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.


    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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      • 244 Pages
      • Black & white illustrations
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