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John Wilton had had some previous concert room experience, having chaired
the meetings at Dr Johnson's Tavern in Fleet Street. In 1853 he rebuilt
the old saloon as a concert room, 40 to 47ft long by 25 ft wide. This
room had a balcony supported on iron columns on three sides and a stage
with a light canvas and wood proscenium. It was a more than averagely
well appointed performance space for artistes and audience, not a mere
room for free-and-easies. Dressing rooms were provided under the stage
for singers who, Wilton said, would be ‘singing in character'.
The new room's location on a totally enclosed site with a 40ft long,
narrow entrance corridor passing through the pub, made it, in the eyes
of an inspecting official a hideously dangerous place, but there were,
at the time, no regulations concerning safety from fire and no legal grounds
for refusing to certify the building as fit to receive the public. An
of€cial noted that 'though called a concert room, (this) is to all intents
and purposes a theatre'. Similar remarks made around this time by inspecting
of€cers in relation to other pub additions, mark the emergence of a new
building type – the music hall.
Shortly after opening, an additional link was built, a corrugated iron
covered, woodlined bridge linking the balcony with a first floor 'supplementary
refreshment room' in the pub. Its main purpose was to facilitate drink
sales. It had the undoubted merit of being an additional means of escape
but its construction, ironically, made it a fire risk in itself. This,
John Wilton's first hall, whose axis lay across that of the present hall,
was run up by Thomas Ennor, a builder. No professional designer seems
to have been involved, but in 1855 an architect, S.C. Aubrey of Dalston,
was brought in to carry out improvements, providing stone staircases to
the balcony and making it deeper at the south end.
A Metropolitan Buildings Office record of a conference in February 1853
refers to the activities of an ‘architect from Bath' who was building
a concert room (unidentified) in Whitechapel. If this was the Maggs of
Bath, credited with having designed Wilton's great hall in 1859, it is
at least possible that he was also responsible for this building, which
was under construction in March 1853. By this time, Wilton was also the
owner of at least one, probably two adjoining houses. An enlarged entrance
and stone staircase were formed within No.2 Graces Alley, which had probably
been acquired by Eltham some years earlier.
It is not clear whether any parts of these works survive today but what
is known of the way in which bits of buildings were repeatedly recycled
in theatres and music halls (in order to reduce loss of income on closure,
as much as to save money on construction) makes it more likely than not
that the present state of the entrance derives in part from the 1855 improvements.
Wilton's first Mahogany Bar Concert Room was calling itself Wilton's
Music Hall in its advertisements from at least 1854 and the foundation
stone laid by Mrs Ellen Wilton in 1858 makes it clear that this was to
be the name of the magnificent new hall. It was nearly 75ft long and 40ft
wide, flat floored, with a carton pierre bombe-fronted balcony on three
sides, supported on cast iron columns of curious helical spiral form.
The original stage was set in an apse, lined with Gothic-framed mirrors.
At the opposite end was a shallower apsidal recess which probably backed
a refreshment counter. There was a servery link between the pub and the
hall near the stage end.
The gas lighting included, in the centre of the ceiling, a 'huge sunlight'
or sunbumer by Defries providing both light and forced air extract. The
decorative plaster work was by White and Parlby and the decorations, in
'subdued white' and gold leaf, by Homan or Holman. There is no architectural
warning of the presence of this room. The first patrons who walked through
the unremarkable entrance from the Alley in March 1859 and crossed the
little stone-paved hallway alongside the main bar room, either walking
up the plain stone stairs facing, or manoeuvring themselves through the
doorway in the passageway beneath, must have been astonished at their
first sight of the great hall.
In such a place and at such a time it would certainly have been a breathtaking
experience. The suddenly revealed view is, in fact, as effective today
as it was when the hall was new.
Copyright John Earl and Wilton's Music Hall.
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Mr John Wilton
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