The Wilton’s Music Hall archives are housed at the V&A Museum. They hold a wealth of material relating to Wilton’s from the 1860s to the present day, including building plans, photographs, material relating to productions, programmes and posters.
The catalogue is available online here. Please note that the Wilton’s Music Hall Archive will be temporarily closed to visitors while the V&A is working on their exciting plans to transform how you can access, explore and experience their world-class collections of art, design and performance through their V&A East project.
To prepare for this major move, they will be temporarily closing the Theatre and Performance Reading Room at Blythe House before re-opening in their new home in Stratford, East London in 2025.
Explore our digital archive on Google Arts & Culture
For more information about V&A East please click here.
Wilton's on the Move
The buildings of Wilton's have been on this site in one form or another since the 1690s. The hall itself is now the oldest surviving grand Victorian music hall, having been built in 1859. We all know that Wilton's survived the Blitz, the GLC slum clearances and decades of dereliction but despite this even those campaigning to save it had plans to pull it down!
The London docks were decimated during the Second World War and it was not until many decades later that reconstruction could begin. When it did, it exploded; the regeneration of the Docklands is one the resounding successes of gentrification, but in the process it altered completely the atmosphere and community of the area. St Katherine Docks redeveloped the western side in the early 1970s, it became the prestige project for developer Taylor Woodrow and remains a popular and vibrant hub today.
The campaign team behind Wilton's in the late 1970s were closely linked to local organisations including All Hallows by the Tower church and St Katherine's By the Tower Ltd., a Taylor Woodrow company who advised on the structural aspects of Wilton's restoration. It is less surprising that there would be a vested interest in relocating Wilton's closer to the Katherine Docks redevelopment. The radical idea was, however, endorsed by the Trust and became a very real prospect as they prepared plans for Wilton's future.
The move did not happen and new communities populated and rebuilt the surroundings of Wilton's, ensuring a more viable prospect for remaining in situ. It is easy to dismiss the idea of relocation, but Spon Street in Coventry and sites such as Beamish and the Black Country Museum have proved that the drastic step can offer a positive and stable future for at risk structures. Numerous schemes have come and gone for Wilton's - the final restoration is respectful and almost invisible but that comes as the result of exhausting wildly different ideas and passing through waves of development trends.