The Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall (Chinese: 维多利亚剧院及音乐会堂) is a complex of two buildings and a clock tower joined together by a common corridor and is located in the civic district of Singapore.
On 6 February 1919, which marked the centenary of Singapore's founding, a statue of Stamford Raffles by T. Woolner was moved from the Padang to the front of the memorial hall. The statue was complimented with a new semicircular colonnade and a pool.
In the lead up to World War II, the memorial hall was used as a hospital for victims of bombing raids by the Japanese forces during the Battle of Singapore before their successful occupation of the colony. During the occupation, the buildings themselves escaped major physical damage, although the colonnade was destroyed, and Raffles's statue moved to the National Museum. At the end of the war, the statue was returned to its original site in 1946. In 1947 The Straits Settlements coat of arms that was hung on the tympanum of both wings of the building was replaced by the newly formed coat of arms of The Crown Colony of Singapore. It was later brought down in 1959 to make a plaster cast of the Coat of Arms of Singapore which was topped of with two flagpoles with the Flag of Singapore on it. The hall also served as the venue for Japanese war crime trials.
In 1954, the memorial hall underwent renovations by Swan & Maclaren, and on 21 November, it was the venue where the People's Action Party was founded. The town hall was also internally restructured to allow air-conditioning and soundproofing to be added. It was reopened as the Victoria Theatre.
In 1979, the memorial hall was renovated again to accommodate the Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO), upon which it was renamed as the Victoria Concert Hall. Additional works up to the 1980s added a gallery to the Concert Hall, adding seating capacity and enclosing the second storey balconies on the front and back facades with glass.
The Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall was gazetted as a national monument on 14 February 1992.
Read more about Victoria Theatre And Concert Hall: Construction of Town Hall, Construction of Clock Tower, Existing Facilities
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—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
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—Anonymous Father. As quoted in Women and Their Fathers, by Victoria Secunda, ch. 3 (1992)
“... the theatre demanded of its members stamina, good digestion, the ability to adjust, and a strong sense of humor. There was no discomfort an actor didn’t learn to endure. To survive, we had to be horses and we were.”
—Helen Hayes (1900–1993)
“Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)