Palace Theatre & Shaftesbury Avenue
Why is it significant?
On the corner of Cambridge Circus rises a fantastic red-brick and terracotta building, all turrets, arches and striped stone, like a castle that has wandered into the West End. This is the Palace Theatre, and it was born out of a grand dream that failed.
Key Facts
| Place | Palace Theatre & Shaftesbury Avenue |
|---|---|
| Address | 113 Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1D 5AY, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51310, -0.12980 |
| Part of Walk | Curtain Up: London's West End Theatreland, from the Savoy to Covent Garden and Leicester Square |
| Generated | Generated |
On the corner of Cambridge Circus rises a fantastic red-brick and terracotta building, all turrets, arches and striped stone, like a castle that has wandered into the West End. This is the Palace Theatre, and it was born out of a grand dream that failed.
It was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte, the man you met at the Savoy. Flush with the success of Gilbert and Sullivan, he wanted to give London a serious English opera house, and in January 1891 it opened as the Royal English Opera House with Arthur Sullivan's grand opera Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe ran for a respectable season, but Carte had nothing to follow it with. Within a couple of years he had sold up, and the opera house became the Palace Theatre of Varieties, with music hall, dancers and, early on, moving pictures.
Its great musical era came later. In 1985 Les Misérables transferred here from the Barbican after mixed reviews, and audiences ignored the critics, so it stayed for almost nineteen years before moving down the road. Since 2016 the stage has belonged to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, a play so long it was first performed in two parts. And the composer and actor Ivor Novello was starring here in his own musical, King's Rhapsody, when he died in 1951.
Shaftesbury Avenue, which runs from here to Piccadilly Circus, was itself a piece of Victorian surgery. It was cut through some of the worst slums in London in the 1880s and named after the reforming Earl of Shaftesbury, and within twenty years it was lined with theatres. The famous winged statue at Piccadilly Circus that everyone calls Eros is in fact part of a memorial to the same earl.
Now walk south-west down Shaftesbury Avenue, past the Lyric, the Apollo, the Gielgud and the Sondheim theatres, with their lights and posters, to Piccadilly Circus. Then turn left and walk down the hill of Haymarket, until two theatres face each other across the road.