Qualla: Charing Cross Music Hall

Charing Cross Music Hall: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It was called being "tried on the dog." If you were a young performer in late-Victorian London hoping for an engagement at one of the big halls, you went first to the funny little venue tucked under the arches of Charing Cross railway station. The manager sat at a central rostrum and announced each act, tapping a wooden hammer on the desk before him. The audience sat on benches arranged around a platform, more like a prize ring than a theatre. Privileged friends could sit on the platform with the manager, but the price of that honour was buying his drinks all evening. Baroness Orczy, who later wrote The Scarlet Pimpernel, described it in her autobiography as "a funny little one under the arches of Charing Cross Bridge where aspirants to fame were given a trial." Many a famous artiste, she added, started his or her career under the old arches.

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Charing Cross Music Hall: Built Into the Bones of a Railway

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 spac...

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Charing Cross Music Hall: Kipling Listening

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 abou...

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Charing Cross Music Hall: The Performers and the Audience

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Briti...

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Charing Cross Music Hall: The Slow Fade

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Wa...

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Charing Cross Music Hall: The Players' Theatre and Julie Andrews

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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