NZ Visual Diary - entry 351
Whanganui Embassy Cinema
My wife and I recently returned to Auckland after a four-day road trip with our grandson to Whanganui, the North Island city located at the mouth of the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s longest navigable river.
My initial impulse when visiting a city for the first time is to make my way to its city centre. Carefully curated city centres bring together two aspects of urban life that I most enjoy: the scope, sometimes grand, of a city’s commercial & public architecture and by inference intimations of its civic pride.
Whanganui’s city centre, and specifically the lower end of Victoria Avenue as the avenue intersects with Taupo Quay and approaches the west bank of the Whanganui River, is a punctuated pronouncement of exuberant civic pride. Every building, representing the full range of commercial architectural styles across a time span from from late 19th through mid-20th centuries, has been tastefully restored to its original lustre, none more elegantly than the Embassy Cinema.
The Embassy Cinema is a magnificent example of the Art Deco style that flourished in the first three decades of the 20th century in the United States, Europe and colonial outposts of the British Empire like Australia and New Zealand.