Hoxton Hall

Hoxton Hall is surely one of London’s best-kept secrets. An intimate mid-Victorian music hall in the East End, it has been an important and popular public venue since opening in 1863. One of only a handful of such buildings to survive in Britain, Hoxton Hall also boasts the rare distinction of having maintained continuous activity as a provider of amusement and instruction during its 160 years of existence in a deprived but resilient area of the city.

This book celebrates the hall’s reopening, charting its many different guises over more than a century and a half of activity, from exemplar of Victorian rational recreation to working-class variety music hall to headquarters of a prominent temperance movement to pioneer of 1970s community arts. This study also offers an invaluable lens for understanding an area of London that has experienced comprehensive social change during the lifetime of Hoxton Hall.

Marking its Lottery-funded refurbishment in 2015 and celebrating its renewal, this unique history of a building brings together a range of scholars of architecture, theatre and entertainment history, and social and religious history, to chart the various lives of Hoxton Hall and those who have used it.