My parents knew Toynbee Hall in the 1940s. They attended classes, went to concerts, and saw Gilbert and Sullivan operas in the theatre. This is a record of their return, 50 years later.

Supported by an Artsadmin Bursary

Toynbee Hall is a place I’d heard of since I was a child. Both my parents were born and grew up in the East End and came to Toynbee Hall to attend adult education classes in the 1940s.

The Evening Class programme included Social Studies and History, Philosophy and Psychology, English, Modern Languages, Biblical Studies, Music, Art, Film, Drama, Dance, Physical education, First Aid and Home Nursing. There were plays, concerts, operas and ballets in the theatre.

The City and East London Observer (17.12.1938) ran the headline:
Dockers in Ballet Audience!

Ordinary people developing an appetite for reading, thinking and talking. A place to improve oneself...

My Mum did Musical Appreciation and, briefly and unsuccessfully, learned the violin. My Dad did a psychology course.

Those things were certainly around me as I grew up. My Dad’s volumes of Freud, Darwin, and Marx (his heroes) on the shelf. Beethoven, Schubert and Tchaikovsky on the record player. Every month my Mum ran (and still runs) the Musical Appreciation group for the Town Women's Guild.

Researching this project has been a journey which led back to where I began. I read about the origins of Toynbee Hall and the extraordinary Canon Barnett who founded it. In the British Library I read the pamphlet (The Bitter cry of Outcast London) which inspired him to ‘do something’ for the East End, and I read about Arnold Toynbee who it was named after. I found the house where Arnold Toynbee died in 1883 (aged 30) and searched (unsuccessfully) for his grave in St. Mary’s Parish Church, Wimbledon. I read about visits from Marconi and Lenin and about the many worthy organisations which developed at Toynbee hall: The WEA, the YHA, The Citizens Advice Bureau, the Child Poverty Action Group, etc
I even saw a photograph of Margaret Thatcher singing Amazing Grace with two members of the Senior Care and Leisure Centre “to vigorous maracas accompaniment.”

In the end I found my parents far more interesting. In July they came back to Toynbee Hall for the first time in at least 40 years.

I’ll let them speak for themselves.