There was a 360-degree painting of Paris in here

It was 19 January 1871, the last attempt to break the siege of the city. The painting ran all the way around you. Between the platform and the canvas, real ground was laid with real dogs and chickens on it, so you could not tell where the hall ended and the picture began.

This kind of show was called a cyclorama. This one was painted by the French artist Félix Philippoteaux, who put his own house on the Seine into the scene.

While the foundations were going in, the builder blasted rock without a licence, and one blast threw a stone into the long bar of the Palace Hotel. The builder, a man named Grover, got 24 hours in jail for contempt of court.

Then the depression hit, and in 1893 the ticket was cut from two shillings to one. The show was closing by 1895, and that October the painting was put up for auction in the hall itself. It had cost thousands of pounds to paint and £2,500 more to ship out and hang. Nobody bid.

By 1897 the hall was showing “Prof. Norton B. Smith, Emperor of All Horse Educators”. The painting was gone by 1900, and in 1902 the round drum was cut down to half its height.

The plans of 1891 put its Little Collins Street entrance nearly opposite the new premises of George and George, the shop that became Georges. In the early 1960s the Georges store moved into the old cyclorama site. The building has been apartments since 1995.

The round walls are still there. An ABC report in 2022 photographed them in the building’s underground car park.