University of Exeter Press

Hoxton Hall

The History of an East End Music Hall

    • 244 Pages

    Hoxton Hall is an early Victorian music hall built in 1863, one of only a handful surviving in Britain. This book offers a history of the Hall and its role in the social life of a deprived but resilient area of London, bringing together social and religious history with the history of architecture, theatre and entertainment.

    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 the venue.

    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.


    Introduction Nicholas Till and Nadia Valman
    DOI: 10.47788/LASV5187
    1. Hoxton Hall tells its own story Victor Belcher
    DOI: 10.47788/IPYC3695
    2. A tour of Hoxton Hall John Earl
    DOI: 10.47788/HYVE8278
    3. Placing Hoxton Hall in historical context: east London and modern urban popular culture Michael Peplar
    DOI: 10.47788/DVQT9397
    4. Hoxton Hall and the licensing of East End entertainment venues (1863–1871) Deborah Jeffries
    DOI: 10.47788/TMET3307
    5.‘First-Class Evening Entertainments’: the opening programme for Hoxton Hall, November 1863 Nicholas Till
    DOI: 10.47788/GUWI9611
    6. The Blue Ribbon Temperance Mission and the Girls’ Guild of Good Life (1879–1946) Jeremy Crump
    DOI: 10.47788/EZWC7008
    7. The Bedford Institute and Quaker philanthropists (1895–1945) Siân Roberts
    DOI: 10.47788/OEML6782
    8. Rebuilding Hoxton Hall’s postwar community: May Scott’s (1945–1975) Holly-Gale Millette
    DOI: 10.47788/AHOV5209
    9. Experiments in community arts and theatre as education (1970–1990) Maddy Costa
    DOI: 10.47788/HPYX7792
    10. Regeneration, gentrification and community (1990–2010) Nicholas Holden and Mark O’Thomas
    DOI: 10.47788/YUUX3104
    11. Managing crisis (2005–2015) Hayley White
    DOI: 10.47788/MQVI4660
    12. Out of the dust: reflections on a new vision for an old hall (2015–2022) Karena Johnson
    DOI: 10.47788/PCVD6073

    Nicholas Till is a historian, theorist and practitioner of opera and music theatre, and is Emeritus Professor of Opera and Music Theatre at the universities of Sussex and Amsterdam. He has had a long association with Hoxton Hall since he first worked there as a volunteer in 1984.

    Nadia Valman is Professor of Urban Literature at Queen Mary University of London. She researches the history and culture of East London.

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    ISBN
      DOI https://doi.org/10.47788/HGIF9092
      • 244 Pages
      • Black & white illustrations
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