London Pavilion

The London Pavilion at 1 Piccadilly Circus was rebuilt in its current form in 1885 as one of London's largest and most fashionable Victorian music halls. For anyone who knew where to look, it was also one of the most reliable meeting places for men seeking other men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The building's upper tier contained a promenade – a wide gallery circling the auditorium – that became notorious for the mix of sex workers, gay men, and opportunists who used it as a meeting place. The management was aware of the trade and pragmatic about it. A 1916 newspaper account described "painted and perfumed travesties" visible on the promenade to any audience member who looked upward. Jack Saul, the most celebrated male sex worker of the Victorian era and a central witness in the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, was a regular at the Pavilion.

The London Pavilion closed as a music hall in 1934, becoming a cinema before being absorbed into the Trocadero entertainment complex in 1984. Today the ground floor houses Ripley's Believe It or Not. The building's stone façade – which looked out across Piccadilly Circus at the Dilly boys for half a century – is largely unchanged.