Wilton's Music Hall (Former Methodist Mahogany Bar Mission) - Graces Alley, London, UK - Methodist Churches on Waymarking.com

Wilton's website tells us:

Methodism’s Finest Hall (1888-1956)

Towards the end of the 19th Century the East End had become notorious for extreme poverty and terrible living conditions. Religious organisations tried to help. In 1888 Wilton’s was bought by the East London Methodist Mission, renamed The Mahogany Bar Mission and for some time considered ‘Methodism’s finest hall’. During the Great Dock Strike of 1889, a soup kitchen was set up at The Mahogany Bar feeding a thousand meals a day to the starving dockers’ families.

The Mission remained open for nearly 70 years, through some of the most testing periods in East End history including the 1936 Mosley March and the London blitz. Throughout that time the Methodists campaigned against social abuses, welcomed people of all creeds and ethnicity, and gave invaluable support to the local community, particularly the needy children of the area.

The Methodist London website tells us:

The Mahogany Bar Mission, part of the East London Wesleyan Methodist Mission, was opened on 5th February 1888 and described at the opening ceremony as ‘Methodism’s finest hall’. Situated between Cable Street and St Katharine’s Dock and serving one of the poorest neighbourhoods of late nineteenth-century London,  it was housed in the former Wilton’s Music Hall building (1859-1880), one of the grandest of first generation pub music halls.

The Methodists named their new mission after the music hall bar because they saw alcohol as the main cause of the East End’s social ills and were proclaiming their arrival as a triumph of good over evil. John Wilton’s 1859 hall was well-designed and well-constructed, with excellent acoustics, and during the Methodists’ seventy-year residency, the mid-Victorian hall and its 18th-century frontage were hardly altered at all, leaving us today a unique surviving example of an early grand music hall which also became a Methodist Mission.

The Methodists ran The Mahogany Bar for nearly seventy years. As well as holding religious services and spreading the Christian message, the mission was actively involved in improving living conditions in the East End, most notably during the 1889 London Docks Strike when over a thousand meals a day were served to the starving dockers’ families at the Mahogany Bar.

The mission also set up a whole network of social services, distributing food and second-hand clothes, running clubs and country outings and providing free medical assistance before the start of the National Health Service. The Mahogany Bar Mission closed in 1956 as the local community had become smaller in the aftermath of wartime bombing and the decline of the docks. The building was then used as a rag warehouse and after decades of dereliction, re-opened as a theatre in 1997.

The building is Grade II* listed with the entry at the English Heritage website telling us:

Mid C19 formerly the Albion Saloon. Music Hall from mid C19. Stock brick. 3 and 2 storeys, 9 windows, unbarred sashes with painted lintels. Entablature with cornice above ground floor. Pilasters. Door has carved flanking pilasters with bas relief of flowers and fruit. Interior with stage and surrounding balcony (used for sailors originally whilst civilians sat in the pit) remains. Formerly known as the Mahogany Bar as it was the first theatre to have wooden fittings. Balcony has gilded leaves and floral decoration, and is supported on barley sugar pillars. Proscenium arch has gilded ball moulding. Arcading to rear apsidal wall, opposite stage. Tiered balcony floor and banded ceiling. Has also been used as a chapel and as a seamans club. Grade II* for sociological interest and for interior.

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