page_title: Queen's Hall
section_title: Second World War
hierarchical_section_title: Queen's Hall / Last years / Second World War
caption_attribution_description: English: Bust of Henry J. Wood at the Duke's Hall, Royal Academy of Music, London. During the Proms, it is placed in front of the organ at the Royal Albert Hall.
context_page_description: The Queen's Hall was a concert hall in Langham Place, London, opened in 1893. Designed by the architect Thomas Knightley, it had room for an audience of about 2,500 people. It became London's principal concert venue. From 1895 until 1941, it was the home of the promenade concerts founded by Robert Newman together with Henry Wood. The hall had drab decor and cramped seating but superb acoustics. It became known as the "musical centre of the [British] Empire", and several of the leading musicians and composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries performed there, including Claude Debussy, Edward Elgar, Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss.
  In the 1930s, the hall became the main London base of two new orchestras, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. These two ensembles raised the standards of orchestral playing in London to new heights, and the hall's resident orchestra, founded in 1893, was eclipsed and it disbanded in 1930. The new orchestras attracted another generation of musicians from Europe and the United States, including Serge Koussevitzky, Willem Mengelberg, Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter and Felix Weingartner.
context_section_description: On the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the BBC immediately put into effect its contingency plans to move much of its broadcasting away from London to places thought less at risk of bombing. Its musical department, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, moved to Bristol. The BBC withdrew not only the players, but financial support from the Proms. Wood determined that the 1940 season would nevertheless go ahead. The Royal Philharmonic Society and a private entrepreneur, Keith Douglas, agreed to back an eight-week season, and the London Symphony Orchestra was engaged. The concerts continued through air raids, and audiences often stayed in the hall until early morning, with musical entertainments continuing after the concerts had finished. The season was curtailed after four weeks, when intense bombing forced the Queen's Hall to close. The last Prom given at the Queen's Hall was on 7 September 1940. On 8 December doors and windows of the hall were blown out by blast. After temporary repairs, concerts were continued; after further damage on 6 April 1941 repairs were again quickly made, and the hall re-opened within days.
  On the afternoon of 10 May 1941, there was an Elgar concert at the hall. Sargent conducted the Enigma Variations and The Dream of Gerontius. The soloists were Muriel Brunskill, Webster Booth and Ronald Stear, with the London Philharmonic and the Royal Choral Society. This concert, the last given at the hall, comprised in the view of The Times "performances of real distinction". That night there was an intensive air raid in which the chamber of the House of Commons and many other buildings were destroyed, and the British Museum and Westminster Abbey were seriously damaged. A single incendiary bomb hit the Queen's Hall, and the auditorium was completely gutted by fire beyond any hope of replacement. The building was a smouldering ruin in heaps of rubble; the London Philharmonic lost thousands of pounds' worth of instruments. All that remained intact on the site was a bronze bust of Wood retrieved from the debris. Concerts continued in London at the Royal Albert Hall and other venues. The Proms were relocated at the Albert Hall, which remains their principal venue. In 1951, the Royal Festival Hall was opened and succeeded the Queen's Hall as the main London venue for symphony concerts other than the Proms.
  It was reported in late 1946 that the Commissioners of Crown Lands had increased the site's ground rent from £850 to £8,000, setting back the possibility of re-building the hall, or of building a new Henry Wood Concert Hall. In 1954 the government set up a committee, chaired by Lord Robbins with Sir Adrian Boult among its members, to examine the practicability of rebuilding the hall. The committee reported that "on musical grounds and in the interest of the general cultural life of the community" it was desirable to replace the hall, but it was doubtful whether there was a potential demand that would enable it to run without "seriously subtracting from the audiences of subsidised halls already in existence". From 1982, London had a second hall large enough for symphony concerts, in the Barbican Centre.
  The former site of the Queen's Hall was redeveloped by the freeholder, the Crown Estate. It is now occupied by the Saint Georges Hotel. In 2004, Richard Morrison wrote of the Queen's Hall:
  Everybody who heard concerts in that hall speaks, or spoke, warmly of its acoustics and atmosphere … by all accounts it was perfect. It should have been rebuilt after the war: there were plans, committees, even the start of a fundraising campaign. But it wasn't, and since then London has not had a symphonic concert hall that comes remotely close to perfection.
   The site is now marked by a commemorative plaque, which was unveiled in November 2000, by Sir Andrew Davis, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
caption: Bust of Sir Henry Wood, rescued from the wreckage of the hall in 1941
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