As Walthamstow Assembly Hall opens in March 1943, culture, ceremony and civic pride take centre stage. Concerts, fairs and beauty contests unfold beneath glitter, blackout restrictions, anti-aircraft fire and a war that is still very much alive.

Alchemy explores a moment of contradiction: a town hall transformed into both cultural palace and operational machine; an assembly learning how to listen, watch and gather under pressure.

As the tide of the war begins to turn, crucial decisions are taken behind closed doors. Intelligence circulates that cannot yet be shared. Preparations are made for threats the public cannot be warned about — not because the danger is small, but because it is not yet imaginable.

Ross Wylde is called to a top secret conference and instructed to carry this knowledge silently. The government argues disclosure would cause panic. Wylde does not agree.

Rachmaninoff passes away. The same day the doors to Walthamstow Assembly Hall open for the first time...

Selected audio excerpts featured in this episode:

• 'The war over Walthamstow: the story of Civil Defence 1939 1945' by Ross Wylde © Waltham Forest Council (historical reference)
• 42nd Street (1933), featuring Bebe Daniels
• Yours, performed by Vera Lynn
• Brief Encounter (1945), directed by David Lean
• The Misfits (1961), directed by John Huston | Script supervisor: Angela Allen
• The wonderful book 'Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile' by Fiona Maddocks
• Music excerpt: Vocalise (Rachmaninoff), arrangement by Angela Morley (credited at the time as Wally Stott), from Inspiration (1961)
• All other music by Simon Mills

Audio excerpts are used under UK fair dealing provisions for the purposes of criticism, review, and historical illustration. Full rights remain with the respective rights holders.

Selected newspaper excerpts were accessed via the British Newspaper Archive. Newspaper titles and dates are cited where possible. All rights remain with the respective publishers. Audio and music excerpts are used under UK fair dealing provisions for the purposes of criticism, review, and historical illustration. Full rights remain with the respective rights holders.

Episode 4 is the final main episode of Season One of WAR HALL: A Theatre of the Mind. An epilogue follows.

War Hall is an independent production. If we ever make a profit, half will go to War Child, with the rest supporting our small team. If you’d like to help us make future episodes, you can join our Patreon — even the smallest contribution helps us pay artists fairly.

Follow War Hall: A Theatre of the Mind wherever you get your podcasts, and please leave a review to help others find the show.

Some clips are used under fair dealing and fair use for historical illustration.

Music and sound design by Simon Mills.

Produced by Alison Williams, Professor John Thomas, and Susie Williams.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As the Blitz comes to an end, London refuses to be silenced.

In this episode, we move through the final raids of 1941 into the uneasy calm of “The Lull”, where music, performance and cultural life carried on amid loss and devastation.

We hear how jazz and swing — banned by the Nazis as “degenerate” — became acts of resistance, and how Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, a Black, gay bandleader at the height of his fame, was killed when the Café de Paris was bombed.

We witness the destruction of Queen’s Hall — London’s leading concert hall and home to the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic. Its loss displaced musicians across the city, sending major orchestras elsewhere, including to the newly built Walthamstow Assembly Hall.

Set against wartime Walthamstow — bombed, damaged, yet still building — this episode explores what endured while buildings burned, and why music mattered more than ever.

Selected audio excerpts featured in this episode:

• 'The war over Walthamstow: the story of Civil Defence 1939 1945' by Ross Wylde © Waltham Forest Council (historical reference)
• Film clip: The Battle of Music (1943), UK wartime feature film depicting the London Philharmonic Orchestra during the Blitz
• Beethoven, Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
• Pamphlet: It Shall Not Happen Here: Anti-Semitism, Fascists and Civil Liberty, by Elizabeth Allen, 1943. Held by the Imperial War Museums, London
• “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!” (Baer / Rose / MacDonald), performed by Ken “Snakehips” Johnson and His West Indian Dance Orchestra
• “Free”, performed by The Crazy Gang
• All other music by Simon Mills

Audio excerpts are used under UK fair dealing provisions for the purposes of criticism, review, and historical illustration. Full rights remain with the respective rights holders.

War Hall is an independent production. If we ever make a profit, half will go to War Child, with the rest supporting our small team. If you’d like to help us make future episodes, you can join our Patreon — even the smallest contribution helps us pay artists fairly.

Follow War Hall: A Theatre of the Mind wherever you get your podcasts, and please leave a review to help others find the show.

Some clips are used under fair dealing and fair use for historical illustration.

Music and sound design by Simon Mills.

Produced by Alison Williams, Professor John Thomas, and Susie Williams.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Before the bombs fell, the machine was already being assembled.

In this episode of WAR HALL: A Theatre of the Mind, we step inside Walthamstow Town Hall as it transforms into the operational heart of a borough preparing for war.

Council meeting minutes record debates about the Town Hall clock, dance floors and lighting, an electric rotating glass ball... At the same time, a far more urgent system is taking shape — Air Raid Precautions, control rooms, wardens, signals.

This is the story of assembly: of people, procedures and infrastructure wired together under growing pressure, just before the Blitz. Ross Wylde, head of Walthamstow’s ARP, pushes through a radical, decentralised system — a machine designed to survive chaos — even as doubts, delays and government complacency loom large.

As the summer of 1940 approaches, lights are dimmed, bells silenced, lookouts posted. The town listens differently. Watches the sky. Prepares for something not yet fully imaginable.

The Assembly follows how Walthamstow Town Hall was reorganised for war — before the war arrived.

Selected audio excerpts featured in this episode:

• 'The war over Walthamstow: the story of Civil Defence 1939 1945' by Ross Wylde
• Benjamin Britten, Peter Grimes (1945), Four Sea Interludes — “Storm” Decca
• All other music by Simon Mills

Audio excerpts are used under UK fair dealing provisions for the purposes of criticism, review, and historical illustration. Full rights remain with the respective rights holders.

War Hall is an independent production. If we ever make a profit, half will go to War Child, with the rest supporting our small team. If you’d like to help us make future episodes, you can join our Patreon — even the smallest contribution helps us pay artists fairly.

Follow War Hall: A Theatre of the Mind wherever you get your podcasts, and please leave a review to help others find the show.

Some clips are used under fair dealing and fair use for historical illustration.

Music and sound design by Simon Mills.

Produced by Alison Williams, Professor John Thomas, and Susie Williams.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

WAR HALL takes listeners back to 1939, as Britain stands on the brink of World War II and a working-class London borough prepares for the unimaginable.

In Walthamstow, an unfinished Town Hall complex is rapidly converted into a command centre for air-raid response — coordinating shelters, emergency services, gas-mask distribution, and survival during the Blitz. Drawing on The War Over Walthamstow, the extraordinary firsthand account of local civil-defence chief Ross Wylde, this episode reveals how local government, volunteers, and factory workers — many of them women — were mobilised for total war.

As bombs fall across London, factories switch to military production, women train as engineers, plans continue for a large public concert hall — raising the question: why invest in music and public gathering at the height of such destruction?

Through archival voices, personal memories, and immersive sound design, A Theatre of War explores how ordinary people resisted fear, fascism, and erasure — and how the foundations of the post-war welfare state were laid.

Selected audio excerpts featured in this episode:

• 'The war over Walthamstow: the story of Civil Defence 1939 1945' by Ross Wylde
• All other music by Simon Mills

Audio excerpts are used under UK fair dealing provisions for the purposes of criticism, review, and historical illustration. Full rights remain with the respective rights holders.

War Hall is an independent production. If we ever make a profit, half will go to War Child, with the rest supporting our small team. If you’d like to help us make future episodes, you can join our Patreon — even the smallest contribution helps us pay artists fairly.

Follow War Hall: A Theatre of the Mind wherever you get your podcasts, and please leave a review to help others find the show.

Some clips are used under fair dealing and fair use for historical illustration.

Music and sound design by Simon Mills.

Produced by Alison Williams, Professor John Thomas, and Susie Williams.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

WAR HALL: A Theatre of the Mind begins with an extraordinary question: how and why was a gold and glass concert hall built in London while the city was under bombardment?

In this opening episode, Professor John Thomas and legendary script supervisor Angela Allen introduce the hidden wartime story of Walthamstow Assembly Hall — a sublime music hall born in the middle of the Second World War, standing at the very heart of London’s civil defence effort.

What begins with a chance meeting — and John’s research into women who built Gibson guitars during WWII — unfolds into a far larger story about sound, resistance, feminism, fascism, and cultural survival. From wartime guitars stamped “Only a Gibson Is Good Enough” to a concert hall whose acoustics would later shape the future of recorded music, the episode traces unexpected connections between America and Britain, industry and art, war and beauty.

Through eyewitness memories, archive discoveries, and haunting sound design, we hear how concerts took place as bombs fell outside, how the neighbouring Town Hall was occupied by Air Raid Precautions units, and how music persisted as a form of defiance. Scribbled on a bundle of wartime programmes is a single, mysterious note:

“Bombs were falling all around but the music was divine.”

As rumours swirl — from Nazi architectural fantasies to aviation pioneers and anti-fascist artists — the hall emerges as a beacon of hope. After the war, it would become one of the world’s most important recording spaces, hosting Benjamin Britten, Adrian Boult, Leonard Bernstein, Vera Lynn, Julie Andrews, and pioneering some of the earliest stereo recordings.

This is not nostalgia. It is a story about what was built when the world was being torn apart— and why it still matters.

In the next episode, WAR HALL takes you back to 1939.

Selected audio excerpts featured in this episode:

• Peter Grimes — Benjamin Britten (1958 recording, Decca)
• Mars, the Bringer of War from The Planets — Gustav Holst, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult (recorded at Walthamstow Assembly Hall, 1953, Nixa)
• All You Fascists — Woody Guthrie
• All other music by Simon Mills

Audio excerpts are used under UK fair dealing provisions for the purposes of criticism, review, and historical illustration. Full rights remain with the respective rights holders.

War Hall is an independent production. If we ever make a profit, half will go to War Child, with the rest supporting our small team. If you’d like to help us make future episodes, you can join our Patreon — even the smallest contribution helps us pay artists fairly.

Follow War Hall: A Theatre of the Mind wherever you get your podcasts, and please leave a review to help others find the show.

Some clips are used under fair dealing and fair use for historical illustration.

Music and sound design by Simon Mills.

Produced by Alison Williams, Professor John Thomas, and Susie Williams.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.