Inside the rarely seen 'hidden' bank vaults beneath Sheffield's historic Curzon Cinema

The Star, Sheffield

We go inside the rarely seen 'hidden' bank vaults beneath Sheffield's historic Curzon Cinema ahead of Heritage Open Days 2025.

Transcript

00:00The original building was built in 1793 and it became a bank in the 1830s and it was several

00:08banks over its time but all of our bank vaults are all still here, we didn't remove them.

00:14We didn't want the task of removing these massive three-ton doors out of here.

00:20But yeah, we've tidied it up and want to show it off for Heritage Open days.

00:25Not at first but I mean it doesn't take us long to tell everyone, especially me, I go

00:30on about this to a lot of customers as they come in because obviously the upstairs, the

00:36way we've renovated it, it incorporates a lot of the original features anyway so a lot

00:40of people just, it naturally comes up like what was this building?

00:45Like screen one is just a box that's built in the middle of the room and it doesn't touch

00:48any of the original features and it's a really like kind renovation as it were.

00:54But yeah, it's good to show it off every now and again.

00:57This I imagine would have been an extraordinarily busy corridor but this kind of leads to the

01:02main vaults and there's a further vault back there that we renovated to allow access for

01:08us.

01:11Every bit of history that we've had brought up to us over the years, we tend to just add

01:18it to this wall.

01:21The pictures, one of the ladies in the pictures, she gave us these, they gave us those pictures.

01:29And just anything that we find over time just gets added.

01:33And it's just nice to have.

01:34We also have pictures of the renovation, of what it looked like when we took it over.

01:39So this is like the main vault area.

01:43This is one of the newer safes but it's from the 1890s, we are told.

01:48I don't know exactly.

01:51But it's definitely different to the other safes that we have.

01:54It's also extraordinarily heavy.

01:58So we don't really come by here very often.

02:01This one is one of the original safes from 1831.

02:06This one's the only one that still actually works as well.

02:12But again, extraordinarily heavy doors that you don't want to get stuck behind.

02:16Down there is another floor.

02:18It descends into the darkness and we don't go there.

02:21This is one of the main working areas.

02:23On the night we opened, we had the last bank manager here to kind of help open the cinema

02:30as it were and he gave us a little tour around here and just everything that I tell everyone

02:35practically came from him or other people who have worked here.

02:39And he kind of described roughly what this room would be used for.

02:43And this was the main cash room and this safe was one of many safes similar and it would have

02:53lots of cash.

02:54The cash would be sorted into company boxes and representatives from the companies would

03:00mainly steel companies and different other local Sheffield businesses would come and

03:05collect their payrolls essentially.

03:08But that was all from in here.

03:10Also does have a film connection in the bank as well, which is the actor Patrick McGowan who

03:16people would know from The Prisoner or Braveheart or one of my favorite films, Ice Station Zebra.

03:24He worked here in the 1940s when he lived in Sheffield before he went off to Hollywood.

03:32But yeah, we decided to put a little picture of him up and yeah, it's nice to have a film

03:38connection as well with the bank as well.

03:40Heritage Open Days then, we did them when we first opened in 2015 and then we have not done

03:45them since.

03:47So this has been, it's been a long time since we've done them.

03:50It's good to have people able to come see them.

03:52It's fully booked.

03:53I keep trying to find more ways to squeeze people in, but it's just, it's a very small

03:58place.

03:59So we'll keep trying next year.

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