Cinema lobby carpets: A celebration

You can almost smell the Slush Puppie

(Will Hall)

If, like me, you grew up in multiplexes, you'll probably remember them with a dissonant combination of fondness and disgust.

The sticky floors. The warm popcorn as stale as the air. The imitation slush puppies. The Time Crisis machines. The pissed-off staff. The £8 bag of Revels. The showings with half an hour of adverts. The back row fondlers and the aisle seat gigglers. The middle section shushers and the front row chancers.

They’re slowly going the same way as McDonald's and Coca-Cola, replaced by fancier, less sterile theatres where you can drink a beer in a screen and your seat won't be gummed up with Haribo, but they're a part of our history in all their Vegas hollowness, and are where many of us first got excited by film, sneaking out of Stuart Little and into American Beauty.

The multiplex carpet perfectly encapsulates their gaudiness, decaying 90s aesthetic and underlying nausea. Will Hall has been collecting some of the best over on Pinterest – here's a glut of them...

@christophhooton