London’s West End, the Origins of Its Theatres, and an Interactive Map

London’s West End is defined, broadly, as the area west of St Paul’s Cathedral, north of the River Thames, east of Hyde Park and south of Oxford Street, in the City of Westminster as opposed to the City of London. This is an area of London that is developed rapidly, and which becomes a site of cultural richness, from the Restoration on. The owners of its illustrious estates begin to allow development of their land, and the area becomes London’s most fashionable, with its proximity to the Palace of Westminster, its clean air, and its open spaces which are transformed into leafy squares. The term West End begins to be used towards the end of our current period of study, in the early nineteenth century.

Theatres are at the heart of the West End’s cultural life. When Charles II returned from exile, he encouraged a renewal of London’s theatre scene, and the areas of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden took centre stage. At first there were few suitable venues. The couple of surviving Jacobean theatres were brought back into service and tennis courts were hastily converted (see Gibbon’s Tennis Court, Theatres 1660 to 1669: 5, and Lisle’s Tennis Court, Theatres 1660 to 1669: 6, on our map). Charles granted royal patents to two men, Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant, allowing them to present theatrical entertainments, and they formed the King’s Company and the Duke’s Company respectively. Those patents would have far-reaching consequences, ending up sitting with the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden (with just one other royal patent being granted later, to the Theatre Royal, Haymarket (see Theatres 1750 to 1779: 3 on our map)), and limiting what could be performed elsewhere. Amongst Charles’ edicts was the stipulation that women’s roles were to be performed by women, as opposed to by boys on the early modern stage; the revolutionary importance of actresses on the stage is felt throughout the period.

The ongoing saga of who could perform what where continued, with licences sometimes being granted, sometimes revoked; the genre split of 1707 began to formalise the separation of theatres that could perform spoken-word drama and those that had to focus on music (see The Queen’s Theatre, Theatres 1705 to 1731: 1 on our map). After the Lord Chamberlain established his role as censor through the Licensing Act of 1737 (see the Haymarket Theatre, Theatres 1732 to 1749: 5 on our map), the split became more marked, with the royal theatres having an effective duopoly on spoken-word, ‘legitimate’ plays. But London remained a site for enterprise and opportunity in the theatre, with patent-less managers using all manner of strategies from marketing performances as rehearsals to using musical accompaniment to get round the law. That in turn leads to the development of new genres such as melodrama, and to a flourishing of multimodal spectacles, from Charlotte Charke’s puppet plays at the James Street Theatre (see Theatres 1732 to 1749: 6) to Philip Astley’s horse dances at the Olympic Theatre (see Theatres 1780 to 1812: 11).

In creating a digital map, we have aimed to make these complex histories accessible, to fill in gaps in the received narratives, and to open up questions about the relationship between artistic expression and place. We have captured the ways in which theatres were built, adapted, burnt down, moved; the ways theatrical companies merged and split, and how different managers took them in different directions; and the ways in which different venues became associated with different genres and how their architecture lent themselves to different styles of performance. We envision the map as being of use to everyone with an interest in the subject, facilitating everything from walking tours to interpretive research into cultural geography. Theatre is always, first and foremost, a living form, and we hope that our map captures something of that life in revealing a city that was, and is, centrally defined by its performances.

Dr Peter Maber, Principal Investigator, November 2023