London theatres and cinemas
Today, London theatre is synonymous with the West End, Shaftsbury Avenue and Drury Lane.
But back in the 1800s, the East End had a theatre to more than rival the West End – and one with its own distinct audience.
Despite being ignored by the middle classes and the critics, east London in the 1850s actually had the majority of the capital’s theatres – 14 east of the city compared to 11 in the West End.
Among the biggest, with capacities ranging from 2,000 to 4,000, were Hoxton High Street’s Britannia, the Grecian in City Road, the Effingham at 236 Whitechapel Road and the Garrick at 70 Leman Street.
But that was only the tip of the iceberg. There were seven music halls with a capacity totalling 7,000, as well as penny gaffs and saloon theatres like the Albion in Whitechapel.
And if you expected East End punters to be more rowdy than the toffs up West, you’d be rather wrong.
The famous actor Ben Webster gave evidence before a Commons Select Committee of 1866, looking into the state of London theatre, and said: “East End audiences are more attentive than the West and are just as appreciative of good acting.”
Good audience
And the actors themselves would have appreciated Webster’s observation, that unlike West End audiences, “East Enders don’t talk during the performance!”
A quarter century later, in 1892, another Select Committee heard the Examiner of Plays, Edward Pigott, tell that East End audiences were also much more moral… at least while they were in the theatre.
“The risky, immoral and indecent plays are intended for West End audiences – certainly not for the East End,” said Pigott.
“The further east you get the more moral your audience is.
“You may get a gallery full of roughs, in which every other boy is a pickpocket, and yet their collective sympathy is in favour of self-sacrifice. They have a horror of vice and a love of virtue.
“A boy might pick your pocket as you left the theatre, but have his reserve of fine sentiment in his heart!”
But if there were differences between east and west audiences, there were also distinct clientele at the various East End theatres themselves.
The Pavilion, at 193 Whitechapel Road, had a strongly Jewish audience – no surprise given the area – while the Effingham, down the road, had a mixture of local Jews and sailors.
In 1850, Charles Dickens described the audience at the Brittania as: “Prowlers and idlers… mechanics, dock labourers, costermongers, petty tradesmen, small clerks, milliners, stay makers, shoe binders and shop workers.”
Surprisingly, the weekends were not the top nights for theatre-going.
The Sketch, a theatrical publication of the day, recorded in its edition of June 24, 1896: “The best nights are Mondays, the working class are paid too late on Saturdays to enable them to spend their few coppers.”
“Slumming it”
Of course, it wasn’t entirely true that west stayed west. Author Clive Barker writes of toffs coming down to the Britannia to “slum it” in Hoxton. And The Sketch report writes that “the natives were not pleased to see silk-hatted invaders.”
But the theatres gradually became music halls and they, in their turn, were killed off by the cinema – though many of the old theatres were themselves converted into the first East End picture palaces.
Now, of course, Tower Hamlets is bare of both and we can only dream of the days when the East End was London’s Theatreland.