Kingsway Hall - Overview

Overview

Kingsway Hall took its name from the street on to which its main entrance opened. The address was West London Mission, 75 Kingsway, London WC2.

In 1899, the London Council was given the power to proceed with major slum clearance in the area between Holborn and the Strand. The Methodist Church, which had operated the West London Mission from 1887, had land with a chapel on it, and decided to construct a new building. The Wesleyan Chapel at 67 Great Queen Street was renamed as Kingsway Hall in April 1907, but that building was also condemned by the London Council as part of the clearance.

A new seven-story building called Wesley House was home to the West London Mission until 1972 when it merged with the Hinde Street Methodist Chapel (a merger not completed until 1982). Wesley House included a youth club, religious meeting rooms, a luncheon club, mission offices, and accommodation for resident staff. Adjacent to Wesley House and with a frontage on to Kingsway the Church also speculated by building the International Buildings which was let to many tenants and was a source of much needed revenue to run the mission. The mission was inaugurated at Wesley House on December 6, 1911 but Kingsway Hall within Wesley House required another year of construction. Although Kingsway Hall itself has been demolished, Wesley House remains today, no longer a mission, as do the International Buildings.

Foundation stones for Kingsway Hall were laid April 24, 1912 and the hall was completed with a ceremony on December 6, 1912. The hall included a raked floor with over 2,000 seats.

The organ, built in 1912 by J. J. Binns of Leeds, was inaugurated April 4, 1913. A fourth manual was added in 1924 by Messrs. Hill & Son and Norman & Beard, along with chimes and timpani. Gatty Sellars, the hall’s organist at the time, gave the inaugural performance on the new organ. The organ was rebuilt in 1932 and remained in use until the closure of the hall. The Nigerian composer Fela Sowande was the organist of the hall from 1945.

Donald Soper (the well-known pacifist, later to become Baron Soper), became the Methodist minister of Kingsway Hall in 1936. When German air raids on London started in 1940, Soper opened a "rest and feeding centre" in Kingsway Hall's basement (not far from Holborn underground station). Here the victims of the bombing could find refuge, and Soper and his family also lived there for a time. Until the end of 1944, Kingsway Hall ran a breakfast canteen. In one 6-month period alone, 26,232 breakfasts were served (and 34,178 cups of tea). At the request of the Ministry of Food, from 1942 Soper also organised the distribution of surplus vegetables from Covent Garden Market to the needy.

After the war, Kingsway Hall became an active venue for concerts and recording sessions, and was regarded as one of the best recording locations in the world. Its use for concerts and recordings continued until 1983 when it was acquired by the GLC and closed.

At the end of March 1983 the Greater London Council purchased Wesley House and Kingsway Hall for the women’s committee. Kingsway Hall was rapidly deteriorating, and an archaeological survey in August 1996 found that nothing significant about it was still present. Despite pleas from some musicians and record magazines, Kingsway was demolished in 1998 to make way for a hotel of the same name, which opened in 2000. The hotel’s reception desk is on the approximate location where orchestra members once recorded.