IT can still be the scene of the odd ruckus, but the days are gone when Lowesmoor was the nightclub capital of Worcester. Except they weren’t called nightclubs back in the mid-1800s, but music halls and the Lowesmoor area had three, the only ones in the city.

True one was on the fringe, for the Railway Bell was in St Martin’s Gate, but the other two, the Alhambra and the New Concert Hall, stood right beside the Lowesmoor roadway. The music hall concept had developed from the tavern concert rooms of the 1850s and gained some notoriety among those of a more abstentious nature.

To the extent that in 1870 the Worcester Herald felt it necessary to leap to their defence and carried supportive reviews of both the Alhambra and its rival down the street. The paper sought to reassure readers they were not the depraved places some believed them to be.

Worcester News:

A 1967 view of the triangle of buildings at the eastern end of Lowesmoor

Of the New Concert Hall (the large building at the end of Lowesmoor later taken over by the Salvation Army), which was “filled nightly almost to suffocation”,  it wrote: “There is nothing in the slightest degree offensive”.

Meanwhile, in the Alhambra, about 100 yards away and built of wood, “the talent is of high class and the entertainment, which is very interesting, is conducted in an orderly and respectable manner”.

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The entertainment consisted mostly of singers, comics and acrobats, but there was always a well-promoted main feature.

This was often a “living tableau” such as “The Death of Nelson” with “novel mechanical effects”. Or “The Grand Divertissement, Fire and Water” with “gorgeous transformation scene, cascades of real water and showers of real fire”. Stand by with fire buckets.

Worcester News:

Smiths family butchers shop in Lowesmoor in 1916

However, by 1869, the entertainment had become less inhibited. The Alhambra presented “Sylvester, the Charmed Monster” and at its rival you could see “Madam Colonna, the Premier Danseuse and her renowned Parisian Can-Can Dancers”.

Sadly, neither of those floor filling attractions feature among the photographs here, but there are some names which will hopefully be rather more familiar.