Queen's Hall

The Queen’s Hall stood in Langham Place, a broad street in the City of Westminster. Designed by Thomas Knightley, it opened in 1893 and seated about 2,500 listeners. The building occupied a corner site bounded by Langham Place, Riding House Street and Great Portland Street. Before the hall was built, the land had housed a coachmaker’s stables and later a bazaar. The name was chosen only weeks before opening, rejecting the alternative ‘Victoria Concert Hall’ to avoid confusion with the Old Vic. Critics welcomed the new venue as a modern replacement for the cramped and stuffy St James’s Hall. The hall became London’s leading concert venue and the home of the promenade concerts founded by Robert Newman and Henry Wood in 1895. Its plain grey walls and cramped seats were outweighed by remarkable acoustics praised by Bernard Shaw. The BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra made the hall their London base in the 1930s, drawing musicians such as Arturo Toscanini and Willem Mengelberg. The arena contained a shallow fountain with goldfish and waterlilies, where, according to Sir Thomas Beecham, young women often fell in nightly. A smaller hall upstairs seated 500 for recitals and chamber music. Visitors entered through an open carriage frontage into public spaces and bars. The auditorium walls were lined with resonant wood fixed on battens, giving the room the acoustic qualities of a violin. Portraits of leading composers flanked the platform, and the ceiling bore a large painting of the Paris Opéra. The royal box was removed after Prince Alfred declined to use it, and the royal party sat in armchairs in the front stalls instead. The hall’s final concert took place on 9 May 1941, two nights before incendiary bombs destroyed the building during the Blitz.