Building
Walter Gibbons, an early moving pictures manager, built the Palladium in 1910 to compete with Edward Moss's London Hippodrome and Oswald Stoll's London Coliseum. The facade (originally that of Argyll House, which is why the pub opposite is called The Argyll Arms) dates back to the 19th century. Formerly it was a temporary wooden building called Corinthian Bazaar, which featured an aviary and aimed to attract customers from the recently closed Pantheon Bazaar (now Marks and Spencers) on Oxford Street. The theatre was rebuilt a year later by Fredrick Hengler, the son of a tightrope walker, as a circus venue that included an aquatic display in a flooded ring. Next it became the National Skating Palace - a skating rink with real ice. However the rink failed and the Palladium was redesigned by Frank Matcham, a famous theatrical architect who also designed the Coliseum, for a site that previously housed Hengler’s Circus. The building now carries Heritage Foundation commemorative plaques honouring Lew Grade and Frankie Vaughan.
The theatre retains many of its original features and was Grade II* listed by English Heritage in September 1960. The Palladium had its own telephone system so the occupants of boxes could call one another. It also had a revolving stage.
Read more about this topic: London Palladium
Famous quotes containing the word building:
“The artist must be an egotist because, like the spider, he draws all his building material from his own breast. But just the same the artist alone among men knows what true humility means. His reach forever exceeds his grasp. He can never be satisfied with his work. He knows when he has done well, but he knows he has never attained his dream. He knows he never can.”
—Rheta Childe Dorr (1866–1948)
“A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like dogma. Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence, like a dogma. People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world, like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“And no less firmly do I hold that we shall one day recognize in Freud’s life-work the cornerstone for the building of a new anthropology and therewith of a new structure, to which many stones are being brought up today, which shall be the future dwelling of a wiser and freer humanity.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)