The secret life of a London Music Hall

Wilton’s Music Hall is known on its publicity materials as ‘London’s Hidden Stage.’ It’s not hidden terribly well, in that it appears on maps and there are sign-posts to it, but visiting it still has something of the feel of stepping into another world.

To reach it, you turn your back on the ramparts and gates of the Tower of London and its attendant steel and glass towers, and walk along streets where office buildings give way to blocky city car parks and then to older brick commercial buildings, well-worn pubs and corner shops. With an elevated section of the Docklands Light Railway echoing and rumbling on one side, you turn down ‘Grace’s Alley’ (which has the look of a turning that won’t be there the next time you try to find it) and you’re faced with what looks like a row of diminutive terraced houses of old, yellow brick with peeling paintwork on the wooden window-frames, opposite a brick wall topped with a set of railings that are barely holding luxuriant bushes at bay; on the other side of the vegetation are the unmistakable, slightly haunting sounds of a school playground. If you were expecting a grand entrance like a West End theatre, there’s none to be seen. And for a visit to somewhere described as being ‘restored’, nothing looks like it’s in mint condition.