoidable death.

“The following week he was falling through a series of sunblinds and ending up unscathed on the pavement. I felt somehow cheated.”

The King’s Cliff was converted from a Congregational chapel and opened in 1920 under the ownership of Mrs I Reith Fellows.

In the 1930s there was competition from the new Odeon in Paston Place which started a Mickey Mouse club.

Maurice Packham recalls that Mrs Reith Fellows dealt with the threat by handing bags of sweets to children as they entered.

He adds that as many patrons did not have bathrooms in their homes, the smell was a little thick and a uniformed attendant would come round with a large device spraying sweet scented perfume.

There was a side entrance in Sudeley Street and if neighbours were careful, they could sneak in and see the films for nothing.

The building became a theatre after the Second World War but this did not last long and in 1951 it was bought by Miles Byrne who specialised in reviving small cinemas.

He renamed it the Continentale and showed films which Maurice Packham says would have shocked the original churchgoers but were tame fare compared with what is on offer today.

Mr Packham had one last connection with the cinema in the 1980s when he was thinking of starting an amateur theatre and bought some spare seats from it. They were stored in a friend’s cellar and as the theatre never started for all he knows they may still be there.

The Continentale closed in 1986 and was converted into flats. There is no sign that it was once a cinema.

Byrne, an odourful character, did not survive it by many months. After his death, the grandly titled Miles Byrne Empire was dissolved.

It included cinemas all-over the south with several in Sussex such as the Orion in Burgess Hill. He also ran the Adeline Genee theatre in East Grinstead for many years. Without him it is doubtful that small venues such as the Continentale would have lasted as long as they did.

Maurice Packham now lives in Horsham but has fond memories of his childhood in Kemp Town, especially going to the cinema.