The
social reformer, Arnold Toynbee died when
he was only thirty years old. In 1884 a group of his friends decided
to establish Toynbee Hall in the East End of London,
to celebrate his life and work. The settlement was run by Samuel
Augustus Barnett, canon of St. Jude's Church. Situated in Commercial
Street, Whitechapel, Toynbee Hall was Britain's first university settlement.
The idea was to create a place where students from Oxford
University and Cambridge University
could work among, and improve the lives of the poor during their holidays.
Most
residents held down jobs in the City, or were doing vocational training,
and so gave up their weekends and evenings to do relief work. This
work ranged from visiting the poor and providing free legal aid to
running clubs for boys and holding University Extension lectures and
debates; the work was not just about helping people practically, it
was also about giving them the kinds of things that people in richer
areas took for granted, such as the opportunity to continue their
education past the school leaving age.
Toynbee Hall served as a base for Charles Booth
and his group of researchers working on the Life
and Labour of the People in London. Other individuals who
worked at Toynbee Hall include Richard Tawney,
Clement Attlee, Alfred
Milner and William Beveridge.
Lenin
attended a debate at Toynbee Hall, Guglielmo
Marconi held one of his earliest experiments in radio there, and
Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the
modern Olympic Games, was so impressed by the mixing and working together
of so many people from different nations that it inspired him to establish
the games.
C.R.
Ashbee, one of the people involved in the Arts and Crafts movement,
was a resident in 1888, as was Hubert Llewellyn Smith, who went on
to run New Survey of London Life and Labour
for the London School of Economics in the
1930s. The Whitechapel Art Gallery had its roots in the art exhibitions
held originally in the St. Jude's school rooms. These exhibitions
were intended to bring the art of major galleries to the people of
the East End. The 1926 General Strike
came to an end at Toynbee Hall - the employers and the union leaders
met there to discuss their terms.
In 1888 Jane Addams and Ellen
Gates Starr visited Toynbee Hall and were so impressed with what
they saw that the returned to the United States and established a
similar project, Hull House, in Chicago.
The Settlement Movement grew rapidly both in Britain, the United States
and the rest of the world. The settlements and social action centres
work together through the International Federation of Settlements.
Toynbee
Hall continues to work today towards solving social problems - developing
practical but innovative solutions and then exporting them to wider
society. Many volunteers work at Toynbee Hall, including ones who
are residents. The residents, like those in the nineteenth century,
work during the day or study for postgraduate degrees or to train
for careers in social work or the legal profession, and give up their
spare time to work with elderly people, disadvantaged children and
teenagers, the legal advice centre, and many others. More than ever
society needs new solutions for new social problems and, as we enter
the early stages of the 21st century, Toynbee Hall will continue to
develop new programmes and blaze new trails.
Townbee
Hall
International
Federation of Settlements
(1)
Jane Addams described visiting Toynbee
Hall with Ellen Gates Starr in a letter
to Alice Haleman (14th June, 1888)
It is a community for University men who live there, have their
recreation and clubs and society all among the poor people, yet in
the same style they would live in their own circle. It is so free
from "professional doing good", so unaffectedly sincere
and so productive of good results in its classes and libraries so
that it seems perfectly ideal.
(2)
In his autobiography, As It Happened, Clement
Attlee described his time at Oxford University.
Oxford was at that time predominately Conservative though there was
a strong Liberal group, notably at Ballioli, which counted among its
undergraduates such men as R. H. Tawney and William Temple, the future
Archbishop, whose influence on socialist thought was in later years
to be so great. Socialism was hardly spoken of, although Sidney Ball
at St. John's and A.J. Carlyle, at University College, kept the light
burning.
I was at this time a Conservative, but I did not take any active part
in politics. I never belonged to any political club. Some of my friends
were interested in the University Settlements - Oxford House and Toynbee
Hall.
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