The location was no accident. Hull Paragon Station had opened in 1848, and by the mid-1850s the city was building new streets to connect the railway terminus with the older neighbourhoods around Osborne Street and Porter Street. The new street that faced the station entrance was officially named Midland Street in 1859. By the early 1870s it was prime entertainment territory: travellers coming off the trains, dockworkers from the Humber wharves, all looking for a drink and a show. Fussey's Albert Hall was a speculative venture into a market other Victorian entrepreneurs were also chasing, and the surviving evidence suggests it never quite caught fire. Local historian Edmund Wrigglesworth, writing his 1890 Guide to Hull, noted only that it was 'occasionally used as a place of entertainment.' Mostly the Albert Hall functioned as a public house with the occasional stage night.

Evidence of the Albert Hall's theatrical life is fragmentary but precious. A promotional leaflet survives from October 1886, advertising itself as the 'Royal Albert Hall' (an ambitious bit of marketing borrowed from the Kensington venue that had opened fifteen years earlier) and announcing a performance of 'The Colleen Bawn' by the Hull Thespian Society. Dion Boucicault's Irish melodrama was hugely popular in late-Victorian Britain, the story of a young Irish gentleman caught between love and rank ending in shipwreck and redemption. For one October evening the dressing rooms Fussey had tacked onto the building eight years earlier filled with amateur actors painting their faces, and the small hall above the kitchen smelt of beer and greasepaint. Then the next morning it was an inn again, serving porter to the day's first customers.

Hull was the most bombed city per capita in the United Kingdom during the Blitz. Whole neighbourhoods of Victorian buildings disappeared in 1941 alone. The Albert Hall survived, and after the war the founding of preservation bodies like the Victorian Society in 1958 brought new attention to what little remained. The building received a full pub licence in March 1953, with living accommodation built out at the rear. But the trade was slipping. The Albert Hall closed as a pub in 1965 when its licence transferred to the Schooner, a modern establishment on Anlaby Park Road North. From the late 1960s the old hall became a bingo venue called the Fair and Square Club. Then, in the 1980s, it simply closed and was forgotten. By 2013 the brickwork was so dangerous that a public safety fence was erected. In June 2015 the frontage was demolished as an emergency. By August 2016 the bulldozers had taken the rest.

Tawazun London Limited owns the site today, where the Albert Hall once stood between an empty lot and the demolished New York Hotel. Planning permissions came and went, including a 2005 proposal for a 116-bedroom hotel that quietly expired in 2010. The bricks have gone to landfill or to other Victorian buildings being patched up elsewhere in the city. What survives is paper: William Fussey's original 1873 warehouse plans in the Hull History Centre archives, the 1874 amendments adding the dressing rooms, the 1886 leaflet for The Colleen Bawn, the 1953 pub licence application. These documents are the only physical trace of a music hall that probably never made much money for its founder, where amateur Hull thespians once performed Irish melodrama, and which spent its last half-century watching the railway trade dwindle away outside its locked doors.