Welcome to Shoreditch Town Hall’s brand new history website – created to celebrate our building’s 150th anniversary!
Staff at the Town Hall, helped by a group of dedicated volunteers, have spent the last year researching the venue’s past. This has included unearthing old plans, drawings and photographs from archives around London and interviewing people who have personal connections with the Town Hall. Through these stories, memories and artifacts, we’ve been able to paint a detailed picture of what the building used to look like and what it was used for.
We have learnt about Friday night dances where lovers met for the first time (and in some cases later married in that very same space); and boxers who fought in the Assembly Hall while betting boys shouted the odds in the smoke-filled ringside. We’ve met with the grandchildren (and great grandchildren!) of old Council Men and Women and Music Hall stars; and finally the locals, who loyally came back again and again to shows, plays and the old library.
The scope of experiences we have uncovered is huge and it has been such a great pleasure to hear every story and memory, however faint, and to see the photos that accompany them. It is the personal experiences that make this collection so wonderful, and we are grateful for everyone’s generous donation of time as well as memorabilia, photos and objects to the project.
This website will become both an archive for what has passed, as well as a continuous timeline for those who come back through the doors once more to recount their stories. It will grow with stories, photographs, articles, and other materials about the Town Hall, regularly adding to the research already undertaken. If you’d like to get involved, don’t think your story or memory isn’t important or not interesting enough!
We hope you enjoy looking back through Shoreditch Town Hall’s personal, poignant and diverse history as much as we have enjoyed learning of it. If you would like to share a story or memory, please contact us via email, by telephone or by writing to us at Shoreditch Town Hall, 380 Old Street, London, EC1V 9LT.