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Victoria - "Fit for a Queen"

Victoria is an informal area of inner city London and the administrative home of Westminster City Council. The district is bounded by Buckingham Palace Road, Wilton Road, Grosvenor Gardens, Bressenden Place and Eccleston Street and consists mostly of commercial property and social housing, with offices and shops lining most of the thoroughfares.
Victoria Street was built in 1851 in time for the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, both as a public thoroughfare but also as a way of demolishing the surrounding slums. The area, named after the late Queen, grew with the opening of the railway terminus in 1861. Victoria underground station is the busiest on the London Underground network.
Westminster Cathedral, the Byzantine style Mother church of England’s Roman Catholics, was built in 1903 on a site previously occupied by the Tothill Fields Prison. This building, like so many other English churches, has never been completed, as when it is they will have to pay taxes.
Opposite the Cathedral was the Stag Brewery, dating back to the early 17th century, which started off as a small brew house in properties that are believed to have once been parts of St James’ Palace. The brewery prospered and was eventually bought out by Watneys, who also built lodgings around the brewery as well as amenities for their staff – today used as a hostel for the homeless. The brewery closed down in 1959.

Victoria Palace theatre, originally known as Moys music hall, has been on its present site since 1832. Its famous for a gold replica statue of Anna Pavlova. Infamously known as the home of the Crazy Gang and the Black and White Minstrels Show, this theatre has hosted several Royal Variety Performance Shows. It has a reputation for its musicals – the current one being ‘Billy Elliott’.
The Apollo Victoria, in Wilton Road, was designed as a super cinema in the Art Deco style in the 1930s as the ‘New Victoria’, replacing its predecessor the ‘Victoria Picture Palace’ built in 1911. The cinema closed in 1975 and re opened as the Venue Theatre in 1981 and went on to host musicals. One of its longest running musicals ‘Starlight Express’, ran for 16 years. Other notable musicals performed here have been the Sound of Music, Bombay Dreams and Saturday Night Fever. The current show is the musical Wicked.

Victoria Street runs on an east-west axis from the bus station to Broad Sanctuary near Westminster Abbey. Cardinal Walk, the new shopping precinct on Victoria Street contains a selection of quality restaurants, banks and shops including a Marks and Spencer store. Further along the street there is the House of Fraser department store. At the Broad Sanctuary end are the government offices for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform building, Transport for London and New Scotland Yard.

Archibald Leitch, who designed football stadiums including Anfield, Stamford Bridge, Old Trafford, Ibrox and White Hart Lane had offices at 53 Victoria Street.
It is said that Norman Wisdom slept near the statue of Marshal Foch, by the bus station at the westerly end of the street, after his parents split up when he was nine years of age. Before going into comedy, he worked as an errand boy in Artillery Mansions on Victoria Street, which was then a grand hotel. During the 1980s the building went into decay and became a squat. The following decade it was gutted, refurbished and now it an elegant apartment block.