The Greatest Hall of Them All

Recording venues aren't famous as a rule. Even Abbey Road Studios is familiar not so much for itself, but for the famed Beatles album. Most people have never heard of such places as the Sofiensaal (the site of many great Decca recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic) or Philadelphia's Broadwood Hotel (Columbia Masterworks and the Philadelphia Orchestra). Recordings have to be made somewhere, after all, but the actual locale is usually buried somewhere in the technical credits. There really aren't any stars amongst the recording venues of the world.

Except one. It was the meeting hall for the West London Methodist Mission, located a stone's throw from Drury Lane, Lincoln's Inn, and the Strand. Located at 75 Kingsway, London WC2, Kingsway Hall was classical music's greatest recording locale, home to a host of memorable recordings, from Kirsten Flagstad and Wilhelm Furtwängler's Tristan und Isolde, to Otto Klemperer's long series of albums with the Philharmonia Orchestra, to Benjamin Britten's incomparable 1963 premiere recording of the War Requiem, routinely listed as amongst the top gramophone achievements of all time.

Kingsway Hall was a freak. It shouldn't have been on anyone's list as an even tolerable recording venue, much less a great one. The record companies were obliged to lease it from the Methodist Mission, and to use it they had to unbolt the pews and store them in a basement room. It was smelly. It was drafty. Poorly insulated, not only did the cold seep through the plaster walls, but traffic noise was a constant problem. So was the Piccadilly Line of the London Underground, which ran directly underneath. The restrooms were poorly placed and increasingly filthy over the years. Parking was non-existent and there wasn't much of anywhere decent to eat nearby. Because it was mostly used as an evangelical mission building, Kingsway Hall was rarely without its assortment of drunks and druggies waiting for their 12-step programs or a warm place to sleep. There are stories about winos stumbling into the hall and ruining a take.

Acoustically it was a magic box. Nobody really knew why. A coffered wooden ceiling was complemented by soft plaster walls. The roughly octagonal room had a raked wooden floor, hollow due to the storeroom beneath. The conductor could stand at the lowest part of the floor, directly in front of the stage procenium, with the orchestra fanned out around him, rising gradually on that raked floor. (That's the setup you see in the top picture; the conductor is Sir Adrian Boult and the orchestra, the London Philharmonic.) The balconies were perfect locales for choruses, the stage itself ideal for vocal soloists.

You couldn't make a bad recording in there, even though the engineers might have to equalize out the notorious "Kingsway Rumble" as the Picadilly Line trundled down below, even though sometimes they had to time their takes to match the traffic flow outside so as not to cause any jarring changes at edit points, even though the place was freezing cold in the winter and hotter than hell during the summer. Hundreds upon hundreds of Kingsway Hall recordings bear witness to its wonderful acoustic, warm without being overly resonant, clear but not dry, and whole glowing with the sense of an acoustically alive space that responded to music like a petunia to the sunlight.

Alas, it couldn't last. Kingsway Hall got worse and worse. The ceiling caved in at one point, and although repaired, it was clear that the hall needed major work. Eventually it was deemed uninhabitable. The Methodists ceded it to the London Council, which in turn offered the building to the three major recording companies—EMI, Decca, and RCA—for a reasonable price. The companies could have it full time; no sharing with the mission. But by then, the 1980s, the hall was so far gone that a study made abundantly clear that the cost of making it habitable and code-compliant was utterly prohibitive. They'd never make the money back. Furthermore, there was that looming possibility that a restoration might wreck the acoustic; nobody ever quite knew precisely why it was the way it was, so the slightest of changes could have a devastating impact.

So they let it go. Kingsway Hall was demolished and a posh hotel now sits on the site. You can stand at the Concierge desk and you're just about where Britten stood when he conducted those 400 some-odd people who gave us that legendary recording of the War Requiem. Even if the building itself is gone forever, it has achieved immortality via all those incredible recordings.

Try listening to Iona Brown playing Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending with Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. The hall is a palpable presence throughout. Towards the end, as Brown's lark-turned-violin heads skyward from its perch on the balcony above the orchestra, you can hear just a whiff of the Kingsway Rumble.

The engineers couldn't quite equalize it out of the mix. So we have a bit of Kingsway Hall's own voice in there: yep, Kingsway here—oh, they tried but they couldn't make me into some perfect, sterile modern room. I am frankly and gloriously what I am: I'm old, I'm cranky, but dammit, I'm wonderful.