Odeon being restored to former glory

Work on the century-old Odeon Cinema building is fast underway and 40 per cent of restoration work has so far been carried out.

The cinema was built in the Saddar area of Rawalpindi on 5.44 acres of land owned by the Lansdowne Trust. The Trust had been set up in 1891 by Sikh brothers Sardar Kirpal Singh Rai Bahadur and Sardar Sujan Singh Rai Bahadur.

In the first phase, the front area of the cinema building has been restored to its original form. Set up in the name of the British viceroy and India’s governor-general from 1884 to 1894, Lord Henry Petty Fitzmaurice, the Marquees of Lansdowne, it was aimed at building and managing a cinema, a library and a park within the Rawalpindi Cantonment to provide educational and recreational facilities to the residents.

The Cantonment Board Rawalpindi’s pre-partition office building, the library and the Shabaloot Park located in front of Odeon Cinema still stand with grandeur façades. The Lansdowne Trust, established by the Sikh brothers, still owns the Odeon Cinema, the Cantonment Board Office, the Cantonment Public Library and Shahbaloot Park.

The Shabaloot Park, nestled among the beautiful oak trees on the Museum Road used to be a resting place for cinemagoers to have spent some leisure time waiting for their turn to see the picture in Odeon Cinema, which became a victim of the overall decline of the cinema industry in the country.

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The cantonment board administration has completed the first phase of restoration work on the Odeon Cinema building. After the complete restoration of the building, entertainment activities will be revived in the cinema again. Rawalpindi residents were once again looking forward to the early restoration of the cinema building, which is one of the finest masterpieces of historical architecture.

The renovation of the building is now in full swing. The Shahbaloot Park in front of it is still in its original condition and has been further upgraded. However, the cantonment library building has lost its attraction as the cantonment board has set up its office in one part of the building, which has shrunk the pace towards the library hall.

Muhammad Nazir, a former cantonment board officer familiar with the history of Odeon Cinema, said that in the past, people used to come to the cinema to watch movies and spend a few moments in Shahbaloot Park and read in the library before watching a picture.

He said that many historical and well-known films were shown in the Odeon Cinema and people used to line up to buy tickets and watch films.

Muhammad Aurangzeb Khan, a former manager of Odeon Cinema, said that the cinema has screened a number of historical films, including The Guns of Navarone, Bridge on the River Kwai Blood, Hercules, Sunflower and the Last Sunset. There used to be a state-ofthe-art cafeteria and a parking lot on the premises of the cinema.