wiltons

Down an alley off a backstreet in Wapping is one of Victorian London’s architectural gems. Behind five early-18th-century houses that form its foyer is Wilton’s, the world’s oldest surviving pub music hall. Built in 1859, it was the only building in the area to survive the Blitz.

It has a rich history. It was a pub-cum-music-hall (and probably a brothel, too) for 20 years, famous as the home of Champagne Charlie and the risqué can-can. Then it became a Methodist mission hall, a safe house for protesters against Mosley’s Blackshirts, and finally a sorting house for rags. John Betjeman led a campaign to save it from demolition in the Sixties, and, in 1997, it was reinvented as a performing space by Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw, who re-launched it with an unforgettable version of TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

It was then taken over and managed by Broomhill Opera, which went bust in 2003. A new trust under the delightful and persuasive Frances Mayhew has run it for the past five years, and it’s now in profit, thanks to rentals for weddings, parties and film shoots (scenes from Little Dorrit, Tipping the Velvet were staged here).

At the same time, it continues as a lively musical and theatrical venue, with a resident string quartet (the Kreutzer) and opera company (Transitions). Out of Joint will present a new play in the autumn, and Shaw and Warner’s The Waste Land returns in December.

Wilton’s is now fundamentally solid but picturesquely dilapidated. In collaboration with the architect Tim Ronalds, Mayhew has come up with a relatively modest £4 million scheme for basic repairs, which will make the premises more functional and satisfy insurers and the Health and Safety squad. Nobody should want to see this building over-restored: its atmosphere is unique and it doesn’t need fancy mod cons.

But Wilton’s fabric does need careful attention, and it’s alarming that the bodies who should be most concerned seem to be tossing it away like a hot potato. The World Monuments Fund has listed it among the planet’s 100 most culturally significant endangered edifices, but it can’t oblige with money. The Heritage Lottery Fund rejected an application on the grounds that its popular appeal was insufficiently broad. English Heritage will pay for emergency repairs, but doesn’t want to acquire it.

Now the National Trust is havering. After two years of negotiations, it has postponed a decision as to whether to take some form of ownership or control to the end of this year. Simon Jenkins, the NT’s chairman, is thought to have reservations, although there is plenty of enthusiasm further down the organisation.

What may be holding the NT back is its discomfort with the sort of raw picturesque decrepitude that is Wilton’s charm. Increasingly, the NT wants everything shipshape, branding its properties with a gold standard of squeaky-clean facilities, providing “interpretation”, food and drink, a shop, loos, disabled access and parking. In Wilton’s case, this would be profoundly destructive (and enormously expensive): it’s a pleasure palace where rules are broken and the past is raffish, dirty, dangerous and distinctly un-Trustworthy.