When the South Eastern Railway demolished Hungerford Market in 1862 to build Charing Cross station, they took down Hungerford Hall in the process. The Gatti family - Italian immigrants who had already established themselves in London catering and entertainment - acquired the space underneath the new station's brick-arched viaduct in 1866. Two of the great arches formed a substantial two-level space; the brothers Giovanni and Carlo Gatti converted them into a music hall. It opened in 1867 as The Arches, was renamed the Hungerford Music Hall in 1883, and from 1887 was known variously as the Charing Cross Music Hall, Gatti's under the Arches, or Gatti's Charing Cross Music Hall - depending on who you asked and which year you were asking. By 1895 it boasted an attached grand cafe and billiard saloon. The site itself was small. Kipling, writing in a story called My Great and Only in 1890, recorded that the hall held "four hundred when it's all full, sir." Above the audience's heads, every few minutes, the floorboards trembled as another train rolled in or out of Charing Cross.

Rudyard Kipling went to Gatti's repeatedly in the late 1880s and early 1890s, after returning from India. He listened to the songs - to the rhythms of the soldiers, the swagger and the laments and the bawdy choruses - and absorbed the cadences of working-class London singing about empire. His Barrack-Room Ballads, published in 1892, carry the unmistakable mark of those evenings under the arches: the soldier's vernacular, the music-hall beat, the punctuated lines that work better declaimed than read. A weekly periodical for performers, The Music Hall and Theatre, reviewed a typical evening on 23 November 1889. It described Leo Dryden in Twixt Love and Duty: "has his hands full, to say nothing of his voice, which is equally full." It noted Charles Ross, "of Gaiety fame, so well known as the Dainty Champion," applauded for She's a real good mother. And it captured James Fawn impersonating a soldier impersonating a policeman, until "James must draw the line somewhere, so he draws it at Gatti's."

Not every artist arrived on trial. Established performers booked here too. Flyers from 1895 show the Whitsuntide bill including Rose Hamilton, Marie Loftus (mother of the early film actress Cecilia Loftus), and the comedian Harry Randall, who would go on to a long career in British music halls and pantomime. The hall's character came partly from its scale - intimate enough that audience and performer could see each other clearly - and partly from its peculiar shape. There was no proscenium arch, no curtain, no formal stage. Just the central platform and the benches around it. The manager kept order with his wooden hammer. By Orczy's description, the format made the place feel democratic and slightly unruly - which was, perhaps, why aspiring performers learned faster here than at the grander venues. If you could hold this room, with the trains rumbling overhead and the hecklers within arm's reach, you could probably hold any room.

Music hall as a form began declining in the early 20th century. Cinema arrived and consumed the same working- and middle-class audience. The hall under the arches converted: it became the Arena Cinema from 1910 to 1923, then the Forum Cinema from 1928 to 1939. The Second World War interrupted everything. The space was repurposed as a fire station and a store for the Army Corps of Cinematography. By 1945 the building was knocked about, dusty, and effectively dormant - one of countless small London venues that had finished their natural life and were waiting to be cleared away or repurposed.

Then in the late 1940s the actor and impresario Leonard Sachs acquired the space from the War Office for the Players' Theatre. The place was a shell. There were no fittings, no curtains, none of the paraphernalia a theatre normally needs. Sachs opened it within three weeks anyway, on a programme of Victorian-style music hall - a self-conscious revival of the very form that had originally filled these arches. The regulars who passed through were a roll call of post-war British comic acting: Hattie Jacques, Bill Owen, Ian Carmichael, Clive Dunn, Ian Wallace, John Hewer. The newcomers included Daphne Anderson, Patsy Rowlands, Maggie Smith, Marian Studholme, Marion Grimaldi, and Margaret Burton. In 1953 Sandy Wilson wrote a one-act musical for the theatre called The Boy Friend. Expanded to a full evening, it transferred to Wyndham's Theatre, and then crossed the Atlantic to open on Broadway with an 18-year-old British newcomer named Julie Andrews in the lead. The Players' Theatre survived until 2002, was briefly revived as the New Players' Theatre, and in 2005 the lease passed to The Pure Group, owners of the adjacent nightclub Heaven. The refurbished 275-seat space still hosts performances and conferences, more than 150 years after the Gatti brothers first looked at two empty railway arches and saw a venue.