The Cinema Museum: HELP US BUY OUR HOME

Aim

After 40 years of uncertainty, we have a chance to secure our home. We need £500,000 to purchase our home and we have five months to do it!

After 40 years of uncertainty, we finally have a chance to secure our home. 

The Cinema Museum needs your assistance in raising £500,000 to help purchase its historic building and permanently secure the home of cinema history.

As the UK’s only museum dedicated to the experience of cinema going, we are completely volunteer-run and we are not publicly funded.

We have an incredible opportunity to buy our buildings. We need to raise £500,000 – and we need to do that by December. 

Our wonderful supporters have saved us before – by generously donating during COVID to keep the Museum open and nearly 70,000 of you signed our petition when the sale of the site meant we could have faced closure – so thank you again for that.

This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to buy our home—the historic Grade II listed Lambeth Workhouse—and we must raise the £500,000 in five months to seal the deal and end decades of insecurity - and potential eviction.

If we do raise more than we need we can then finally do the repairs and development work needed to function to our maximum; open to the public daily; and expand our wellbeing work, our environmental work, our educational work and the work we do in helping develop and support the next generation of young people wanting to break into careers in cinema and filmmaking. 

🎬 Why Our Home Matters

Our home is not just a building; it is a living piece of cultural history.

• The Chaplin Connection: Before he became a Hollywood icon, a young Charlie Chaplin lived and worked in this exact building when it was the Lambeth Workhouse.
• A Treasure Trove of Cinema History: Inside these walls sits an unparalleled collection of art deco cinema seats, vintage projectors, ushers' uniforms, and classic film posters. The Chaplin family themselves call it "the nearest thing that Britain has to a Chaplin Museum".
• A Community Hub: We are a vibrant cultural centre hosting regular independent screenings, local events, and educational tours and provide free and subsidised space to help local charities and initiatives.
• A Supportive Effective Resource: our spaces and collections are not just for looking at - we use them to run projects that make a massive impact on people's lives, young and old. And we share them, with other charities and community groups, who are all part of making life better for everyone. 

⚠️ The Risk of Loss

For years, property developers and shifting ownership have threatened the Museum with closure. If we do not buy the buildings now, this irreplaceable piece of London's heritage could be lost - along with all the work that we do. We have fought hard to secure the option to buy—now we just need to cross the financial finish line.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 24th September 2026 at 6:27pm