BY SHEYMA BUALI

The World Monument Fund has headlined Wilton’s Music Hall as Britain’s oldest music hall.  It is also announced as “one of the 100 most endangered sites in the world”.  The building is comprised of a Victorian theater hall for performance events and a bar on the side.  The history of it is immense, going back well over 200 years.  For this, I had to go visit it.

Getting there, my friends and I were in awe of its raw standing.  The bar, now reinstated as the Mahogany Bar, has been licensed since the 1780’s, but was most likely serving way before then.  By the 1850’s John Wilton built the Victorian style theater right behind it at a time when performance entertainment wasn’t all that popular.  Being so close to St. Katherine’s Docks, the space had a service to the community surrounding it.  For one, it was the spot for dockyard men, bringing steel and iron into the country, to go for after work entertainment and drink.  

The name of the bar, the Mahogany, came for the fact that it had a unique build, made with the finest mahogany wood, only afforded by its relationship and proximity to the Docks.  Though the bar has by now sadly been stripped of all evidence of this, a piece of that original, 150-year-old mahogany still hangs as a living reminder above the door into the foyer of the entrance. 

The bar’s tradition of serving the community continued till the turn of the century, when it offered free meals to thousands of strikers a day during the first dockers’ strike of late 1800’s.  Subsequently, in the 1930’s, it became the meeting point for the anti-fascist movement.

But by the 1950’s it was sold and used as a warehouse, leading to its semi-derelict status of today.  Now, another 50 years later, the place is being run by a small staff that is sincerely concerned with the fate of the building.  Following in the footsteps of a small group of entertainers and locals who started to campaign against the building’s demolition 1960’s, they are working at keeping the place alive and active. 

In current years, the Hall has experienced somewhat of a revival with more plays being performed there pulling in big crowds.  The bar, still holding that warm, English  public house atmosphere is now functioning after a 50 year shutdown. 

There is no desire to restore the theater to what its ‘original’ state would have been.  That is in fact a threat that is being avoided.  The issues with that vary in that the history goes so far back that a restoration would have to choose a single era in its past to hold onto and recreate.  This would be an unfair and obtrusive move to a structure that has kept its aging walls and been allowed its natural course.  One may ask why it is important to try and keep the original build, plaster and structure, arguing that perhaps the time for a new incarnation is here; but with a city such as London, and in fact this goes with any architectural relics, the value of the space is in the age that it has endured.  There are many spaces we are surrounded by that have come and gone, changed with the times, or even faced the ill fate of being restored to a symbolic reformation of what it once was, only to create a façade of a single era in its history, but when a gem such as this still stands in it ongoing original-ness, it is something to protect in order to keep that value to it as it is, the culture of its history, alive and continuous. 

Now, the hope is that it continues to serve the purpose it was built for that it has triumphantly continued to do through all this time, that is: being a performance hall.  The Hall is a beautiful wonder to be in; watching a play there as they did in early Victorian times offers an affect that is its setting within its local historical culture.  But the building itself holds such a raw beauty that it is impossible not to be in awe of. 

Check the program, look deeper into its history, and figure out how you can be involved with the Hall at http://www.wiltons.org.uk/

Free film screenings take place once a month and the theater program is constantly renewing.  One can also take a guided tour and hear particular stories that will bring about more questions about its 200 year past and social importance.