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A short history of Shoreditch Town Hall
This text is an edited and adapted version of a report written
by Chris Miele for English Heritage, and appears in its complete form
in the ‘History of Hackney Vol 4’ available to read at Hackney
Archives.
The Municipal Reform Act of 1835 was the impetus for the first wave
of town hall buildings in the provinces. At a stroke it created 178 municipal
corporations endowed with new duties and powers. Unlike old-style town
government, most council's chose to build new offices rather than share
premises. They were also able to fund building out of local rates, or
even by issuing stock. This system of funding answered what one historian
called ‘the widespread desire for a symbolic centre’.
Initially the Shoreditch vestry met in the nearby Nonconformist Chapel
in Old Street. Most of the £30,000 spent on the new town hall had
been raised by borrowing from an assurance society at 5% repayable over
thirty years. By 1868 close to £100,000 had been raised this way.
The willingness with which Shoreditch borrowed was unusual among metropolitan
vestries, and made possible the substantial capital works in the 1860s
and 1870s.The Shoreditch district surveyor, Caesar A. Long was instructed
to obtain a suitable site. The district was heavily developed already
and land was expensive. He entered in negotiations with several different
landowners, and it took almost a year to strike a deal for the Fuller’s
Hospital site. Long bought it at auction in August 1864 for £4,850.
There was also compensation to the Hospital for the removal of the almshouses
fronting the Old Street site. (Almshouses are charitable housing, they
are often for the poor of the area, people with certain forms of previous
employment, or their widows, and are generally maintained by a charity
or the trustees of a bequest, Shoreditch was famous for them at the time.)
The total spent on the site alone was £7,500, a considerable sum.
The roughly £30,000 which Shoreditch vestry spent on their new building
was far greater than what any other London vestry paid until the end of
the century. The Shoreditch project was remarkable. Its scale and ambition
made it comparable to the municipal offices and halls being built outside
London. The vestrymen clearly wanted something to symbolize the London
variety of modern municipal government. Portland stone was specified,
and the style was to be ‘modern…for the purpose of a public
edifice’.
But the outstanding feature of the new building would be the massive
public hall, capable of seating up to eight hundred people and taking
up the entire width of the first floor. The construction was too substantial
to fund out of rates, so the Public Works Loan Committee was approached
for £22,000, Long’s initial estimate. Eventually a mortgage
was secured and Long’s designs were done in December 1864. The finances
were in place by June of the following year, when Long presented his contract
drawings and, bill’s of quantities, and specifications. The builder
John Perry of Stratford, commenced at the end of August. Sir John Thwaite,
Chairman of The Metropolitan Board of Works, laid the foundation stone
on 29th March 1866 and the finishing touches were being put to the great
halls decorations in summer 1867.
The Town Hall had the look of a proud Renaissance palazzo, high and
broad but occupying only half of the site frontage available. The architect
had wisely decided to run the long axis of the building to the south,
thus freeing up the Weston portion of the site to let to help offset the
cost. The Metropolitan Board of Works paid £1,550 for a lease, and
put a new Fire Brigade station there. The original Vestry Hall survives
in its entirety and is an outstanding example of its type.
The Town Hall extension, 1898-1902
A report was prepared in July 1898 to consider alterations to Long’s
vestry hall. A limited competition was held for the new building, and
the four designs submitted were shown in the public hall in March 1899.
In June 1899 W. C. Hunt was declared the winner and as was usually the
case with competition winners, asked to revise his design. The difficulty
of the job was the requirements to keep the old Vestry Hall in use during
the construction of the extension, which was to be built on the site of
the old Metropolitan Fire Brigade building. This entailed dividing the
contract into two phases, with the ‘cut-through’ being made
only after the new construction was well advanced. Inevitably there was
wrangling over the design of the clock tower, its sculpture, described
simply as a ‘statue of Progress’, and the sculptural group
intended for the tympana of the pediment.
Construction began in March 1901, and proceeded quickly and without
too many problems. As the new building was nearing completion, there was
an approving notice published in The Builder for 1901. The author commented
on one of the most remarkable features of the project, the decision to
incorporate the old Vestry Hall into the new project. This was taken because
the old Hall was seen ‘from a political and social standpoint..(as)
historically interesting’. The importance of the Vestry Hall as
a symbol of progressive local government was apparent to a vestry which
was in the 1890s one of the most advanced and experimental in London.
On the 15th August 1904 a fire started in the roof of the old hall,
completely destroying it and the surface decorations below. The structure
remained, including the galleries. Fortunately the Council Chamber was
not harmed, no life was lost and every official document was saved.
Original text and all images copyright Hackney Archives
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Famous events at the Hall, and recent history
One of the most gruesome events at Shoreditch Town Hall was the Inquest
into the last of the ‘Jack the Ripper’ killings, Mary Jane
Kelly, found murdered in a lodging house. The inquest opened on 12th November
1888 and was presided over by the Shoreditch Coroner. The squalid details
of the killing, the shocking mutilation of her body by the murderer and
the pathetic picture that emerged of Mary Kelly's margined life and the
mystery of the identity of the killer became one of the first truly modern
media sensations.
In the second half of the Twentieth century Shoreditch Town Hall was
one of the East Ends premier boxing venues along with York Hall in Bethnal
Green.The tragic death of Trinidadian heavyweight champion Ulric Regis
following a bout with Joe Bugner at Shoreditch led to a total ban on fights
in Hackney. Joe Bugner alienated the majority of British boxing fans by
his defensive boxing style and also by winning the British, Empire and
European titles from the national favorite, Henry Cooper in a controversial
victory in 1971. There were no judges and the referee, Harry Gibbs, scored
the fight. Bugner won by a 1/4 point. This result prompted the well-respected
boxing commentator Harry Carpenter to state, "I find that [the result]
amazing!"
The Hall fell in disuse as many of the local Town Halls were closed
down and sold off and it was on English Heritage’s Buildings at
Risk Register for a number of years. Semi-derelict it was used to hold
the Whirly-Y-Gig parties before the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust began moves
to save the building.
In 2002 the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust, an independent charity, leased
the Town Hall from the London Borough of Hackney. Re-opening in 2004 following
a £2.3m programme of refurbishment, the renovations include a complete
re-roofing and re-wiring of the building, a new heating system for the
main public rooms and provision of disabled access to the ground floor
and basement. In addition, the imposing entrance hall and original Council
Chamber and Mayor's Parlour, dating from 1865, have been fully restored
to their former glory. The Trust has recently managed and completed the
first stage of a major restoration programme and is leading the regeneration
of Shoreditch Town Hall for community, commercial and conference uses.
For more information on hiring the hall and for enquiries call:
020 7739 6176.
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