You will know it as the old Co-op. The big curved building on the corner of Childwall Road and Church Road North in Wavertree has stood empty since that shop shut in 2020.
Campaigners got it Grade II listed in 2021, which stopped Lidl demolishing it. Six years on, nobody has found anything to put in it.
In July 2026 a Wavertree history teacher, Lydia Jane Alice, started a campaign called Save the Abbey Liverpool. The 2021 campaign set out to stop a demolition. This one has to work out what goes in the building instead.
Checked against Historic England, SAVE Britain's Heritage and Liverpool planning records on 26 August 2026.
What is confirmed
- The Abbey opened on 4 March 1939 with 1,870 seats, designed by Sir Alfred Ernest Shennan.
- It was listed Grade II on 19 April 2021 after a campaign by SAVE Britain's Heritage and the Cinema Theatre Association.
- It was Liverpool's only Cinerama cinema, converted in 1964 at a cost of £105,000.
- Lidl bought the site in 2020, applied to demolish, then abandoned a revised scheme in 2023.
- It has been on the market since 2024 and has not sold.
- The new campaign is at an early stage. There is no funding, no buyer and no agreed scheme.
The first campaign stopped a demolition
In 2021 Lidl applied to knock the Abbey down and put up a single-storey store. SAVE Britain's Heritage, backed by the Cinema Theatre Association, applied to have it listed instead. The then culture secretary Oliver Dowden granted Grade II listing on 19 April 2021, and the demolition stopped.
Listing did its job. It controls what an owner can change, and it does nothing to find one.
Lydia Jane Alice launched Save the Abbey Liverpool in July 2026 out of concern that years of nothing happening narrows the options. SAVE made the Abbey its Building of the Month for August 2026 and described the campaign as an attempt to get people together to reimagine the building's future.
There is an interview with Lydia Jane Alice about why she started it if you want her account rather than a summary of it.
The campaign is at an early stage. It is gathering people and ideas, and it has no funding, no agreed community takeover and no buyer.
It does not have to be a cinema again
"Save" does not mean rebuilding the 1939 cinema. Nobody is proposing that.
Ideas so far include a mix of community, entertainment and commercial use, with room for young people, independent businesses, food and events. That stands a better chance than running a 1,870-seat picture house in 2026.
Any proposal still has to name what fills a building this size, and who pays to repair it, adapt it, run it and maintain it. Five years have produced no answer.
What the building is
Shennan designed it in 1937 for the Regal Cinema Co (Liverpool) Ltd. Plans went in that September, building started in spring 1938, and it opened on 4 March 1939 with Joy of Living, starring Irene Dunn and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. Six months later the country was at war.
There were 1,126 seats downstairs and 744 in the balcony. The style is called Moderne: clean curves and flat surfaces, no fuss. Our guide to Liverpool architecture has more of it. The curved corner entrance was put there on purpose, facing the Picton Clock Tower at one of Wavertree's busiest junctions.
Shennan ran Liverpool City Council, and was knighted for what he did during the war. Two of his other buildings are listed too: the Greenbank Drive Synagogue of 1937 and the Forum on Lime Street.
What survives inside
The shopfront gives nothing away. The listing records a ground-floor foyer that had a wooden mosaic floor with music motifs, mirror and walnut cladding, and a 10-foot-wide green terrazzo stair up to the first-floor lounge.
The cladding has gone. A patch of that mosaic floor is still there, in the bit of the foyer that became the bingo and snooker hall. Both staircases are still there too: the main one from the foyer, and the one from the lounge out to the balcony.
Somebody stripped the seats out years ago. The wooden tiers they stood on are still there under later flooring, across most of the balcony.
Liverpool's only Cinerama
The local Bedford Cinema Group bought the Abbey in 1943. In 1964 they rebuilt it to show Cinerama, an early wide-screen system that ran three projectors at once onto one huge curved screen. It was the only Cinerama cinema in Liverpool.
It cost £105,000 and it was a big job. A giant curved screen went in front of the stage. Builders tore out the back of the stalls to make room for a new projection box. Seating dropped to 1,260, and the upstairs lounge became a bar.
Cinerama at the Abbey ended in 1971, when it moved to ordinary wide-screen film. Every Cinerama cinema in the world did the same, apart from one in Chicago.
