Canterbury Music-Hall

Canterbury Music-Hall, London, in the Westminster Bridge Road, Lambeth. The first of the great music-halls, it was erected by Charles Morton in 1852 on the site of an old skittle-alley adjacent to his Canterbury Tavern, and paid for out of the profits made on drink during free entertainment formerly offered there. The Canterbury Hall, as it was originally called, proved so popular that in 1854 Morton was able to replace it by the larger New Canterbury Music-Hall, which had a large platform stage and accommodation for 1,500. By 1867, when Morton left, the earlier programmes of light music and ballad singing had been dropped and comedy predominated. In 1876 the building was reconstructed as a three-tier theatre, its bar being for many years the favourite rendezvous of music-hall performers. The Canterbury was visited regularly by the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), the Duke of Cambridge, and the Duke and Duchess of Teck. When the popularity of the ‘halls’ began to decline, drastic reductions in the price of seats brought audiences back for a while; but the heyday of the music-hall was over long before the Canterbury was destroyed by bombing in 1942.