The LCC and the Arts II: the ‘Patronage of the Arts’ Scheme

Tags

1950s, 1960s, LCC

Last week’s post looked at the LCC’s open-air sculpture exhibitions but arguably the more significant contribution to the worthy attempt to bring art to the people lay in its ‘Arts Patronage Scheme’ inaugurated in 1956. By 1964 when it (and the LCC) were wound up, over 70 works of art had been purchased – adorning schools and housing estates across the capital.

Henry Moore, Two-Piece Reclining Figure No. 3, the Brandon Estate, Lambeth © Steve Cadman and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Many of these were significant pieces by some of the leading artists in the country. Nearly all were modernist works and its efforts were not, therefore, without controversy but they remain: (1)

outstanding in their ambition and coherence…In this respect, the LCC may be said to have assisted in the democratisation, if not the socialisation, of art.

The origins of the scheme are marked by their time and place.  Although a Conservative government ruled, a broadly social democratic consensus prevailed which held that a progressive and classless society would be achieved, in part, by a democratic civic culture.  In this, the arts would be a shared patrimony, neither solely derived from nor confined to a cultural elite.

Practically, there was a feeling – as the years of a genuine rather than enforced and politically motivated austerity passed – that the LCC could now look beyond immediate necessities and broaden its efforts to improve Londoners’ quality of life.  In 1954, Isaac Hayward, Labour Leader of the LCC, expressed his view that ‘the Council has both a cultural and an educational responsibility to do what it reasonably can to encourage and assist in the provision of works of art’. (2)

Isaac Hayward

If that, to jaundiced eyes, might reek of middle-class do-goodery, take another look.  Isaac (‘Ike’) Hayward was a former South Wales miner (he started work down the pits aged 12) brought to London by his trade union work. A councillor for Rotherhithe and Deptford, he had been chair of the Public Assistance Committee which reformed the Poor Law before playing a key role in introducing comprehensive education to the capital. The Royal Festival Hall – designed and constructed by the LCC – was built under his determined leadership.  The Hayward Gallery remains a fitting tribute to his role.

In 1956, with the approval of the Conservative Minister of Education, the LCC set aside £20,000 annually (the equivalent of perhaps £0.5m in present-day terms) for the purchase of artworks.  It was thought ‘a reasonable sum’ at a time when the LCC was spending around £20m a year on ‘new architectural work and open-space development’. Some of the money was to be spent on the acquisition of existing works of art but the bulk was to go towards ‘the commissioning of new work and the encouragement of living artists’.

The LCC understood the sensitivities involved in this: (3)

The Council’s fundamental problem in running the scheme lies in the collective exercise of taste: an exercise which has to be accepted by those who provide the money, by those responsible for the service concerned, and by those who ultimately have to live with it.

And, as it acknowledged, such sensitivities were exacerbated by the predominantly modernist form of the works themselves:

Because most of the works acquired were to be associated with the Council’s own contemporary architecture, they have in practice been examples of contemporary style in art. This has sometimes been the cause of criticism, particularly where advanced design was in question.

It’s a valid point. Traditional statuary – a classicist monument or some ‘great man’ memorial – would have been as visually out of place as it was politically inappropriate.  But the public art debate was usually couched in ideological terms: between modernists (criticised by some as ‘highbrow’ and ‘difficult’) and traditionalists who defended representational art and, they claimed, the taste of the ‘man in the street’.

Robert Clatworthy, The Bull, Alton Estate © Edwardx and made available through Wikimedia Commons

For all that sound and fury, however, there were relatively few open controversies around the Council’s selections.  A Reg Butler figure for the new Crystal Palace Recreation Centre commissioned in 1961 and eventually rejected was criticised by the Times as too abstract and opposed by a local Conservative councillor who wanted something with ‘the themes of vigour, strength or sport’.  He concluded that: (4)

All this is just another symptom of the current mystique of art – that it is much too clever for ordinary people to understand.  There are very clever things to be seen now in Battersea Park, and let no-one suggest that they are a load of old iron.

In the meantime, David Wynne’s Gorilla was installed nearby – a much safer and more popular choice at a time when its model Guy was a star attraction at the London Zoo.  A John Hoskins sculpture intended for the Chicksand Estate in Whitechapel was also rejected as ‘too advanced’ by the Housing Committee.

David Wynne, The Gorilla, Crystal Palace Park

But, conversely, the LCC, which had wanted a representational work at the Elmington Estate celebrating the poet Browning’s connection with Camberwell, ended up with a more abstract piece in Willi Soukop’s wall relief, The Pied Piper of Hamelin. (The sculpture was removed in 2000 when parts of the Estate were renovated but, to Southwark’s credit, has recently been restored to a wall at the adjacent Brunswick Park Primary School.)

Willi Soukop, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, Elmington Estate, Camberwell

In general, the LCC’s selections reflect (in words quoted by Margaret Garlake) an ‘aesthetic eclecticism’.  This might reflect the cumbersome approval process involving – in fairly indecipherable fashion – departmental proposals, a Director of Arts, the Council’s General Purposes Committee and its Special Development and Arts Subcommittee and, finally, an Advisory Body on Art Acquisition itself advised by the Arts Council.  By some bureaucratic magic, public art emerged.

Siegfried Charoux, The Neighbours, Highbury Quadrant Estate, Islington

General themes and trends do stand out, however.  The earlier selections were marked by more thematic or obviously humanist content.  Siegfried Charoux’s The Neighbours, located in the Highbury Quadrant Estate in Islington is an example of this; Geoffrey Harris’s Generations in the Maitland Park Estate off Haverstock Hill, Camden, another.

Geoffrey Harris, Generations, Maitland Park Estate, Camden © Stu and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Some later works, such as Robert Clatworthy’s Bull, erected on the Alton Estate, Roehampton, in 1961 have a more obviously modernist sensibility.  Henry Moore was, of course, the prime contemporary exponent of the genre and two of his most prestigious works were placed in showpiece LCC estates – Two-Piece Reclining Figure No. 3 in the Brandon Estate, Lambeth, in 1961 and his Draped Seated Woman in the Stifford Estate, Stepney, in 1962.

Some of you will know the recent controversy that has surrounded this last work, affectionately known as Old Flo to local residents.  It was sold to the LCC by Moore at the knock-down price of £7000 – a mark of his own commitment to public art – and based in part on his celebrated Wartime Shelter drawings of East End residents taking refuge underground from the Blitz.  It represents, to its supporters, ‘the post-war desire to improve the lives of Londoners’ – its story ‘one of idealism, resilience and the marking of social change in London’. (5)

Henry Moore, Draped Seated Woman (‘Old Flo’), Stifford Estate, Stepney

That continuing social change was further marked by the demolition of the Estate’s three tower blocks in the 1990s.  Old Flo was removed and later moved for safekeeping to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  In 2012 the then Mayor of Tower Hamlets, which claimed ownership , proposed to sell it off for £20m – a tempting sum for a cash-strapped and impoverished east London borough.  To cut a long story short, a public campaign in its defence, legal action and the recent change of political leadership in the Tower Hamlets appear to have saved the sculpture – and some of that vision it embodied – for the Borough though a new local location it is yet to be found. (6)

Lynn Chadwick, The Watchers, Alton Estate, Roehampton. Photograph by John Donat.

But this is only one element of the threat that these public artworks face.  Theft is another – the fate which befell one of the three figures contained in Lynn Chadwick’s The Watchers unveiled on the Alton Estate in Roehampton in 1966.  Having ‘discovered’ (their own words) the statues in their grounds, Roehampton University are now committed to re-casting the lost piece and safeguarding the work in the grounds of their Downshire House hall of residence. (7)

The vandalised remains of Sydney Harpley’s Dockers (1962) on the Lansbury Estate, Poplar

Another threat is sheer neglect and this perhaps is the most telling.  We have travelled a long way from the idealism of the post-war world.  Local government, once a flagship of a new and more democratic world, is now a beleaguered institution, its budgets cut to the bone, left fighting to defend its front-line services.

All that, inseparably, marks the new dispensation under which our state, society and culture labour – a world in which we know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The classless civic culture envisaged by Ike Hayward and the LCC seems a lost dream but we can and should value its remains.

Postscript

I hope to write more on this topic.  Much remains to be said on the LCC’s programme of school artworks and the less ‘high arts’ elements of its support for public art.  I’d be pleased to hear from anyone with memories, detail or photographs of lost or remaining LCC public artworks and would also be delighted to hear of municipal public art across the country.

Sources

(1) Margaret Garlake, ‘”A War of Taste”: The London County Council as Art Patron, 1948-1965’, The London Journal, vol 18, no 1, 1993

(2) Dolores Mitchell, ‘Art Patronage by the London County Council (L.C.C.) 1948-1965’, Leonardo, Vol. 10, 1977 

(3) London County Council, ‘Patronage of the Arts Scheme’ (1966), London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/DG/PUB/01/364/U2336

(4) Quoted in Garlake, ‘”A War of Taste”: The London County Council as Art Patron, 1948-1965’

(5) Art Fund, ‘Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman: timeline of events’

(6) Mike Brooke, ‘People of the East End win High Court battle for Henry Moore’s “Old Flo”’, East London Advertiser, 9 July 2015

(7) The theft is recorded in ‘Second bronze sculpture stolen’, The Guardian, 24 January 2006; the University’s commitment to restoration and safeguarding in University of  Roehampton, ‘Sculpture to stand watch over Roehampton once again’, 20 February 2015.

Especial thanks go to @SirWilliamD for answering an early Twitter query and supplying copies of the original sources which inform this post.  Any errors, of  course, are all mine.

Advertisement

The LCC and the Arts I: The Open-Air Sculpture Exhibitions

Tags

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, Battersea, LCC

If we remember 1945 at all – and it seems, sadly, an increasingly distant memory – we remember it for its principles of a free and national health service, a system of social security (not ‘welfare’ or ‘benefits’) in which a common duty to share burdens and support the less fortunate was almost universally accepted, and for the seemingly radical idea that the economy should be the people’s servant, not their master.

But beyond this – as if those values were not sufficiently remarkable by contemporary standards – there was a belief in a democratic and shared civic culture.  The arts were understood as an integral part of this.

Labour’s 1945 manifesto, ‘Let Us Face the Future’ (modestly described as ‘A Declaration of Labour Policy for the Consideration of the Nation’), urged that:

National and local authorities should co-operate to enable people to enjoy their leisure to the full, to have opportunities for healthy recreation. By the provision of concert halls, modern libraries, theatres and suitable civic centres, we desire to assure to our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation.

At a national level, the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts founded in 1940 was replaced, in January 1945, by the Arts Council and its budget boosted from £50,000 to £235,000. But while described by some as ‘the cultural arm of the Welfare State’, the Council became circumscribed by the elite aesthetics and values of its ‘natural’ middle-class constituency.

It became, increasingly, the responsibility of local councils to navigate the difficult terrain between high-brow and popular culture.  Section 132 of the 1948 Local Government Act permitted local authorities to provide financial support (up to sixpence in the pound of local rates) to leisure and the arts and gave them this opportunity.  Typically, the London County Council was in the vanguard of such efforts.

Battersea Park open-air sculpture exhibition, 1948

In 1947, Patricia Strauss, the chair of the LCC’s Parks Committee, suggested holding open-air sculpture exhibitions in the capital’s parks.  Strauss herself (a wealthy middle-class member of the Labour Party and a patron of the arts in her own right) embodied the tensions in the enterprise but she was clear that she wanted it ‘to frankly be an exhibition of Modern Sculpture’ – ‘if the discussion aroused is controversial, so much the better’. (1)

In this, she represented the prevalent views of the more progressive sections of the contemporary arts world and was assisted by Henry Moore, the leading figure in British sculpture of the time.  Moore was an active member of the contemporary arts establishment: ‘a new brand of English public intellectual, committed to a more democratic culture’. (2)

Henry Moore shown working on Three Standing Figures; photograph Felix Man © Picture Post, May 15 1948

But his work, though undoubtedly ‘advanced’, was understood – with its themes of family and the human figure – as humanist and Moore himself was not a figure of the metropolitan elite.  He came from Yorkshire; his father had been a pitman and a Labour Party and trade union activist. As a Picture Post article of 1948 stated: (3)

Henry Moore is not one of those sheltered artists who have always lived on the margin of life.  He is a miner’s son, a matter-of-fact fellow, eminently sociable and sensible.

Moore was on the organising committee of the first LCC exhibition which took place in Battersea Park in 1948 and, with two pieces on show, probably its biggest name.

The show was adjudged a great success.  Over 150,000 paid to enter and some 50,000 bought the 6d programme, written to enable ‘a person on the threshold of the study of sculpture to take an intelligent interest in the exhibits’. (4)  It was also the topic of six radio broadcasts and an early television report and received very favourable international coverage.

It’s harder to judge the fine grain here but contemporary observations that most visitors were relatively well-heeled and that those who weren’t preferred the ‘less difficult’ works can’t come as any great surprise.  A contemporary Times report notes Zadkine’s Laocoon and Modigliani’s Head as among the more challenging works but concluded it required ‘no special training to appreciate the lovely figures by Rodin and Maillol, Epstein’s Girl with the Gardenias or John Skeaping’s spirited stallion’. (5)

Zadkine, Laocoon

John Skeaping, The Horse (1934); now in the Tate

Moore’s work, particularly Three Standing Figures, attracted most interest and comment. According to one guide ‘almost everyone wanted to know…what is the meaning of the Moore group’ though a London taxi-driver (then, as now, the go-to people for pithy comment) described them simply as ‘one-eyed, little minded women having a gossip’.

Henry Moore, Three Standing Figures, Battersea Park © Yair Haklai and made available through Wikimedia Commons

One of the exhibition guide/lecturers, Matvyn Wright, concluded that it attracted ‘a large public whose intelligence is on average, much higher than in the provinces’. (6)  (What would he have made of Henry Moore?)  But Strauss, who had fought for an accessible exhibition – physically at least to the extent that attendees were to be allowed to ‘pat and touch the work’ – concluded it provided firm evidence that ‘ordinary people could enjoy sculpture’.

The second exhibition in 1951, also in Battersea Park, with a stronger international presence, coincided with the Festival of Britain; the rival attraction held to be an explanation of its lower though still impressive attendance of 110,000. The Festival itself was a major source of artistic patronage and display – the Arts Council commissioned works from Lynn Chadwick, Frank Dobson, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, FE McWilliam, Bernard Meadows, and Eduardo Paolozzi amongst others, some of these works being displayed at Battersea.

Frank Dobson, London Pride, commissioned for the Festival of Britain 1951 and still on the South Bank

The 1954 exhibition (held in Holland Park) focussed on British artists and was, apparently, influenced by the more conservative tastes of a new working-class Labour chair of the Parks Committee, Councillor Alfred Kemp.  The suggestion that potential exhibitors submit models or photographs of their work prior to its acceptance was also resented by the bigger beasts of the art world who withdrew their participation as a result and the exhibition was criticised for its ‘lack of lustre’. (7)  Just 60,000 attended.

The 1957 exhibition, also in Holland Park, was principally curated by Gilbert Ledward, the President of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and was exclusively British in content.  Numbers attending rose slightly – to 72,000 – but that would be the latter peak.  Although the final exhibitions – back in Battersea Park – were more innovative in content (that of 1960 was Anglo-French in theme, the 1963 show featured artists from the US), the public fervour for public arts and entertainments had receded.

1960 Programme. The illustration is Henry Moore, Glenkiln Cross

The 1963 Exhibition was notable for its inclusion of a piece by Barbara Hepworth: Single Form (Memorial), 1961-62. This was one of three iterations of the work (the others may be found at the United Nations building in New York and in Baltimore) and ‘would, but for the Council’s action’ – they purchased it for 6000 guineas – ‘have been sold abroad’. The General Purposes Committee had been advised that it was ‘the finest work produced by Miss Hepworth in recent years’. (8) It remains today to adorn Battersea Park.

Barbara Hepworth, ‘Single Form (Memorial), 1961-62’, Battersea Park

The final exhibition – the seventh of the triennial series, held under the auspices of the Greater London Council after the abolition of the LCC – took place in 1966 but the GLC would prove to be generally less high-minded and expansive in its promotion of public art than its predecessor.

The open-air exhibitions were only one strand of the LCC’s efforts to bring art to  the people. We’ll look at its arts patronage scheme which placed artworks in council estates and schools and other council buildings next week.

Sources

(1) Jennifer Powell, ‘Henry Moore and “Sculpture in the Open Air”: Exhibitions in London’s Parks’, in Anne Wagner, Robert Sutton (eds.), Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, 2013

(2) Andrew Stephenson, ‘Fashioning a Post-War Reputation: Henry Moore as a Civic Sculptor c.1943’, in Anne Wagner, Robert Sutton (eds.), Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

(3) Quoted in Dawn Pereira, ‘Henry Moore and the Welfare State’, in Anne Wagner, Robert Sutton (eds.), Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity.  Quotations and detail which follow are drawn from the same source.

(4) AL Lloyd, ‘Henry Moore Prepares for Battersea’, Picture Post, May 15 1948

(5) ‘Sculpture in Battersea’, The Times, 14 May 1948

(6) Quoted in Powell, ‘Henry Moore and “Sculpture in the Open Air”: Exhibitions in London’s Parks’.  We shouldn’t be too hard on Wright – he was also the illustrator of Andy Pandy.

(7) Margaret Garlake, ‘A War of Taste’: The London County Council as Art Patron, 1948-1965’, The London Journal, vol 18, no 1, 1993

(8) ‘LCC to Pay 6000 Gns for Hepworth Bronze’, The Times, 13 December 1963

Stepney’s Early Town Halls: ‘fine commodious buildings’

Tags

Pre-1914, Stepney, Town Halls

London’s boroughs celebrate their 50^th anniversary this year; of these, Tower Hamlets has had a more colourful history than most.  Now the borough has a directly elected executive mayor and local governance might – on the face of it – seem relatively simple. You probably know better than that but this post looks to the past – at the complexity of some of the borough’s earlier forms of local government and, specifically, those in Stepney, one of the three metropolitan boroughs which combined to form Tower Hamlets in 1965.

London’s first city-wide administration was created in 1855 in the Metropolitan Board of Works.  This was initially a body of 45 members, elected indirectly by 43 London districts: the Vestry in 29 of the larger parishes and 12 District Boards of Works in which smaller parishes were combined (plus special bodies in the City and Woolwich if you’re counting).

Local administration before 1900: the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney was formed from the Whitechapel and Limehouse Districts and the vestries of St George-in-the-East and Mile End Old Town.

In what became the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, formed in 1900, there were two Vestries governing in their own right and two District Boards, the latter comprising a total of 13 parishes.  Keeping up?  I haven’t even mentioned the local Boards of Guardians which had administered the Poor Law since 1835.

These local bodies were generally notable, according to critics, for their ‘apathy, indifference or jobbery’.(1) All male householders (and unmarried female ratepayers from 1869) could vote but only those who paid £25 in rates could stand – a recipe for an unrepresentative body of middle-class members whose main concern was to keep down their local taxes.

An 1868 map marking the offices of the Whitechapel District Board of Works

The Whitechapel District Board confronted, to be fair, huge problems with few resources. Faced by criticism from the Sanitary Committee of the Jewish Board of Guardians in 1884, the Board complained that its difficulties in enforcing sanitary regulations were ‘greatly intensified by the arrival in the district of a vast number of foreign Jews’ and its inspectors fully occupied in trying to remedy ‘the filthy conditions of the rooms, yards and water closets occupied…by these people’.

Ten years later, an investigation by the recently-formed London County Council upheld the Jewish Board of Guardians’ complaints but the Whitechapel District maintained its mix of defensiveness and offensiveness by suggesting that ‘influential members of the Jewish community’ might educate their poorer compatriots to ‘use, instead of abuse, the Sanitary Conveniences provided for them, and to which they have not hitherto been accustomed’. (2)

There’s no remnant of the Whitechapel Board’s former offices in Alie Street, Aldgate, but it has left at least one physical reminder of its more progressive ambitions – an electric lamp-post standing outside the Whitechapel Bell Foundry on Whitechapel Road which proudly bears the Board’s arms.

The Limehouse District Board of Works building, White Horse Road, Ratcliff

Elsewhere, Stepney’s early local government bodies have left a more impressive residue, notably in the case of the Limehouse District Board of Works which built headquarters on White Horse Road in Ratcliff.  The building, erected between 1862 and 1864, was designed by the Board’s surveyor, CR Dunch – a ‘liberal interpretation of Italian Renaissance’ according to Pevsner. (3)

Limehouse District Board of Works arms above main entrance

Within four years the Board was grappling with one of the latest and largest of the cholera outbreaks to afflict London in this period – its sound advice to locals to avoid drinking potentially unsafe water availing little against the terrible sanitary conditions of the area (which couldn’t be blamed on immigrants this time).

Appropriately, after 1900 the building would house the Borough of Stepney’s Public Health Department.  In 1994, it became the home of the Half Moon Theatre, committed to giving ‘young people an opportunity to experience the best in young people’s theatre’.

Mile End Old Town Vestry Hall, now the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Bancroft Road: the 1937 extension showing to the right

To the north, the Mile End Old Town parish (not to be confused with Mile End New Town which formed a subordinate part of the Whitechapel District) was an independent vestry and it marked its status by the erection of a vestry hall on Bancroft Road in 1862 for a comparatively modest £3700. To the right of the large entrance hall, and at the heart of the vestry’s functions, lay the offices of the surveyor, medical officer and inspector of nuisances.  On the left was a committee room and – showing the peculiar mix of roles which remained – a churchwarden’s room.

All were, according to the contemporary newspaper report, ‘lofty and well lighted’ but the showpiece of the building lay, up a Portland stone staircase, on the first floor – the vestry hall itself, 56ft wide, 36ft long and 22ft high with a striking elliptical ceiling and cornice decorated with the arms and seals of the Vestry and the local Board of Guardians.  Two sun-lights in the ceiling, each containing 72 gas lights, provided light and an early form of ventilation.

Decoration of former main hall

The building, its vestry functions superseded in 1900, was converted two years later – with the aid of Carnegie funds – to a library: the lending library situated in the former vestry hall and a reference library in an extension to the rear built in 1905 designed by MW Jameson, the Borough Engineer.  The latter is praised by Pevsner who describes it as an ‘unexpectedly lavish…large room with Composite pillars and lush Renaissance style ceiling’.  A children’s library was added in 1937 in a six-bay extension to the left of the main façade designed by a later Borough Engineer, BJ Belsher.

Ceiling of 1905 Reference Library extension

The building now houses the excellent Local History Library and Archives – always worth a visit and, if you get there before 6 August 2015, you’ll be able to see a fascinating exhibition on the history of Tower Hamlets.

Limehouse Town Hall, Commercial Road

You might expect Limehouse Town Hall, standing on Commercial Road, to have been the main centre of local government in earlier days but it was in its inception merely the home of the Limehouse Vestry. It was designed, also ‘in Italian style’, by local architects Arthur and Christopher Harston.

At a cost of £10,000, the new hall was not universally welcomed but to its supporters it was a clear expression of local civic pride.  One of local vestrymen Thomas Carter Potto was clear that the town hall: (4)

in an important parish like Limehouse should be not merely a place where the Vestrymen were to meet and discuss parochial matters, but a fine commodious building where the parishioners could meet and discuss imperial and local politics.  While in the provinces, he had noticed some imposing buildings of the kind erected, especially in the northern counties, where he was happy to say the parishioners did not mind contributing in the shape of the rates in order that they might get a place where they might state their grievances or get educational enjoyment after their labours.

It’s a reminder of a time when the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ was less a political tactic than a reality on the ground – one, in fact, which could make London appear a little ‘provincial’.

A tinted photograph of the town hall in its early heyday

In the end, the building probably entered local affections more through its grand main hall’s role as a venue for dances, entertainments and some very lively political meetings.

Limehouse Town Hall would enjoy a long afterlife after 1900 – housing Stepney Borough Council’s committee rooms, then an infant welfare centre…and much more besides.  It currently houses the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust, working hard to create an arts and community centre for the district. I’ve written more on its colourful history in this post.

St George’s-in-the-East Vestry Hall/Stepney Town Hall, Cable Street:

Finally, there’s the St George-in-the-East Vestry Hall in Cable Street opened in 1860.  Its cost – a little under £4700 – had aroused, according to a contemporary press report, ‘a strong display of party opposition’ at the laying of its foundation stone.  For all that, it was, in the first place, a fairly modest edifice:  a five-bay building designed by Andrew Wilson whose ‘general feeling’ was described, yet again, as Italian – ‘this style being followed throughout the building, in the internal as well as the external decorations’.

The Vestry report from 1871 gives a good insight of its work:  turncocks responsible for opening the street pumps which supplied water for many local people and an inspector of pavements whose subsidiary and ceremonial role as beadle reminds us of the sometime self-regard of these early officials, so mercilessly satirised by Dickens.

Just to the west of the vestry hall in the former churchyard of St George-in-the-East, you’ll find a derelict brick building, constructed by the vestry in 1876 as the local mortuary. This has its own rich history, explored elsewhere. (5)

An 1899 extension to the vestry hall costing almost £8000 significantly enlarged the building though, as it simply lengthened the existing façade, almost indistinguishably in terms of architectural style.  It added a coroner’s court and a new main hall accommodating 550.

This, as it turned out, was just in time for the building to be taken over by the new Stepney Borough Council and it became known as Stepney Town Hall. In fact, borough administration was more complex than that– the council chamber itself was located in the town hall but the chief offices of the council were located in ‘a former private building in Great Alie Street’, rate-collectors elsewhere and, as we’ve seen, committee rooms and the public health department in  Limehouse and Ratcliff respectively. Unsurprisingly, there was talk of the need for a new and larger town hall to centralise all these functions. (4)

1919 Proposal for Civic Centre with Campanile, Stepney, London: http://archiseek.com/2013/1919-proposal-for-civic-centre-with-campanile-stepney-london/

In Stepney (unlike the neighbouring boroughs of Bethnal Green and Poplar), this was never brought to fruition. There were great plans, notably in 1919 for a grand Beaux Arts scheme designed by TH Mawson which proposed to transform Cable Street into a stately boulevard, renamed fancifully ‘Stepney Greeting’ and intended to open up the Borough to its more affluent western neighbours. (7) The formality of the scheme and its overpowering campanile perhaps make us grateful it wasn’t fulfilled.

The scheme was revived more modestly and more functionally in plans for a seven-storey building (which included space for the Borough’s Electricity Department) in 1937. It received planning approval from the London County Council but the war intervened and Stepney muddled on until swallowed up by the new Tower Hamlets authority in 1965.

Battle of Cable Street mural, St George’s-in-the-East Town Hall

Stepney Town Hall also enjoyed a long afterlife – home to a boxing club where the likes of John H Strachey and Terry Marsh trained, neighbourhood housing offices for the new Tower Hamlets council, facilities for the local Somali community, a law centre, and since 2013 the Unite union’s first community centre.  Non-locals are likely to visit it for the striking mural commemorating the 1936 Battle of Cable Street unveiled in 1983.

Attlee’s 1923 general election leaflet

If all this seems parochial (and, literally, it is in some respects), don’t neglect the vital role and incipient revolution marked by these early manifestations of local government and don’t disdain the civic pride signalled by its early structures.  And if it was good enough for the greatest of our prime ministers, Clement Attlee – a one-time Stepney councillor and mayor – it should be good enough for us.

Sources

This post is partly based on a talk I gave for Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives in June 2014.

(1)  WA Robson, Government and Misgovernment of London (1939)

(2) Quoted in Geoffrey Alderman, London Jewry and London Politics, 1889-1986 (1989)

(3) Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien, Nikolaus Pevsner, London 5: East (2005)

(4) Reported in ‘A New Town Hall for Limehouse Indignation Meeting’, Tower Hamlets Independent, 11 December 1875

(5) The website of the St-George-in-the-East parish contains some wonderfully rich local history and numerous images.  The detail on the mortuary comes from a fine post on the always readable Flickering Lamps blog, The Little Mortuary at St George in the East and Its Reincarnation as a Museum

(6) ‘Stepney and a New Town Hall: Revival of an Old Question’, East London Observer, 17 February 1912

A Guide to What You May Have Missed

I’m on my hols but there is an addition to the blog today – a new page (which will be updated) which provides a location and brief details of all the posts to date. You can click on the link just provided or find it at any time by clicking on the ‘Map of the Blog’ link at the top right of the page.

The map of the blog – the real thing is interactive and allows you to zoom in

I’ve tried to ensure a decent geographical coverage but it reminds me that there’s plenty of good stuff out there which deserves coverage.  I’m very happy to receive suggestions (recommended sources and detail always welcome!) of places and topics to cover or guest posts if there’s something you would like to share.

Thanks for reading the blog.