Capacity: 2,286
Coming soon: School of Rock
From the roster of stars who have played there and many televised performances, it is arguably the most famous theatre in London, especially for musical variety shows. Walter Gibbons, an early moving-pictures manager, built the Palladium in 1910 to compete with Sir Edward Moss’s London Hippodrome and Sir Oswald Stoll’s London Coliseum. The theatre was rebuilt a year later by Fredrick Hengler, the son of a tightrope walker, as a circus venue that included an aquatic display in a flooded ring. It then became the National Skating Palace – a skating rink with real ice. However the rink failed and the Palladium was redesigned by Frank Matcham, a famous theatrical architect who also designed the Coliseum, on the site that had previously housed Hengler’s Circus.
Find out more about the West End production of School of Rock, soon to be playing at the London Palladium