Playhouse Theatre

On 5 December 1905, the iron-and-glass overall arched roof of London Charing Cross railway station collapsed during a long-term maintenance project, killing six people.

Northumberland Avenue is a street in the City of Westminster, Central London, running from Trafalgar Square in the west to the Thames Embankment in the east. The road was built on the site of Northumberland House, the London home of the Percy family, the Dukes of Northumberland between 1874 and 1876, and on part of the parallel Northumberland Street. When built, the street was designed for luxury accommodation, including the seven-storey Grand Hotel, the Victoria and the Metropole. The Playhouse Theatre opened in 1882 and become a significant venue in London. From the 1930s onwards, hotels disappeared from Northumberland Avenue and were replaced by offices used by departments of the British Government, including the War Office and Air Ministry, later the Ministry of Defence. The street has been commemorated in the Sherlock Holmes novels including The Hound of the Baskervilles, and is a square on the British Monopoly board.

The Charing Cross Music Hall was established beneath the arches of Charing Cross railway station in London in 1866 by brothers Giovanni and Carlo Gatti, to replace the former Hungerford Hall. The site had been acquired, together with Hungerford Market, by the South Eastern Railway in 1862, and incorporated into the railway station, which opened on 11 January 1864, resulting in the demolition of the hall.

The Corinthia Hotel London, at the corner of Northumberland Avenue and Whitehall Place in central London, is a hotel and former British Government building, located on a triangular site between Trafalgar Square and the Thames Embankment. Originally opened in 1885 as the Metropole Hotel, its location close to the Palace of Westminster and government offices in Whitehall meant it was commandeered in both world wars. After the Second World War, it was purchased by the Ministry of Defence and used as government offices until it was declared surplus to requirements and sold by Crown Estates in 2007. It was then restored as a hotel and renamed the Corinthia Hotel, a combination of hotel and residential building.

Toole's Theatre, was a 19th-century West End building in William IV Street, near Charing Cross, in the City of Westminster. A succession of auditoria had occupied the site since 1832, serving a variety of functions, including religious and leisure activities. The theatre at its largest, after reconstruction in 1881–82, had a capacity of between 650 and 700. As the Charing Cross Theatre (1869–1876) the house became known for bills offering a mixture of drama, burlesque and operetta. Among the authors of its burlesques were W. S. Gilbert and H. B. Farnie. Its stars included Lydia Thompson, Lionel Brough and Willie Edouin. In 1876 Thompson and her husband, Alexander Henderson, became lessees of the theatre and renamed it the Folly Theatre. They continued the theatre's customary mix of operetta and burlesque. Their greatest successes were with English adaptations of French opéras bouffes and opéras comiques, most conspicuously Les cloches de Corneville, which began its record-breaking run (705 performances) at the Folly in 1878. In 1879 the comic actor J. L. Toole took over the lease. In 1881 he changed the name to Toole's Theatre and had the building substantially reconstructed. He continued the policy of staging burlesques, but introduced more non-musical comedies and farces. Among the authors who wrote for the theatre were John Maddison Morton, F. C. Burnand and Henry Pottinger Stephens; composers included George Grossmith and Edward Solomon. The theatre was important for beginning the professional careers of many actors, writers and actor-managers. Among the playwrights whose early works were presented at Toole's were Arthur Wing Pinero and J. M. Barrie. Future stars who were members of the company as beginners included Kate Cutler, Florence Farr, Seymour Hicks, Irene and Violet Vanbrugh and Lewis Waller. The lease of the theatre expired in 1895, and the lessor, the Charing Cross Hospital, did not renew it. The theatre was demolished in 1896.

The statue of James Outram, a work by Matthew Noble, stands in Whitehall Gardens in London, south of Hungerford Bridge. It is a Grade II listed structure. Unusually, the plan to erect the statue began in Outram's own lifetime, at a public meeting held in Willis's Rooms, London, on 5 March 1861. The general had recently returned to Britain from India, the stage on which his military career had been played out, due to poor health. It was decided to erect an equestrian monument in Calcutta, with J. H. Foley as the sculptor, and a standing design by Matthew Noble in London, "near [the statue] of his illustrious comrade, Sir Henry Havelock", on Trafalgar Square. Permission for this site was refused by the First Commissioner of Works, who subsequently offered a site in the yet-to-be-created Embankment Gardens. The statue was unveiled by Lord Halifax, a former Secretary of State for India, on 17 August 1871.The bronze statue rests on a granite pedestal.

The Authors' Club is a British membership organisation established as a place where writers could meet and talk. It was founded by the novelist and critic Walter Besant in 1891. It is headquartered at the National Liberal Club.The Authors' Club was based for many years next door to its present site, on Whitehall Court, first moving into the National Liberal Club in 1966. After ten years there, in 1976 the Authors' Club joined forces with The Arts Club in Dover Street, London W1. In 2011 it moved to Blacks, a Grade 2* listed building by John Meard in Dean Street, Soho - a house that was once home to a club run by Samuel Johnson and Thomas Gainsborough - where it remained for three years. It has now returned to its old home in the National Liberal Club. The Club welcomes both men and women as members, and is open to all those 'professionally engaged with literature'. It was at a dinner at the Authors’ Club that Oscar Wilde denounced the censorship of his play Salome. 'Casting aside all his gifts of humour and irony the angry Irish poet poured out his sense of assault and battery committed upon himself and laid his spirit bare and bruised before us. Having finished he did not sit down again but swept from the company still overwhelmed by the weight of his wrongs.'Three Poets Laureate — Alfred Austin, John Masefield and John Betjeman — have graced its ranks, while guest speakers included Émile Zola, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Winston Churchill, Bram Stoker, TS Eliot and Clement Attlee. Arthur Conan Doyle was for many years chairman, and often used to read his manuscripts to members prior to publication. The first president of the Authors' Club was the novelist George Meredith; he was followed by Thomas Hardy; who was in turn succeeded by JM Barrie. Subsequent presidents included the architectural historian Sir Banister Fletcher, the Anglo-Irish writer, dramatist and poet Lord Dunsany, Compton Mackenzie – author of Whisky Galore – and Laurence Meynell. The current president is the author and The Independent columnist John Walsh.

The National Liberal Club (NLC) is a London private members' club, open to both men and women. It was established by William Ewart Gladstone in 1882 to provide club facilities for Liberal Party campaigners among the newly enlarged electorate following the Third Reform Act in 1884, and was envisioned as a more accessible version of a traditional London club. The club's Italianate building on the Embankment of the river Thames is the second-largest club-house built in London. (It was the largest ever at the time, but was superseded by the later Royal Automobile Club building completed in 1911.) Designed by Alfred Waterhouse, it was completed in 1887. Its facilities include a dining room, a bar, function rooms, a billiards room, a smoking room, a library and an outdoor riverside terrace. It is located at Whitehall Place, close to the Houses of Parliament, the Thames Embankment and Trafalgar Square.

The Savage Club, founded in 1857, is a gentlemen's club in London, named after the poet, Richard Savage. Members are drawn from the fields of art, drama, law, literature, music or science.

Villiers Street is a street in London connecting the Strand with the Embankment. It is partly pedestrianised; traffic runs northbound only up to John Adam Street, where vehicles must turn right. It was built by Nicholas Barbon in the 1670s on the site of York House, the property of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, whom the street commemorates. A watergate in nearby Embankment Gardens is the only remnant of the mansion and shows the original position of the north bank of the River Thames.John Evelyn lived here in the 17th century and the Irish writer Richard Steele, who founded The Spectator and The Tatler magazines, lodged here from 1712. The Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, now a part of the Imperial College Faculty of Medicine, was founded here in 1834. Prior to 1865, Villiers Street ran down the hill directly to a wharf by the river, known as Villiers Wharf. This was swept away in 1865 by the construction of the Victoria Embankment, with its sewers, and the District line railway. The river was moved back some 50 metres (164 ft) from the foot of Villiers Street.

The York Buildings Waterworks' Water Tower was a water tower on the north bank of the River Thames and a dominant feature of the 18th century London skyline. The water tower was a wooden structure, 70 feet high (21 metres) and with an octagonal cross-section. It was erected in the late 17th century on a site at the end of Villiers Street, by the York Watergate, now part of the Victoria Embankment Gardens. The Survey of London includes a drawing (plate 31 in volume 18) showing the building. The prominent position and height of the water tower meant it appeared in many paintings and drawings of London's north bank at the time. These include:

York House (formerly Norwich Place or Norwich Palace) was one of a string of mansion houses which formerly stood on the Strand, the principal route from the City of London to the Palace of Westminster.