Oceana nightclub, Watford

Image: © Cathy Cox Taken: 15 Jun 2010

This is the site of the Odeon cinema in Watford High Street, pictured here http://viewfinder.english-heritage.org.uk/search/reference.aspx?uid=108332&index=0&form=advanced&county=HERTFORDSHIRE&district=WATFORD&collection=John%20Maltby in 1937 in the John Maltby collection. I can find very little online about the history of this cinema but 'The Book of Watford' published by J B Nunn in 1992 has the following entry - "The first building of the super cinema era was the Plaza by the Pond, opened in April 1929. It was taken over by the Odeon circuit and renamed in October 1936, closed in November 1963 and was demolished to make way for a ground-floor supermarket and Top Rank Suite." This renaming would seem to account for the name of the café next door in the 1937 photograph, the cinema only having changed hands around 3 months before John Maltby's photograph was taken. One wonders if they ever got around to changing it to the Odeon café. The building is still recognisable and now houses an estate agency. The Albions descended on Watford in 1981 by which time both the supermarket and Top Rank were things of the past and the present building was occupied by Bailey's nightclub. The nightclub has had several incarnations since that time having become Paradise Lost, Kudos and then Destiny before a major revamp in 2008, reopening in September of that year as part of the Oceana chain of nightclubs.

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