With at least 80 cinemas once existing in Leeds and now only a handful remaining you may be asking: where have all our cinemas gone? The answer is, they’re all around us – you just need to know where to look.

Presented by the Hyde Park Picture House, Hiding In Plain Sight is a new interactive heritage project, bringing together years of research with illustrations from Adam Allsuch Boardman – allowing you to rediscover the lost cinemas of Leeds.

From small neighbourhood picture houses to gigantic super-cinemas, so many of these incredible buildings remain in our lives today – repurposed into shops, clubs, offices – strangely familiar and hiding in plain sight. And for those that are no longer standing, their legacy lives on through the stories, photos and memories that so many of you have.

Supported by Leeds Inspired and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, this ever evolving archive will allow you to navigate the city and learn all about Leeds’ amazing cinema heritage.

Huge thanks to Adam and the Picture House’s creative engagement officer Laura Ager, for all their hard work on the project. Thanks also to Lets Dance Agency for bringing the website to life.

This project owes an enormous debt to earlier research carried out in the 1980s by author Robert Preedy, as well as the many individual contributors to the Cinema Treasures website. We'd also like to thank local cinema historians Jane Ellis and Shaun Page for their insights.

And big thanks to Leeds Libraries and especially the staff at the Local and Family History library for contributing advice, items from their archive and photographs from their amazing Leodis website.