Egyptian Hall
Coordinates: 51°30′29″N 0°8′21″W / 51.50806°N 0.13917°W
The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, was an exhibition hall built in the ancient Egyptian style in 1812, to the designs of Peter Frederick Robinson. In 1905 the building was demolished and is now a Starbucks Coffee Shop.
The Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, commissioned by William Bullock as a museum to house his collection (which included curiosities brought back from the South Seas by Captain Cook), was completed in 1812 at a cost of £16,000. It was the first building in England to be influenced by the Egyptian style, partly inspired by the success of the Egyptian Room in Thomas Hope's house in Duchess Street, which was open to the public and had been well illustrated in Hope's Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (London, 1807). But, unlike Bullock's Egyptian temple in Piccadilly, Hope's neoclassical façade betrayed no hint of the Egyptianizing decor it contained. Detailed renderings of various temples on the Nile, the Pyramids and the Sphinx had been accumulating for connoisseurs and designers in works such as Bernard de Montfaucon's, ten-volume L'Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures (1719-1724), which reproduces, methodically grouped, all the ancient monuments, Benoît de Maillet's Description de l'Égypte (1735), Richard Pococke's A Description of the East and Some Other Countries (1743), and Frederic Louis Norden's Voyage d'Egypte et de Nubie (1755); the first volume of the magisterial Description de l'Egypte (1810) had recently appeared in Paris. The plans for the hall were drawn up by architect Peter Frederick Robinson. Bullock, who had displayed his collection in Sheffield and Liverpool before opening in London, used the hall to put on various spectaculars, from which he made money from ticket sales. The museum was variously referred to as the London Museum, the Egyptian Hall or Museum, or Bullock's Museum.
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