Brass 24 mm.  ROYAL CASINO  PROMENADE  CONCERT HALL * LEEDS *  R. KING CHARLES CROFT above building, HIRON F  BIRM. at sides, LEEDS in ex. W.TB3.721.  About VF, but has been 'chewed' - many knocks in field.

Royal Casino, later Royal Alhambra, King Charles Croft.
In January of 1849, William Schuking Thorne opened the Princess’s theatre. The theatre staged straight drama, variety acts and what we would now think of as circus with the accent on stuff with a local flavour. Thorne rented the land next to the theatre to Joseph Hobson who built the Leeds Casino and Concert Hall, which was extended in 1856 and re-named The Royal Alhambra.
In 1864 Hobson obtained a dramatic licence which enabled him to put on plays as well as music hall, and changed the name of his theatre to the Royal Amphitheatre.
 Thorne’s theatre could not compete successfully with the Amphitheatre, so he left the business, selling his theatre to Hobson, who rebuilt it and re-opened it as the Princess’s Concert Hall on Christmas Eve 1874. 
Fashion is a funny thing though, and the public forsook this concert hall when two others opened in 1898, despite a change of name to ‘The Tivoliand’ to try to revive its fortunes, it went into liquidation a year later. The theatre was sold, refurbished by its new owner and re-opened as The Hippodrome. The cinema was taking the place of the theatre, however, and then came radio, and the Hippodrome closed in 1933, and, following the usual pattern became a warehouse. It was demolished in 1967.