The Populist Palatial

This chapter explores the West End music hall, which drew on a heterogeneous audience, drawing all classes in for a smart night out. The argument is that we can observe a cultural style that is called here the ‘populist palatial’, which the West End helped propagate. This meant flattering audiences through spectacular buildings and high profile performers. The chapter looks in particular at the London Pavilion music hall on Piccadilly Circus and at two music hall stars: Jenny Hill and the Great MacDermott. Music hall gave women a voice allowing them to be comedians and the source of knowing humour. MacDermott was associated with music hall jingoism and patriotism. West End music hall expressed something of the liberating set of emotions that urban mass culture released.

Theatreland, 1880–1914

This chapter examines the period from 1880–1914 when the West End was established as theatreland. This was characterized by a huge wave of theatre building with new stages servicing the masses who were flooding into the district. Theatre was dominated by the titanic figures of Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Shows would also tour, benefiting from the information that they had first been seen in the West End, thus enhancing the glamorous reputation of the district. The chapter argues that the West End stage was often conservative and reflected the values of Lord Salisbury’s Britain. It considers the West End theatre business in its different forms (including the world of the West End audience and the theatre critic) and builds to a case study of the rebuilt Her Majesty’s Theatre which exemplified many of the trends in the late-Victorian theatre world.

Capital of Pleasure

This chapter decodes some of the pleasures of the West End and analyses its different forms of cultural work. To do this, it explores its appeal to the senses: sight, touch, smell, taste, orality. Pleasure districts trade on forms of hyper-stimulation. This helps locate the West End in terms of visual culture. The chapter argues that the West End was the product of artificial light, embodied in the deployment of gas-light and sheet glass. The chapter then explores the West End in terms of the production of images of glamour and sexuality: further examples of the sensory appeal of the district. This is then contrasted with the way prostitutes became a notorious feature of the West End evident both on the streets and in the night houses (nightclubs) around the Haymarket.

The Beau Monde

Chapter 3 explores the world of elite leisure in both its high and low forms to uncover how the aristocracy continued to shape the West End in the first half of the nineteenth century. This chapter is devoted to nightlife and is intended to show that one purpose of pleasure districts was to construct the idea of the night-time economy. The chapter explores the world of gentlemens’ clubs and other locations of masculine pleasure before moving into an examination of opera, ballet, and gambling; both sources of aristocratic networks. The second half of the chapter then looks at the world of low life in the Covent Garden and Maiden Lane areas; territory of the ‘flash’ and the bohemians. Affluent gentlemen explored what they saw as the ‘underworld’. Here was a world of disreputable bars and spaces for popular song. There is a detailed analysis of venues such as the Cider Cellars which shaped the development of popular music and culture with its bawdy ballads.

The Other West End

This chapter provides a conclusion to the book. It shows that by 1900 the West End functioned as the heart of empire. This was evident in the Mafeking celebrations but also in the way West End shows helped explain the empire to the British. The conservatism of West End culture provided a backdrop for popular imperialism. Whilst the book has emphasized the West End as the source of a conservative consensus, it ends by drawing on the experience of working-class people to show how its opulence could be the source of resentment and conflict. The chapter discusses the Blood Sunday riots which took place in the pleasure district and ends with the Suffragettes window smashing campaign where women attacked an area that was built to attract them. On the eve of the Great War, the West End served as a magnet for protest and pleasure.

Eating Out

The restaurant in its modern form was an important addition to the nineteenth-century urban landscape. It epitomized the new forms of metropolitan culture. The restaurant is explored here through the way in which it developed forms of commercial hospitality, which were in turn, integral to the discourses of the West End. Pleasure districts function partly through a discourse of hospitality which makes them inviting. Eating out was never just about the consumption of food; it was about the facilitation of forms of social interaction. The chapter looks at elite restaurants such as Romano’s on the Strand, which were crucial to the nightlife of the rich. It then looks at the way the West End developed food for the masses by delving into two business empires. First, it studies the world of Lyons catering, which established a hugely successful franchise of tea shops, starting in the West End. It then looks at the world of the Gattis, who owned cafeterias, music halls, and theatres. The Gatti’s restaurant on the Strand was a major West End venue which attracted middle-class diners in an opulent setting but with affordable prices.

Capital of Culture

This chapter examines the West End as a place for the formation of cultural and intellectual capital. This dimension to the West End was associated with the construction of high art and culture. The chapter looks at painting, music, and the literary and journalistic worlds. Each in their different way was a flourishing creative industry, demonstrating how the West End could employ art and intellectual work to propel the economy. The art world developed an extensive network of galleries particularly around Bond Street. The concert world was boosted by the creation of the St James’s Hall which made classical music more widely available while the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden increasingly displaced Her Majesty’s Theatre as the centre of the operatic world. The emergence of Gilbert and Sullivan showed how the district could be the site of new musical forms. The Strand area in turn became a major site for the construction of networks among the literary intelligentsia. The overlays, contrasts, and juxtapositions between art, music, and journalism was what gave the West End its character.

Curiosity

‘Curiosity’ explores the varied world of exhibitions in the West End. The district became home to a variety of popular exhibitions that stood side-by-side with sites of ‘official’ art and culture such as the new National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. The West End visitor could enjoy spectacular panoramas, which dazzled the eye, or poses plastiques where models made classical paintings come to life. There were also freak shows and events where non-white peoples were placed on exhibition. These included the Hottentot Venus and the Aztec Lilliputians. Exhibition-mania was particularly centred on Leicester Square but could also be found on Piccadilly, site of the Egyptian Hall, that offered curiosities, art works, popular lectures, dioramas, and automata. Pleasure districts abounded with what were seen as distorted bodies. This gave them the quality of what Michel Foucault terms ‘heterotopias’ which draw upon, but disturb, the culture at large.

Drury Lane, 1800

This chapter sets the scene for the transformation of the West End in the nineteenth century. It commences with the attempted assassination of George III at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. This event is employed to look more closely at the theatre in 1800 and then broadens out to look at the wider world of the West End at the time. It argues that the modern notion of the West End as a distinct pleasure district barely existed at the start of the nineteenth century (only taking in the areas of the Strand and Covent Garden). The reader then discovers how this embryonic pleasure district emerged during the period from 1660 to 1800. The construction of Mayfair and St James’s in the eighteenth century was pivotal because it reveals how the West End existed to service the aristocracy, creating elite aristocratic shopping areas such as Bond Street. The peculiar arrangements for the provision of theatre are explained: Drury Lane and Covent Garden enjoyed royal patents which in theory prevented anyone else from performing the spoken word on stage. It also shows how this exclusive world was beginning to change at the end of the eighteenth century as more vulgar entertainments arose on the Strand and in Leicester Square.

Gaiety Nights

This chapter identifies the emergence of ‘light entertainment’ in the West End. Linked to music hall, this was a form of performance that was aspirational and less vulgar. It led to the construction of large variety houses such as the London Coliseum. The chapter moves from musical comedy to variety, vaudeville, and the exotic ballets at the Alhambra. These were entertainments that offered sophistication but rarely pretended to be high culture. The chapter examines theatres such as the Alhambra and the Empire variety houses who were attacked because of the sexual nature of their ballets as well as their toleration of prostitutes. The figure who dominates the chapter is the impresario George Edwardes who turned the Gaiety Girl into an icon of the age. Light entertainment was conservative but had its utopian dimensions.