Collins' Music Hall - Islington Green, London, UK
N 51° 32.186 W 000° 06.153
30U E 700940 N 5713460
This square, Greater London Council (GLC) blue plaque indicates that "Collins Music Hall was here from 1862 to 1958". The plaque is attached to a building, now a bookshop, on the north side of Islington Green in London.
Waymark Code: WMWDZW
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 08/21/2017
Views: 0
The full wording on the Greater London Council blue plaque reads:
Greater London Council
Collins
Music
Hall
was here
from
1862 to 1958
The Theatres Trust website has an article about Collins' Music Hall that tells us:
The music hall active at the rear of the pub since 1863 and associated until its destruction 95 years later with the name of Sam Collins was actually only licensed to him for the two and a half years before his death in 1865. The site backed on to a former burial ground (New Bunhill Fields) which restricted development so that no major improvement was possible after the 1897 reconstruction. Following a destructive fire in 1958, the hall itself was demolished. The pub façade in its late nineteenth century form survives, somewhat modified, but the rooms behind have been radically altered to form a bookshop and the space formerly occupied by the theatre itself is now a timber store, open at the rear. The side walls and some traces of escape staircases serve to identify it but (contrary to popular belief) there is nothing else left to be seen of the music hall. The façade carries a blue commemorative plaque. There has been some discussion of the possibility of building a new theatre on the site of the hall and this might very well be successful in the ‘Little Theatreland’ between Sadler’s Wells and Highbury Corner.