Wilton's Music Hall

Wilton's Music Hall is the oldest surviving grand music hall in the world. Tucked away down Graces Alley, this building began its life in the sixteen nineties as a series of townhouses and a pub known as the Mahogany Bar. In eighteen fifty-nine, a publican named John Wilton constructed his magnificent new music hall in the space behind these existing structures, intending to bring West End glamour and entertainment to the working-class residents of the East End. The theater remains a rare architectural treasure, characterized by its U-shaped gallery supported by delicate barley-sugar cast iron pillars that once overlooked a room filled with supper tables and rowdy, soot-stained audiences.