Embracing Barry’s heritage as a vibrant town and a location for public entertainment, Tom has drawn upon Barry’s history of theatres and cinemas dating back as far as the 1880s. At the turn of the century there were several venues in Barry where the earliest forms of cinema could be experienced. In particular, Leon Vint’s ‘Electric Palace’ on Thompson Street.

It was in venues like the Electric Palace that the public became familiar with ‘living pictures’, and the latest scientific craze, the Cinematographe’. The heyday of the cinema was perhaps the inter-war years but before this there were filled theatres showing ‘animated pictures’.

..And before that in the 1830’s Charles W Poole’s celebrated ‘Myriorama’ visited Barry. Myriorama means a myrid of pictures and was applied to shows using a sequence of impressive visual effects to entertain an audience….

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