January 26, 2012 11.36 am This story is over 145 months old

Please find your seats, the film is about to begin

This seat is reserved: Off The Bench secure 320 vintage cinema seats to regenerate the Ritz Cinema on the High Street.

OTB’s Jack Bennett shows off the vintage seats

— Off The Bench, a Lincoln-based voluntary organisation, have set out to bring back the Ritz cinema to its former glory. In the second of their weekly updates on the project, OTB’s Pete Genders has some very good news.


Three weeks into the project and today we receive delivery of our first large donation of help, in the form of no less then 320 vintage red cinema seats.

There has been a real buzz around the OTB Ritz camp this week with the confirmation of this phenomenal donation from Oldham Coliseum Theatre in Manchester.

After seeing the story of The Ritz regeneration on Facebook, The Lincolnite reader Al Dumcombe noticed an advert posted on an online forum offering the seats and passed the information on to us.

We couldn’t quite believe the opportunity and went frantically into some week-long negotiations with the Coliseum, culminating in the donation of the seats worth almost £100,000.

The OTB Team travelled up to Manchester on Wednesday to begin the task of removing the seats and loading them onto two delivery trucks, and today we have been unloading them into The Ritz.

Excitement is really setting in now as it’s clear today more than ever that The Ritz project is going to be a huge success for the people of Lincoln.

The hard work will now begin on the restoration of the seats. So now is your chance to get involved in our sponsor a seat appeal.

More on the OTB Ritz Cinema project:

Pete Genders runs Off The Bench, a Lincoln-based voluntary organisation that has set out at the beginning of 2012 to bring back the Ritz cinema to its former glory. The organisation works with dozens of youth volunteers across the city, helping keep them off the streets, and also organises the Zombie Run.