Kingsway Hall - Kingsway Hall, 1912-2012: A Centenary Tribute.

Kingsway Hall, 1912-2012: A Centenary Tribute.

At 3.30 in the afternoon of Friday, December 6th 1912 the Lord Mayor of London, Colonel Sir David Burnett, presided over the opening ceremony of a new Methodist Church Hall. Although this was an event that took place in Central London, the opening was reported in the national press including the Manchester Guardian, the Times, Express, Morning Post and Daily News and Leader. The Daily Graphic of December 5th, as well as several provincial newspapers, published photographs of the new Hall. It would be hard today to find a similar event reported so widely and presided over by such a celebrated person. Can one imagine Boris Johnson opening a Church Hall? That Church Hall was of course Kingsway Hall, well known to record collectors world wide for the qualities of its acoustic, and it was built to replace a previous “Kingsway Hall” based in a chapel round the corner at 67 Great Queen Street. A chapel had existed at the site since at least 1709.

However, regular recording did not begin in the Hall until January 1926, a year of economic depression and the General Strike, when HMV signed an exclusive contract with the Church authorities. That 1 year agreement, the first of many, allowed for 130 sessions for a fee of £1,000. At this time HMV also had exclusive recording access to the Queen’s and Albert Halls. The reason for this initiative was of course the coming to maturity of electrical recording technology that allowed recordings to be made in the natural acoustics of the concert hall, free of the constraints of acoustic recording and its intrusive sound gathering horns. At first, the new technology allowed the disc recording machines to be located in other buildings in London the microphones being connected to them using Post Office telephone lines. Soon however disc cutting machines were installed in the Hall itself using rooms beneath the stage. In the years between 1912 and 1926, including those of the Great War, the Hall was also used for concerts conducted by the likes of Beecham and Boult with the young John Barbirolli among the cellists, its fine acoustic having been discovered early in its life. The Hall’s active life spanned the age of the acoustic cylinder to the coming of the Compact Disc. It remained a venue for public meetings and exhibitions for example a model railway engineering exhibition in 1928.

The Hall itself was only part of the complex of buildings that the Church had built to re-house its evangelical West London Mission which was launched in October 1887; its partner was Wesley Hall where the philanthropic work of the Mission was carried out. Whilst the element of the Mission that was Kingsway Hall was demolished in the late 1990s to make way for the present Kingsway Hall Hotel in Great Queen Street, Wesley Hall still stands but is now used mainly for office accommodation with an entrance in a side street. The Main entrance to Kingsway Hall in Kingsway itself is now a sandwich bar.

During the 1930s the Great Western Railway built a series of steam locomotives in its Hall class. Number 5933 was built in June 1933 and was called Kingsway Hall. Its first home was Bristol, before being moved to Reading, Southall and finally Oxford from where it was withdrawn from service in 1965 and scrapped at Llanelli. The fate of the engine was somehow prescient of its namesake.

Whilst the opening of Abbey Road studios in November 1931 reduced the need for Kingsway as a regular venue, HMV, now a part of the newly formed EMI, retained it under exclusive contract but available to all other EMI partner labels including Columbia. EMI were to retain this guarded access to a prized acoustic until the Hall was acquired by the Greater London Council in 1983 after which all recording activity ceased, the final contract expiring on December 31st that year. Exclusivity was maintained throughout the whole time between 1926 and 1983 and shared between EMI, and all its affiliated labels, and Decca, and its affiliates, who joined the agreement in 1944. Whilst both EMI and Decca used the Hall for sessions sponsored by other labels such as Lyrita the recording teams were always those of EMI or Decca. However, occasionally, when they were not using the Hall themselves, Decca and EMI agreed to allow access to small labels using their own equipment and technicians, even loaning microphones on occasion. Such was the rare case with a label, Bartok Records established by Peter Bartok, the composer’s son, who made a number of recordings of his father’s works in 1950 and again in 1953. The New Symphony Orchestra was used, a pick up band organised by Jack Simmons, and for some items it was conducted by Walter Susskind. These rare recordings are available on CD .

Ironically, the very last recordings made at Kingsway were by Deutsche Grammophon, a partner of Philips and Decca in Phonogram since 1979, of Manon Lescaut, Sinopoli conducting the Philharmonia, recorded between December 28th 1983 and January 5th 1984. Of all the orchestras to have recorded at Kingsway the Philharmonia/New Philharmonia spent more days there than any other. Decca’s last recording was Beethoven’s String Quartet Op130 and Grosse Fuge Op133 with the Fitzwilliam Quartet on December 10-12th 1983. EMI’s last recording appears to have been Tennstedt’s Mahler 6 with the LPO in May 1983.

Whilst the vast majority of recordings at Kingsway were of London or British orchestras very rare visitors to Kingsway for recording included the Vienna Philharmonic. The VPO appeared once only on October 4th 1949 for a recording of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder with Walter and Ferrier for Columbia. This recording was made after a performance in London and after some contractual wrangling between Decca on the one hand and EMI/HMV and EMI/Columbia on the other. It is available on Naxos Historical 8.110 876 as well as REGIS RRC1153 and EMI 678 722 2. In the aftermath of WW2 Decca needed artists and so invited a number of continental orchestras to record in London, usually while they were on tour. Among these were the Turin Symphony Orchestra under Frede and Rossi, the Paris Conservatoire under Charles Munch and the Hamburg Radio Symphony Orchestra under Schmidt-Isserstedt. Later the Israel Philharmonic under Mehta also recorded whilst passing through London on tour in both 1968 and 1975 . James Galway recorded with the Zagreb Soloists for RCA in 1975. Infrequent visiting conductors were Krauss, Celibidache, Kleiber Snr, Furtwangler, Knapperstsbusch, Weingartner, Szell, Dorati, Leinsdorf, Bohm, etc.

Although Kingsway Hall is no more its legacy of many great recordings made over 57 years covers every genre of classical music from organ music, string quartets, solo piano, opera and choral works and film scores to full scale orchestral symphonies. These recordings can be explored by browsing the several discographies complied by Philip Stuart for a number of London Orchestras and by Stephen Pettit for the Philharmonia . It even included Christmas carol recordings by the oddly named Butlin Choral Society. It was also very rarely a location for recorded jazz concerts and even Mantovani. Its acoustic added something unique to all these genres.

Its demise was brought about by a combination of events but also by factors which related to its location and the fate of the recording industry. Rumbles from the Piccadilly line plagued its whole life as did extraneous noise from traffic and aircraft, neighbouring buildings and from the inhabitants of the Wesley Hall Mission next door. There were always complaints about the maintenance of the building, especially when it was owned by the Church whose funds were much diminished after WW2. Indeed the roof collapsed in early September 1969 and put the Hall out of action whilst repairs were made and imminent sessions for the ASMF Vivaldi Four Seasons were hastily moved to St John’s Smith Square. The Church sold the whole Mission building to British Land in 1972 but this did not improve matters. After a number of attempts at justifying acquiring it neither Decca nor EMI could envisage the building being a major recording centre and so in 1983 it fell into the hands of the GLC bringing its recording career to an end.

In March 1986 the GLC was abolished and the Hall put up for sale once again. In October 1987 a centenary exhibition was held at the Mission’s then home at Hinde Street, near Wigmore Hall and a history published, authored by the late Professor Philip Bagwell. Many of the exhibits and artifacts are now kept at the London Metropolitan Archives in London. By this time Kingsway Hall had been out of regular use for some time and was in a poor state of repair. It would seem that there were no takers and so it was gutted and remained derelict until 1996 when planning permission for its demolition and replacement by a hotel was requested. The Gramophone magazine and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe were among the very few to object and archeological excavations were conducted by the Museum of London following which no widespread opposition was raised to the granting of the demolition order, English Heritage being unable to justify preservation. Kingsway Hall was demolished in 1998 and the hotel opened in 2000. Fate seemed to dog the Mission’s home; it’s previous two meeting Halls, St James’ in Piccadilly and Exeter Hall in the Strand, had also been demolished to make way for hotels.

If you were to stand at the hotel reception desk today and be able to transport back to December 6th 1972, 60 years to the day after the Hall was opened, you would find yourself among the LSO first violins recording Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor with Joan Sutherland. Take your iPod along there sometime, close your eyes and try to imagine it!

PS: Despite there being many to choose from there are no photographs appended to this article. The reason is to do with copyight.