Evans's Music & Supper Room

No 43 King Street is an early eighteenth century house attributed to Thomas Archer. It was converted to an hotel which, by the 1830s had a thriving supper room. The original song and supper entertainment was held from the mid-1830s in a basement coffee room. It was very popular by the 1840s. Under John Green a large new music hall (to which the old room formed a vestibule & picture gallery) was built to cover almost the whole of the rear garden. This fine hall, by William Finch Hill, is usually dated to 1856 but actually opened in December 1855. With the Canterbury Hall (1854) and Weston’s Music Hall (1857) the new Evans’s set the style and standard for the first generation of giant supper room music halls in London. It was a rectangular, flat-floored room with an open stage, backed by a triumphal arch.

The hall was enlarged and improved by J H Rowley in 1871. Although licensed to 1881, it effectively ceased to operate in 1880, but remained as a recognisable room well into the twentieth century. Doubt has been expressed as to whether the Mewes & Davis alterations planned in 1911/12 for the National Sporting Club (in occupation from the 1890s) were ever carried out, but the evidence of a Phil May sketch published in 1932 suggests that they were. The altered Archer house front still dominates a corner of the Piazza and provides telling evidence of disregard for those aspects of architectural history which, until recently, were given scant scholarly attention. In the course of an imperfect 1970s reinstatement of the façade, the iron arched entrance to the early supper room was destroyed (the bits were salvaged by the Museum of London). Nothing is now recognisable of the supper room itself, a key building in the history of music hall.