Amusement: Theatres and Music Halls
London’s West End is virtually synonymous with theatre – indeed, with its 40 venues, it is often referred to as ‘theatreland’. Some claim that this is the “finest concentration of theatres anywhere in the world,” and is certainly in no way inferior to New York’s Broadway. (1)
Londoners expressed a great passion for the stage regardless of their social class – theatre-going was just as popular with members of the working classes as it was with the prosperous middle classes. These places had more to offer than the play itself; they were meeting places for members of certain classes and offered a space for informal sociability. Especially during the Season, when the wealthy and fashionable congregated in the West End, enjoying a performance was almost secondary to high society who used the venue itself as stage to show off. With 57 licenced theatres in 1903, 30 of which were conveniently located in the heart of the West End, fashionable Londoners had plenty from which to choose. (2)
The theatre had been an established form of entertainment by the Victorian period and still continues to attract large numbers of visitors to the capital each year. The music hall, on the other hand, only emerged during the mid-decades of the nineteenth century, already declining in popularity by the early decades of the twentieth. The music hall was thus a relatively short-lived form of entertainment, yet one without fin-de-siècle London could not be imagined.
Above: the Garrik Theatre
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Right: The Shaftesbury Theatre
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Below: His Majesty's Theatre Haymarket
The music hall grew out of many different forms of entertainment, but the public house is probably the most important influence. Proprietors of the first licenced halls built separate establishments for musical performances alongside their pubs, where they offered their visitors the opportunity to experience a combination of an evening at the pub – with its comforts of eating, drinking, and smoking at tables – and an evening at the theatre – watching a performance on stage, in a relatively luxurious setting. Although these early halls primarily catered for a working-class audience, proprietors and managers were trying to increase their respectability by investing in lavish decorations and creating a programme of decent quality. Still, they frequently caused moral concerns for middle-class commentators, who branded music halls disreputable and vulgar, putting on senseless entertainment for audiences consisting of roughs and women of questionable morality. Nonetheless, music halls soon began to spread to the West End, where they managed to establish themselves quickly and became larger and even more ornate, drawing in vast middle-class audiences. Finally, by the turn of the century, they had developed into grand palaces of entertainment that offered varied amusements of a very high standard, making them popular with members of the higher echelons of society, too. While the quality of the performances and the respectability of audiences could vary strongly depending on the location of the hall, places such as the Alhambra Music Hall or the Empire Theatre of Varieties, both on Leicester Square, could hold several thousands of people and were famed for their tasteful programmes.
However, during that time, such establishments were starting to lose the typical characteristics of a music hall, by exchanging the traditional tables with rows of seats, for example. The stars the music halls had produced were getting old, and another form of popolar entertainment was on the rise: film. Initially, music halls incorporated short film shows in their programmes – the Empire Theatre, in fact, was the first venue in the United Kingdom to show commercial theatrical performances of a projected film by Auguste and Louis Lumière in 1896. This marked the beginning of the end of the music halls, most of which had to make way for purpose-built cinemas in the 1920s and ‘30s. (3)
Music halls developed from pub-extensions, offering light entertainment for a working-class audience, into glorious palaces occupying the most fashionable places in the West End. There were music halls for every kind of clientele in the capital, which is why they are frequently referred to as the first form of mass entertainment. They were a distinctly urban phenomenon, and a crucial part of London’s entertainment facilities.
Concluding with the words of H. Chance Newton:
To sum up, it may in common fairness be said that without its Palaces of Variety and its Music-Halls Living London would only be half alive. (4)
Right: The interior of the Canterbury Music Hall
Below: Oxford Street with the Oxford Music Hall on the left
Leicester Square at night - the Alhambra on the right, the Empire on the far left
The Empire Theatre of Varieties and its interior when it first opened in 1884
(1) This claim was made by Mike Kilburn his book London’s Theatres (London: New Holland, 2002).
(2) Jerry White, London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God (London: Vintage, 2007): 281.
(3) “Empire Theatre, Leicester Square,” Arthur Lloyd, 2018, http://www.arthurlloyd.co.uk/EmpireLeicesterSquare.htm.
(4) H. Chance Newton, "Music-Hall London," in Living London: Its Work and Its Play, Its Humour and Its Pathos, Its Sights and Its Scenes, vol 2, ed. George R. Sims (London: Cassell and Company): 228.
