Sab Astley

If you walk down Clerkenwell Road, a red building will catch your eye. It’s a bazaar of the bizarre, a shrine to the shocking.  Welcome to The Nickel, London’s newest – and cultiest – cinema. A DIY affair, it’s owned and operated by Dominic Hicks, a movie aficionado who has travelled the globe’s repertory cinema scene, from New York to LA, Barcelona to Japan. The Nickel Cinema began life in October 2023 as a pop-up in pubs like Camberwell’s The Bear, before expanding to The Cinema Museum, Jamboree in King’s Cross and All Is Joy in Dean Street. The events regularly sold out as The Nickel’s popularity grew. ‘The plan was always to build an actual space, so these pop-ups gave me a means to get more experience, which I definitely needed since I was pretty green in the realms of programming and projection,’ says Hicks. Hicks initially balanced his filmmaking day job with running The Nickel, before dropping everything to focus on the project. ‘You have to be a bit mad to try to pull off something like this, but I would have died trying.’  Photograph: Dominic HicksInside The Nickel’s screening room He launched a fundraiser with a target of £10,000, ending up on nearly £15,000 and added confidence that Londoners bought into his vision for a cult cinema. ‘It created pressure that if I had failed to deliver, I probably would have had to leave the country!’Happily, with some help from The Scala’s Jane Giles and other cinema veterans, and a crash course in cinema programming – Hicks w

Named after silent era moving picture venues, London’s newest cinema The Nickel has found a permanent home in Clerkenwell. The cinema will open in early summer with a 35-seater screen dedicated to the ‘grindhouse spirit’, which will encapsulate the bizarre, the sensational, subversive, psychotronic and rebellious, from the silent age all the way to the modern YouTube era. One night you could be watching El Topo and Eraserhead, the next a series of Adult Swim shorts with the director himself in for a Q&A.  Those attending a screening can grab a drink to debrief in the venue’s basement bar. The cinema will boast its own physical media emporium, where cinema lovers can pick up soundtracks, posters, books, and even movies to rent and buy in a Blockbuster-style throwback. The Nickel plans to slowly expand from film screenings to live performances and a zine, and it will offer the space for creative work and discussion groups, as well as filmmaking workshops on how to shoot on 16mm film.  The cinema is located on Clerkenwell Road and its exact opening date will be announced in the coming weeks.  Photograph: The Nickel The Nickel founder Dom Hicks has travelled the globe as a result of his love for global repertory cinemas, from London's Prince Charles Cinema and the ICA to the Cine Doré in Madrid and The New Beverley in Los Angeles.For him, The Nickel is a place to offer a film that you may never have heard of but where you end up walking out with a new all-time favourite. ‘It’s