A Theatre to a shady porn cinema to today a popular pub

There is more to the Prince of Wales on St Mary’s Street than a JD Wetherspoon pub chain I was reminded today the building as a history from a Theatre to a shady porn cinema to today a popular pub.

My first memory was a visit to the cinema, no not the porn era I remember going to watch “Dumbo” with my mum, dad and brother when I was nine or ten. It was as any other cinema showing general releases back then.

Before the cinema and a name change to the Prince of Wales it opened as the New Theatre Royal and then for a short time The Playhouse. In 1935–1957, it became The Prince of Wales it was mainly live theatre before becoming a cinema.

In the mid-seventies, the Prince of Wales was as much a part of Cardiff's cultural landscape with its reputations now fixed in the seedy side of Cardiff’s culture, as Chippy Lane is today part of the cities landscape. The fine looking gothic building inside and out became a porn cinema.

It showed the steady declining fortunes the once great theatre had mutated into an infamous cinema for dirty old men. When it was a theatre, some of the biggest names in theatre land played the venue. The likes of Richard Burton, Noël Coward, Laurence Olivier, and Hollywood star Robert Montgomery just to name a few.

Being not of an age to be a patron you could perv at the lurid adverts outside before being shooed away. The dirty mac brigade would shuffle in and out hoping not to be seen in the era of Super-8 projectors. It was about the only way to watch home adult entertainment before the explosion of the age of the video.

If your friend’s dad had a projector, the chances were there was a reel of porn somewhere in the house normally on top of the wardrobe in your parent’s bedroom.

It became a rite of passage, a challenge to visit the aforementioned cinema and if it were here today, it would be on most Cardiffians bucket list. It was about 17 when I got through the doors into the theatre with some friends having been turn away months before. Interestingly I knew the lady at the ticket booth and her husband worked as an usher this elderly couple always looked snobbish, up themselves and what nice jobs.

Inside it was dowdy like no one cared about the building it was now a porn theatre sparsely populated with lonely men and the odd group of lads in there for a giggle/laugh. The stories of the toilets had a reputation akin to Sodom and Gomorrah, a place you would never venture alone the same with the upper balcony. The films were tame, sex comedies, titillation soft-core and I even remember the film we seen, Confessions of a Young American Housewife.

After shutting the door on the dirty mac clientele, it reopened as "Ceaser's Nightclub” for a few years. In 1988, the interior was divided into multiple spaces for a variety of uses, including an amusement arcade and a pub.