QUEEN'S HALL

The 'Queen's Hall' was a classical music concert hall in Central London, England, opened in 1893, but is best known for being where the Promenade Concerts were founded by Robert Newman in 1895.
It was situated in Langham Place, and had a total of 17 entrances and exits on three streets (the other two being Riding House Street and Great Portland Street). It had seating for up to 3,000 within a floor area of 21,000 square feet (2,000 m²). It was considered to have a 'perfect acoustic' and was designed by Thomas Edward Knightley^[1] employing a floorplan developed by C. J. Phipps. Internal alterations, completed in 1919, reduced the capacity to 2,400.
The Queen's Hall first opened its doors on 25 November 1893 when Newman gave a children's party in the afternoon. In the evening some 2000 ladies and gentlemen attended a concert given by the Band of the Coldstream Guards, which included vocal music, piano and organ solos. At 11.00pm the seats in the arena were removed and the dancing began. The official opening of the hall took place on 2 December. On 10 August 1895 the first Promenade concert was given.
The Queen's Hall provided a much needed centrally located music venue for the capital. St James's Hall, just south of Oxford Circus, was already proving too small and it had serious safety problems. The Wigmore Hall which opened a decade later was a recital hall, not a concert hall. The Queen's Hall provided modern facilities, open frontage for carriages and parking room, a press room, public spaces and bars and a 500 seater hall (the Queen's Small Hall) adjoining the conservatory. The Proms, starting in 1895, gave it a strong identity.
On January 14, 1896, the first public film show was presented at the Queen's Hall to members and wives of the Royal Photographic Society, by the maker of the ''Kineopticon''^[2] and Fellow of the society, Birt Acres and his colleague, Arthur Melbourne-Cooper. This was an improved version of the early Kinetoscope^[3].
From 1930 to 1941, the BBC Symphony Orchestra regularly gave broadcast concerts in the hall. Arturo Toscanini, who guest conducted the orchestra during the 1930s, made a series of commercial recordings from 1937 to 1939 that were issued by His Master's Voice in the U.K. and RCA Victor in the U.S. Some of those recordings, as well as transcriptions of broadcast concerts, were later reissued on LP and CD by EMI.^[4]
The hall closed in 1941 after the auditorium was gutted by fire after a single incendiary bomb hit the building during a massive air raid in which the chamber of the House of Commons and many other buildings were also destroyed.
After the destruction of Queen's Hall, the BBC Symphony Orchestra moved its broadcast concerts and recording sessions to the Bedford School. Among the memorable recordings made at the school was Sir Adrian Boult's 1944 EMI sessions of Sir Edward Elgar's second symphony; this was later reissued on CD, along with other recordings by Boult and the BBC Symphony of Elgar's music from Queen's Hall during the 1930s.^[5] The BBC Symphony later performed in the Royal Festival Hall, which opened in 1951 during the Festival of Britain.
In 1954-55, a report was commissioned, chaired by Lord Robbins, into the feasibility of a replacement, the 'New Queen's Hall', but which concluded: "On musical grounds it is desirable to replace the destroyed Queen's Hall by another large hall of good acoustic qualities, but it is doubtful if there is a potential demand which would enable it to run without subtracting from the audiences of subsidised halls already in existence."
Its former site is now the St George's Hotel.

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Notes

1. Thomas Edward Knightley (1824 – 1905). was District Surveyor for Hammersmith for over 40 years and his practice was in Cannon Street, EC1. Knightley had previously designed the Birkbeck Bank premises (now demolished)
2. Birt Acres was born 23 July 1854 in Richmond, Virginia to British parents. He developed and patented a number of developments in early cinema, including the ''Birtac'', the first British 35 mm moving picture camera, and the first daylight loading home film camera and projector system.
3. Birt Acres biography accessed 21 Jun 2007
4. Seraphim Records, EMI reissues
5. EMI reissue

External links

★ Queen's Hall

★ New Queen's Hall Orchestra Official Website