Lewisham's Year Without a Cinema
A Clusterflick report · Data from 1 January 2026 to 31 October 2026
Since Catford Mews closed in October 2024, Lewisham has been the only London borough without a cinema. Two years on, it is still waiting: The Castle Cinema plans to reopen the site, but as of September its lease had yet to be signed.
Clusterflick collects the listings of every place we can find that screens films in London: cinemas, but also libraries, pubs, universities and community centres. From 1 January 2026 to 31 October 2026, we found 863,909 film screenings across London. 103 of them were in Lewisham.
- Film screenings in Lewisham, all year
- 103
- Westminster has had this many screenings by this time on a typical day
- 3pm
- Lewisham is home to 3.3% of Londoners, but has only a tiny share of all London's film screenings.
- 0.01%
Every borough
Lewisham's bar is there: it is 103 screenings long. The next lowest, the City of London, had 60 times as many.
Where Lewisham's 103 screenings were
None is a cinema with a regular programme. The busiest month was October, with 24.
Two are volunteer-run community cinemas, Sydenham Arts and Piehouse Co-Op, with 16 screenings between them. The borough's best-known volunteer cinema, Deptford Cinema, lost its home on Deptford Broadway in 2020 and has screened as pop-ups ever since.
What's on in Lewisham nowHow we counted
- What counts. A film screening is one listed with a date and time: a film, a shorts programme, a double bill or a TV screening. Talks, live music and other events are left out, in Lewisham and everywhere else.
- What actually screened. Clusterflick's listings only look ahead, so we rebuilt the year from the copies we save every day: each screening is counted once, from the last copy before it happened. A screening cancelled before then isn't counted.
- Clusterflick grew through the year. We follow more venues all the time: across London, 182 had screenings in January and 444 by October. A venue's screenings count from when we began following it. Most of Lewisham's came from venues we have followed since January; the 6 we added later account for 10 of the 103. If you know of screenings in Lewisham we missed, tell us at [email protected].
- Population. ONS mid-2024 estimates: Lewisham 301,255, London 9,089,736.
- The working. The scripts that produced these numbers, and how to run them, are on GitHub.
- Using these numbers. They're free to use with credit, under CC BY 4.0 like the data behind them: see our data licence. Please credit Clusterflick and link to this page.