Gloucestershire Cinema Gazetteer

SEVERN BEACH

Gone but not forgotten:  Rustic

Severn Beach on the river Severn is not the most glamorous of seaside towns, but would at one time have seen its share of holiday visitors.  Today the only clue to the old cinemas location is Rustic Holiday Park.   This was once the Rustic Tea Gardens and in these gardens was the Rustic cinema, a metal building once referred to as the 'Galvanised Gaumont'. The first record of a cinema in Severn Beach was called the Cinema Hall and was closed by the mid 1930s perhaps never being adapted to sound.  Whether this cinema building was the same as the Rustic is not known. The Rustic appears around 1954 as a part-time 16mm cinema operating on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays with 140 seats.  The operator is John Shufflebottom.  It is not certain when the cinema closed but it is unlikely to have lasted out the 1950s.