A brief history ...
Sadler's Wells' has been a place of entertainment for over 300 years, ever since a Mr Dick Sadler opened his 'musick house' in Islington in the 1680s.
Soon afterwards an ancient medicinal well was discovered in the grounds and the enterprising Mr Sadler was quick to promote the water's health-giving properties. The spa soon became a fashionable attraction at the musick house, hence the name of Sadler's Wells.
The public eventually lost interest in 'taking the waters' at Sadler's Wells and by the beginning of the eighteenth century entertainment was once again the main attraction. Jugglers, tumblers, rope-dancers, ballad-singers, wrestlers, stage-fighters, dancing dogs and even a singing duck trod the boards there!
The surrounding area developed rapidly following the Great Fire of London and the musick house thrived. During the centuries that followed the building was to be reconstructed four times before the current Lottery-funded project.
Joseph Grimaldi, the great comic actor who led the development of English pantomime, was Sadler's Wells' star performer in the early years of the nineteenth century.
By the 1840s Sadler's Wells was known for pantomime, light opera and variety acts, largely because London's three Royal Theatres had a legally enforced monopoly on 'regular drama'. However, by the time actor/manager Samuel Phelps took over in 1844, the terms of the new Theatres Act of 1843 freed him to achieve his aim of turning Sadler's Wells into '...a theatre as it ought to be - a place justly representing the work of our great dramatic poets'. Within the next thirteen years he had staged thirty of Shakespeare's plays, introducing them in the original texts to large audiences of working people.
After Phelps' departure in 1862 Sadler's Wells went into a gradual decline. Variety and melodrama crept back into the repertoire. The theatre was then converted into a roller-skating rink and later a prize fight arena. After re-opening as a theatre in 1879, it became a music hall and featured the legendary performers Marie Lloyd and Harry Champion among its stars.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century Sadler's Wells became a cinema, one of only three places in London where the new cinematography could be seen. After a succession of managements in the 1900s, the theatre became increasingly run-down and was eventually closed in 1915. S.R. Littlewood, theatre critic of the Daily Chronicle, summed up its demise: "...poor old wounded playhouse. Here it stands, even now shabby and disconsolate, its once familiar frontage half-hidden with glaring posters...".
All was set to change when Lilian Baylis arrived at Sadler's Wells in 1925.
