The Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly: London's House of Shows, 1812 to 1905

For almost a century, one building on the south side of Piccadilly, facing the end of Bond Street, was among the places where London went to pay for a look at something new. It began as a natural history museum dressed as an Egyptian temple. It became a set of rooms for hire, where a painter, a showman or an explorer could take a gallery for a season. It ended as a small theatre of stage magic. The Egyptian Hall was demolished in 1905, and the record of what passed through it is a record of changing tastes, and of the people who were put on display there.¹

A museum in Egyptian dress

The Hall was the project of William Bullock, a jeweller and naturalist who had opened a museum in Liverpool around 1800 and brought it to London in 1809, first to a house at No. 22 Piccadilly. By the end of 1810 he wanted a purpose-built home. The site belonged to a Crown lease held by John Mackay, an oilman, whose rebuilding had stalled after his builder failed. Mackay’s petition to the Treasury in November 1810 described a museum block with, in the petition’s words, “a front elevation in the Egyptian manner, and ornamented with Egyptian friezes.” Building probably began early in 1811, and the museum opened in the spring of 1812.¹

Bullock’s architect was Peter Frederick Robinson, who had worked at the Brighton Pavilion. The Survey of London credits him with probably the first wholly Egyptian-style building by an English architect, drawing, the Survey suggests, on scholarly works such as Jomard’s Description de l’Égypte. The front stacked tapering pylons against one another, with an entrance flanked by lotus-bud columns and, above, Coade stone statues of Isis and Osiris by the sculptor Sebastian Gahagan. The Survey’s authors called it “an extraordinary exotic among the prosaic brick house-fronts of Piccadilly.”¹

The guidebook Bullock sold to visitors, in its twelfth edition of 1812, announced the collection as open in an “Egyptian Temple” just erected “opposite the end of Bond-Street.” Its address to the public is dated March 28, 1812.²

Bullock’s London Museum

Inside, the display was a natural history cabinet on an industrial scale. Bullock claimed about fifteen thousand exhibits, acquired at a cost of £30,000, alongside curiosities from Cook’s Pacific voyages, arms and armour, and works of art.¹ His proudest room was the Pantherion, where a giraffe, a lion, an elephant and a rhinoceros were, as his guide put it, “exhibited as ranging in their native wilds and forests,” surrounded by modelled tropical plants and painted scenery to give an effect of distance.²

Bullock was also quick to see what the news could sell. In 1815 and 1816 he showed the carriage captured from Napoleon after Waterloo, which later passed to Madame Tussaud’s and burned there in 1925. In 1819 he gave up the museum altogether. The collection was auctioned: much of the ethnographic material went to Berlin, other parts to the University of Edinburgh, and the armour to the collector Samuel Meyrick. The architect J. B. Papworth redesigned the great room in the Egyptian style, and the building became a suite of exhibition rooms let to others.¹

Rooms for hire: painters and a pharaoh’s tomb

The new arrangement suited large single attractions. In 1820 Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa was shown there, and the same year Benjamin Haydon hired a gallery for his huge Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem. Haydon came back to the Hall repeatedly until shortly before his death in 1846.¹

In 1821 the building’s Egyptian front finally matched its contents. The explorer Giovanni Belzoni exhibited a model of the tomb he had opened in the Valley of the Kings near Thebes in 1817.¹ His own narrative explains how the reproductions were made. Finding that others’ claims had closed most of the ground at Thebes to him, he “retired to my tomb, and devoted my whole time to taking models of it.” He took impressions directly from the painted reliefs: “The wax alone I found would not stand, as the climate did not permit it,” so he mixed wax with resin and fine dust. He counted 182 life-size figures and copied nearly five hundred hieroglyphs with their colours. The hard part, he admitted, was taking the impressions without injuring the colours of the paintings.³

Jens Holm, Karina Christian and their son

The following year the Hall held something new: a living family. In 1822 Bullock exhibited a herd of reindeer with sledges and harness, accompanied by a Sámi family from Norway who had brought their own summer and winter dwellings.¹ Bullock’s pamphlet for the show, priced at one shilling and sixpence, names the adults as Jens Holm and his wife Karina Christian, with a son of four and a half. They understood Norwegian, and an interpreter stood by to answer visitors’ questions.⁴ Norwegian sources give the names a little differently: a University of Tromsø publication identifies them as Jens and Karen Thomassen Holm from Røros, and a lithograph by Denis Dighton, published by Bullock in 1822 and bought by Norway’s Nasjonalmuseet in 2024, calls the father Johannes Holm.⁵⁶ The son’s name does not appear in any of these sources.

Bullock framed the venture as an agricultural experiment. He wanted to establish reindeer on Britain’s uplands for venison and milk, and the family were, in his account, the animals’ “natural proprietors.” The show itself, he wrote, would be conducted “by the people themselves.”⁴ His pamphlet is the main contemporary source, and it needs reading with care. It calls the Sámi a “diminutive race of human beings,” and much of its description of Sámi life is lifted from Linnaeus’s Lapland journey of nearly a century before, which Bullock says had been “corroborated, and additions made to it by the people themselves.”⁴

Read against that framing, the pamphlet still preserves glimpses of three individuals. Karina, Bullock wrote, often preferred to walk across Norway’s hills with her son on her back rather than ride the horse provided, and reached the post-houses ahead of the party. When two reindeer calves could not be found, she told Bullock not to worry, because their mother had hidden them where no one else could find them; later she pointed out a doe slipping back from the herd “to fetch her child,” which soon appeared. Wolves, Bullock noted, were the herders’ greatest enemy, and Jens Holm’s first question to him was whether there were any in England. Told that there were none, he is reported to have said: “If it had snow, mountains, and rein moss, what a happy country it would be.” Many of the wooden bowls, spoons and vessels shown in the room were his own work. By Bullock’s account the family deposited their earnings in a savings bank every week and attended the Swedish Lutheran chapel in London.⁴ All of this reaches us through the man who was selling tickets, and it cannot be checked against anything the Holms wrote themselves.

The archaeologist Cathrine Baglo, who has traced about four hundred Sámi who took part in exhibitions between 1822 and 1950, argues against reading such shows only as stories of victims. Later participants often had contracts covering pay, travel and medical care, and some made a profession of it, though contracts were also broken and conditions could be poor. In her words, the Sámi “sold exhibitions of their lives and culture, exhibitions that they themselves, through being there, helped to shape.”⁷ What became of the Holm family after London is not recorded in any source consulted for this article.

A business of display

Bullock left for Mexico at the end of 1822, returned to show what he had collected there in 1824, and seems to have sold his lease soon afterwards to the bookseller George Lackington.¹ Under later managers the rooms filled with whatever drew a crowd. The Survey of London’s list runs from a “mermaid” made in Japan from parts of a monkey and a fish to an artificial chicken hatchery, a Burmese state carriage, groups of Ojibwe people and of San people from southern Africa (listed in period terms as “Ojibbeway Indians” and “South African Bushmen”), a model of the Battle of Waterloo, John Banvard’s moving panorama of the Mississippi, and Albert Smith’s lectures and dioramas between 1852 and 1860. From 1850 one gallery housed Lord Dudley’s pictures and later the Dudley Gallery’s exhibitions of watercolours.¹ P. T. Barnum’s agent also exhibited a speaking automaton by an inventor named Faber there for several months.⁸

The single greatest draw, the Survey suggests, was Charles S. Stratton, known on stage as General Tom Thumb.¹ Barnum’s autobiography is frank about how the act was built. When Barnum engaged him in 1842, Stratton was, by Barnum’s account, five years old, and Barnum’s bills announced him as eleven and newly arrived from England. “This announcement contained two deceptions,” Barnum wrote. The two sailed for England on January 18, 1844. After private visits to wealthy London houses, Barnum took the Egyptian Hall. When Stratton was summoned to Buckingham Palace, Barnum hung a sign on the Hall’s door: “Closed this evening, General Tom Thumb being at Buckingham Palace by command of Her Majesty.” By Barnum’s own account the levees ran from March 20 to July 20, taking about $500 a day.⁸ Those are a promoter’s numbers. What they show without doubt is that a small boy from Bridgeport, Connecticut, was appearing before crowds every day in a foreign city, managed by a man who had invented his age and his birthplace.

England’s Home of Mystery

The Hall’s last long tenancy was its most coherent. In 1873 the conjurors John Nevil Maskelyne and George Cooke came to the building, and their show stayed for more than thirty years.⁹ Maskelyne used the first-floor room at the front as an auditorium for what the Survey calls his “magical entertainments.”¹ Posters on the façade called the place “England’s Home of Mystery.” Anne Goulden, writing from the Davenport Collection’s archive, notes that “The stage was tiny and the auditorium seated less than 300,” yet the little theatre made both partners wealthy. Cooke retired in the early 1900s, after the run of the playlet The Entranced Fakir.⁹

The show kept pace with new technology. Nevil Maskelyne, J. N.’s elder son, and David Devant were early users of film and brought “trick” films into the magic programme. Nevil, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, filmed the total eclipse of May 28, 1900 in North Carolina; a fragment survives in the society’s archive and was restored by the BFI in 2019.⁹¹⁰

Maskelyne’s lease ran out early in 1905. He had already bought the lease of the much larger St George’s Hall in Langham Place, and opened there on January 2, 1905 with a magical play, The Coming Race, that failed badly. For a few weeks his two venues competed, while the young magician Martin Chapender ran a final season in Piccadilly that ended on January 21. In Goulden’s summary, “The Egyptian Hall won hands down.”⁹

It did not matter. With the lease expired, the Hall and the houses and shops on either side, Nos. 166 to 173 Piccadilly, were demolished, and the site was rebuilt shortly afterwards as a new block of shops and upper floors named Egyptian House.¹ The name is the building’s only trace on the street. The rest survives in guidebooks, playbills and prints, and in the few lines that a showman’s pamphlet recorded from a reindeer herder who wondered whether England had wolves.

Footnotes

1. Survey of London, vols 29-30 (1960), “Piccadilly, South Side,” pp. 251-270, sections on the White Horse Inn and the Egyptian Hall. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

2. Bullock, Companion to Mr. Bullock’s London Museum and Pantherion, 12th ed. (1812), title page and address. ↩ ↩²

3. Belzoni, Narrative, 3rd ed. (1822), vol. 2, pp. 11-18. ↩

4. [Bullock], An Account of the Family of Laplanders (1822), Wellcome Collection. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. UiT, Labyrint E/11 (2011), p. 10, caption. ↩

6. Nasjonalmuseet, NMK.2024.0069. ↩

7. Høgetveit Berg, ScienceNorway, April 24, 2012, on Baglo (2011). ↩

8. Barnum, Life of P. T. Barnum (1855), pp. 243-262 and 346-347. ↩ ↩²

9. Goulden, “The Magic of 1905” (2025), pp. 2-5 and 8. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

10. Royal Astronomical Society news release (2019). ↩