The London Pavillion – “The Promenade”
A Victorian music hall’s other life
The stone façade facing you is largely unchanged since 1885, when the London Pavilion was rebuilt as one of London’s grandest Victorian music halls. Its upper tier had a wide balcony promenade – and that promenade was notorious. A 1916 newspaper account described “painted and perfumed travesties” visible to anyone who looked upward. Jack Saul, the most celebrated male sex worker of the Victorian age and a witness in the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, was a regular. The management knew, the audience knew, and the men who came for reasons other than the performance knew exactly where to go. The promenade is gone. The building is now Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The façade has been watching the Dilly boys across the circus for a hundred and forty years.