As you may already know, the Picture House have launched new membership schemes which will offer benefits including discounted tickets. Unfortunately this means it will no longer be practical for us to provide discounts as part of your Friends Membership. Anyone who was a member before the closures will continue to receive the discounted price for the On The Road screenings until the Picture House re-opens and will also receive a special discount to join the new schemes.

We know a lot of people joined for the discounts and that this is quite a big change but to reflect that we’ll be moving to a “Pay What You Decide” model and focussing more on our charitable aims:

• To promote and support participation in the cultural landscape of Hyde Park, Leeds and Yorkshire through appreciation of cinema
• To celebrate the heritage of Hyde Park Picture House and ensure its preservation and continued use for cinema and related arts for all sections of the community

This means the Friends will continue to exist as a separate organisation, a group of people who enjoy cinema and feel in some way connected to The Hyde Park Picture House and want to ensure that it does not go the way of so many wonderful historic cinemas across the country.

Exactly what we do will depend on what the members want to do. We are only a small committee of Trustees but can enable members to organise events and activities and promote them to the membership. Whilst the committee can and will organise some core events such as our now traditional Yorkshire Day and Christmas Screenings, it is not feasible for us to do everything. If you would like to get more involved or have any ideas then please do get in touch.

In the future we will also be looking at ways of supporting the Picture House such as providing volunteers to work on preserving and catalogue the archives, co-ordinating film discussion groups, outreach to the wider Hyde Park community and more.

All of this will take time and at the moment we are focussing on the practical aspects of the changes but it’s an exciting time and we hope that you will stick with us and get involved if you can.

We’ve put together a page of Frequently Asked Question to explain things in more detail but if you have any other questions please get in touch.