Queen's, Poplar

The Queen’s Arms Public House was licensed to Fred Abrahams in 1863. Morris Abrahams was the last licensee named over the bar door of the theatre in 1956.

The first music hall licence was granted to Fred Abrahams in 1865. A hall was built at the back of the pub in 1867. It was then known as the Oriental. In 1873 a completely new music hall, the New Albion, was designed by J T Robinson, amalgamating the pub. It was, as usual for this type of hall, squeezed on to back land, with its entrances in the single plot width between the Queen’s Arms and another pub, the Little George.

When it closed in 1956 it was still, in part, the Robinson building, as modified by Bertie Crewe, and later by Thomas Braddock. At that time it had a wide three storey stucco façade, rather bland and featureless above the ground floor, apart from the name Queen’s Theatre in large relief letters on a deep, storey-height, plain band. At one end were the original three arched entrances; at the other end, the stalls bar entrance (which also served as artists’ entrance) incorporated an earlier coat of arms. Between the two was the remaining mid-Victorian Queen’s Arms pub front.

Internally (like Collins’s) it retained, until the end, the feeling of a drinking music hall entered through a pub via narrow corridors and (in the case of the stalls) a long bar which opened on to the side of the auditorium. Until well into the twentieth century there was also an open bar at the back of the benched pit. At the rear there was a range of dressing rooms, looking rather like a terrace of cottages, and a detached painting room. An important building, and a serious loss. If it had survived twenty years longer it would probably have been listed Grade I or Grade II*.