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The site of 100 Whitechapel Road once had an eighteenth-century public house next to almshouses of the 1650s.1 The pub, to the west, was enlarged for a theatre, rebuilt on a grand scale as the East London Theatre in 1867, but destroyed by fire in 1879. Various adaptations and additions ensued, including for use as a drill hall and for Wonderland, a place of rowdy exhibitions and amusements, shut down and adapted to use as a clothing factory in 1899. By 1902 Wonderland had been revived and the hall was being used for boxing, packed to the utmost with about 3,000 present. It functioned for a period as a small cinema under the ownership of Jonas (Jack) Woolf, who enlarged to the rear for the New Empire Hall (sometimes the East London Picture Palace). Wonderland was burnt out in 1911, but the cinema business continued till 1918 as the East London Palace, Theatre of Varieties.
A fresh start for the larger site to function as a cinema was made in 1919-21. Moses Cohen, in partnership with David Morris and Isaac Lewis as Morris, Cohen & Lewis, of 21 Finsbury Pavement and 130-139 Commercial Road, redeveloped the whole Wonderland site and land to the east around St Mary's Station as the Rivoli Cinema, designed by George Coles of Adams & Coles, architects.
The cinema had seating for 2,230 and standing room for 349. Facing the Whitechapel Road were twin three-storey and attic blocks, which flanked the diminutive station with up-scale Beaux Arts dignity. Entrances were to the west, with tea and dance rooms above, where the tavern had stood. The east block had the exit vestibules below nine flats for the rehousing of people from the 'slums' on Hampshire Place that were cleared for the project.
The Rivoli suffered bomb damage twice in the Blitz. Coles prepared a scheme for restoration as a smaller Granada Cinema in 1956, but this was abandoned and the site had been sold for other purposes by 1958. A remnant of the Rivoli survives as a strip alongside 102 Whitechapel Road.
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This is an edited version of a longer illustrated text available on the Survey of London's Histories of Whitechapel website, see https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/838/detail/#from-the-earl-of- effingham-saloon-to-the-rivoli-cinema-via-wonderland. Full sources for the Survey's text can be found at this address. ↩
Cite This Article
Rivoli Cinema, jewisheastendmemorymap.org?feature_type=polygon&id=40, accessed June 2025.