At The Hippodrome

 

Contributing Photographer Sarah Ainslie & I enjoyed an exciting day out recently at the magnificent Hippodrome in Cranbourn St on the corner of Leicester Sq and Charing Cross Rd – the veritable corner stone of the West End – which this year celebrates its 125th anniversary.

We were privileged to join Simon Thomas, the casino supremo, as he commenced his daily ritual of ‘walking the floor,’ greeting his staff of more than 950 – each of whom he knows by name – checking that his house was all in order and no lightbulbs needed replacing. Yet even before we arrived we were in awe of the history of this distinguished venue that has survived and upheld its reputation in the entertainment world for over a century through constant adaptation and reinvention.

This enormous Frank Matcham-designed theatre opened in 1900 as a circus of variety where the auditorium could be flooded to enable extravagant aquatic spectacles such as fifteen elephants swimming, acrobatic diving displays, a battle with a giant octopus, and large scale recreations of earthquakes and typhoons. Luminaries including Charlie Chaplin and Harry Houdini performed here in the early days before Ragtime and revue superseded circus and, somewhere in the midst of this, Swan Lake received its London premiere.

In the decades after the Great War, the craze for musical comedies held sway with stars including Jack Buchanan, Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn, interspersed with traditional annual pantomimes featuring Music Hall legends such as Lupino Lane, George Robey and Fay Compton. Glamour and variety better reflected the public mood after the Second World War with the emergence of stars like Shirley Bassey, Max Bygraves, Judy Garland and Tom Jones, and the Hippodrome adapted to become a dinner theatre, rebranded as the Talk of the Town in 1958.

When the liveried doorman ushered us past the velvet rope and we followed the red carpet into the theatre, we wondered what to expect. Frank’s Matcham’s auditorium was demolished in the fifties but it has been spectacularly reconstructed with new plasterwork from the original designs as part of the £40 million restoration in 2009. A casino floor now occupies the stalls where elephants once swam, and the stage where Judy Garland sang is now a studio theatre seating around 300 people where Magic Mike is performed twice nightly.

The Hippodrome is an enormous labyrinth of ceaseless life with a multiplicity of bars, restaurants and places to gamble, open to visit for free twenty-four hours of the day. Simon Thomas led us on an elaborate journey through the maze using his personal swipe card to employ private lifts and secret doors to travel discreetly from one part to another. We entered a speakeasy hidden behind a barbers’ shop and a cocktail bar behind an embossed, touch-sensitive door that only opens if you know where to push and the precise sequence to do it. When we walked through a wall into a Chinese restaurant where an AI-powered robot was clearing the tables, it came as no surprise.

Then it was into another lift, sweeping us up to visit the open-air bar and restaurant on the roof for a sunset view of Frank Matcham’s Roman charioteer that he placed on the top as a symbol of his epic creation, an architectural leitmotif that has its equivalents in the globe on the London Coliseum and the dancer on the Victoria Palace.

When Simon revealed proudly that guests came from far and wide to spend the entire weekend inside the Hippodrome, I realised he embodied the tradition of bold West End showmen whose enthusiasm and imagination have kept these Victorian palaces of popular entertainment open. After gambling so many millions, it is now his passion to keep it alive and I do not imagine he gets too much sleep. ‘I’ve been ten minutes late for each of my meetings all day,’ he confessed to me with a wry grin, rolling his eyes excitedly, ‘and I just catch keep up…’

 

The Hippodrome by night

A Cross-section of the Hippodrome in The Sphere (1904), showing how an elephant slid down a slide into the water-filled arena. Water spectacles were an integral part of the Hippodrome’s programme after opening in 1900 and the theatre had a water tank which flooded  the auditorium whenever a hydraulic a floor was lowered. © Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library

Gamblers at the casino

Frank Matcham’s charioteer upon the roof

Mid-afternoon the gaming floor

Where once elephants swam…

Serious gaming

Where Swan Lake was first performed

The basement bar in the former hydraulic water tank

Simon Thomas, Casino Supremo

At the barber’s shop which conceals the entrance to the speakeasy

Glittery outfits and slot machines

The Chinese restaurant in the cellar

The robot that clears the restaurant tables and returns the plates to the kitchen

Dancers limbering up in advance of a performance of Magic Mike

Rooftop lettering Hollywood style

Album cover for Shirley Bassey Live at the Talk of the Town. In the seventies, Shirley Bassey performed here on numerous occasions. © Mary Evans Picture Library

Frank Derrett’s photograph of the Talk of the Town when the Three Degrees were headlining in the seventies

New photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

Learn more in The London Hippodrome – An Entertainment of Unexampled Brilliance by Lucinda Gosling published by Memory Lane Media

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