The Paragon Theatre of Varieties, Mile End Road, was on the site of the Eagle Public House, 95, Mile End Road, built in 1848. When it was run by William Lusby from 1868 it became Lusby's Music Hall, and after reconstruction in 1877 and reopening on 2nd April, it became Lusby's Summer and Winter Garden. The theatrical newspaper The Era noted then that it could seat 5,000, and that the auditorium was a hundred feet long, sixty feet wide, and thirty-eight feet in height. There was a balcony forty feet deep from the curve of its horse-shoe shaped front to the back of the hall, with four private boxes on either side on the balcony tier and two larges stage boxes beneath them, on either side of the hall.

Lusby sold the hall to Crowder and Payne in 1878. It was destroyed by fire on the 20th of January 1884 but Crowder and Payne commissioned the renowned theatre architect Frank Matcham to design a new theatre to replace it. The Paragon Theatre of Varieties, as it was renamed, opened the following year, on the 19th May 1885. This silk programme commemorated the seventh anniversary of its reopening.

Originlly lit by gas, it was modernised and lit by electricity when the hall was refurbished in 1893, again to Matcham's designs, with 'rich Indian colours' and 'lavish' gilding and a ceiling featuring 'dancing Moorish figures holding aloft rich Indian draperies suspended from the centre, and disclosing a blue Indian sky'.