The Kingsway Hall, Holborn, London, built in 1912, was the home of the West London Mission of the Methodist Church, and eventually became one of the most important recording venues for classical music and film music. Among the prominent Methodists associated with the Kingsway Hall was Donald Soper, who was Superintendent Minister at the West London Mission from 1936 until his retirement in 1978.
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Kingsway Hall took its name from the street on to which its main entrance opened. The address was West London Mission, 75 Kingsway, London WC2.
In 1899, the London Council was given the power to proceed with major slum clearance in the area between Holburn and the Strand. The Methodist Church, which had operated the West London Mission from 1887, had land with a chapel on it, and decided to construct a new building. The Wesleyan Chapel at 67 Great Queen Street was renamed as Kingsway Hall in April of 1907, but that building was also condemned by the London Council as part of the clearance.
A new seven-story building called Wesley House was home to the West London Mission until 1972 when it merged with the Hinde Street Methodist Chapel (a merger not completed until 1982). Wesley House included a youth club, religious meeting rooms, a luncheon club, mission offices, and accommodation for resident staff. Adjacent to Wesley House and with a frontage on to Kingsway the Church also speculated by building the International Buildings which was let to many tenants and was a source of much needed revenue to run the mission. The mission was inaugurated at Wesley House on December 6, 1911 but Kingsway Hall within Wesley House required another year of construction. Although Kingsway Hall itself has been demolished, Wesley House remains today, no longer a mission, as do the International Buildings.
Foundation stones for Kingsway Hall were laid April 24, 1912 and the hall was completed with a ceremony on December 6, 1912. The hall included a raked floor with over 2,000 seats.
The organ, built in 1912 by J. J. Binns of Leeds, was inaugurated April 4, 1913. A fourth manual was added in 1924 by Messrs. Hill & Son and Norman & Beard, along with chimes and timpani. Gatty Sellars, the hall’s organist at the time, gave the inaugural performance on the new organ. The organ was rebuilt in 1932 and remained in use until the closure of the hall. The Nigerian composer Fela Sowande was the organist of the hall from 1945.
At the end of March 1983 the Greater London Council purchased Wesley House and Kingsway Hall for the women’s committee. Kingsway Hall was rapidly deteriorating, and an archaeological survey in August 1996 found that nothing significant about it was still present. Despite pleas from some musicians and record magazines, Kingsway was demolished in 1998 to make way for a hotel of the same name, which opened in 2000. The hotel’s reception desk is on the approximate location where orchestra members once recorded.
Kingsway was built for evangelical purposes, as a place of worship, not as a concert or recording hall. However, it was considered to have the finest acoustics in London for recording orchestral and choral repertory. The acoustics resulted more by accident than through conscious design. The size and shape of the space as well as the plastered walls and wooden floor all contributed, as did the large storage chamber below the hall. Musicians were enthusiastic about performing there since the hall allowed them to hear their own playing very well. At the same time they found other aspects of the hall difficult since nearby parking was scarce, it was cold in the winter, was dingy and dirty, and lacked food services. For recording engineers, there was also continual rumbling from the London Underground line interrupting recordings. Directly below Great Queen Street is the main line of the Underground Piccadilly Line which opened on 15 December 1906, and under Kingsway was a branch, the rail extension from Holborn to Aldwych which opened November 13, 1907 and closed 1994. The sound of the underground could be heard on many recordings, and became known as the “Kingsway rumble”. There were also recording problems created by road and construction noise, and even occasional interruptions from the clientele of the mission itself. Engineers complained that takes made with outside traffic noise could not be edited together with those made while traffic stopped for a red light.
Despite the drawbacks, Kingsway became the most sought-after recording venue for orchestral music in England because of its central location and excellent acoustics, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s when companies were converting from monaural to stereophonic recordings. The London Symphony Orchestra alone made 421 recordings there between 1926-1983; the London Philharmonic Orchestra made 280 recordings there, including its very first sessions (with Malcolm Sargent conducting choral favorites).
The hall had sufficient space for choral and even operatic recordings, and the availability of the organ offered still another benefit. Since the stage itself was not large enough for an orchestra or chorus, the metal ground floor seating was removed for recordings. The conductor often faced the horseshoe balcony, giving that individual an unusual prospect of looking at the orchestra rising rapidly away from him due to the five percent raked floor that sloped down towards him and the stage behind. Cellists much preferred to have the seating this way around so that they played "downhill" rather than up.
EMI began recording at Kingsway Hall on December 31, 1925 using electrical equipment obtained from the American Western Electric company, to whom they paid a royalty on each disc sold for the patents involved, and continued making regular use of it even after the construction of its own recording complex at Abbey Road Studios in 1931. From about 1933 EMI used its own equipment designed by their brilliant engineer Alan Blumlein who successfully circumvented the Western Electric patents and thus avoided their substantial royalty costs. At this time he also developed and patented a stereo disc recording method which was eventually adopted for the LP standard set in 1958. Decca Records only began using the hall in May 1944, introducing their famous FFRR recording system developed during war work, but it would become one of the three most-used Decca recording locations (the others being Victoria Hall in Geneva, and the Sofiensaal in Vienna). Lyrita used Kingsway from 1965-1980 (these recordings were actually produced by Decca’s recording team) as did RCA Records from 1957-1977. Although primarily used for classical music recording, very occasionally dance bands and the like were recorded there including Sydney Lipton in the thirties and Ted Heath in the summer of 1958. EMI rarely used the venue for chamber music but Decca recorded solo keyboard, violin sonatas and string quartets.
EMI and Decca had opportunities to purchase Kingsway Hall, which they did not pursue. EMI determined that although the facility was one of the best recording locations in the world, refurbishment would be too expensive. Decca's and EMI’s recording contracts at Kingsway expired December 31, 1983. The final recording, with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli, was made with Deutsche Grammophon a few days later: Giacomo Puccini's Manon Lescaut, which finished taping on January 5, 1984.
There is no published one-volume history of Kingsway Hall.
Photos of Kingsway Hall [2]
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