Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Finsbury Park flapper venue: Palais de Dance, c1920
Following on from my piece on Harringay's Salon du Bal in the jazz age, I've been unsuccessfully trying to find out more about the contemporary Palais de Dance in Finsbury Park.
I can find very little on the venue at all, most particularly its precise location.
What I have been able to ascertain is that the Palais de Dance in Finsbury Park was a popular Jazz dancing club between 1920 and, I think, the early 1930s.
I had assumed that it was connected with other venues of the same name. A more atmospheric photo of the much better documented Hammersmith Palais de Danse shows the same leaning towards Chinoiserie.
However a report of a court case in 1922 between the owners of the Hammersmith Palais and the Finsbury Park one shows that the ownership was not common. (Reported in the Bioscope, 19th January 1922, attached below)
Hammersmith Palais de Dance, c 1920
The closest I can get for a location for the Finsbury Park club is provided in a memoir of growing up in north London in the 1920s and 1930s (King's Cross Kid: A London Childhood between the Wars) by Victor Gregg.
The author placed the venue "almost opposite the posh new Astoria cinema".
I've looked through local directories of the time but have been unable to find any mention of it. Nor can I find any mention of it in local newspapers or almost anywhere else.
The one thing I could find was a write-up in a weekly dance magazine from 1923, which I bought a copy of on ebay. But, apart from the photo, that's about the only evidence I can find that it ever existed. Nonetheless, the photo above and the article below do give some faint whiff of what it might have been like.
Popular Music & Dancing Weekly, 22nd March 1923
The cover of the issue that covered the Finsbury Park venue was pretty dull. But some of its contemporaries are very atmospheric.
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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Part of the cinema/dance hall complex became the Majestic Ballroom in 1959. It was a music venue where the Beatles performed in 1963. It also hosted boxing and wrestling.
The photo below shows the exterior in Stroud Green Road c1960.
I'm not sure which bit of the building became the Majestic. The photo below of the Beatles performing there in 1963 suggest a relatively compact space with ceilings lower than they were in the cinema auditorium. So, I wonder if the Palais de Danse ended up as the Majestic.
I assume there are plenty of people alive who have a personal memory of the space. Anyone on HoL?
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I stumbled across this 1959 photo of the newly converted New Majestic Ballroom, (ex-Gaumont). The accompanying description is as follows:
The New Majestic, Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park, was opened by CMA on August 20. It is CMA's second largest ballroom and is licensed to hold 1700 people.
When it began the transformation, CMA set out to make the New Majestic intimate and modern in every way, and achieved this by installing up-to-date equipment, and decorating the walls in carefully blended colours of cardinal red, gold, regency blue and splashes of yellow, and red and blue carpets.
Although no effort was spared to achieve its aim, CMA retained some of the original charm in the main foyer and lounges at both levels by preserving the two sweeping stairways, oak panelling and marble columns.
The ballroom has a Canadian maple sprung floor covering an area of 5400 square feet. There is modern electric equipment that includes high fidelity stereophonic sound and two huge glittering lights.
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Permalink Reply by Geoff Amabilino on
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That's amazing, Hugh. What we have missed...
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