For a stretch of the early Nineties, the Coronet Cinema in Woolwich was my very own suburban dream factory. Set in the swooping, incongruous grandeur of an art deco monolith near the ferry terminal, it was there that I got what passed for a cinematic education at the time; there that, between fistfuls of stale popcorn, I marvelled at Jurassic Park, squirmed through Arachnophobia and was, weirdly, traumatised to the point of jittery sleeplessness by (ostensible comedy) Hocus Pocus.
But by the new millennium, this secular place of worship had become a literal one. Taken over by the New Wine Church in 2001, it is now home to one of the biggest and most successful black majority congregations in the area. And it is not the only outer London monument to have undergone a similar transformation in the past couple of decades. Defunct pubs on the Essex border have become African supermarkets; snooker clubs in the wilds of Zone 6 have been reborn as Nigerian-run function halls; the old Barclays Bank in my commuter-belt hometown in Kent is, perhaps inevitably, now a Pentecostal church.
