105 Barking Road

The hall's purpose was to provide a public meeting space and to administer council business in the southern part of the borough, where the population had expanded rapidly in the late nineteenth century. The site cost £2,400 (including land for the library) and construction cost £20,000. The library next door was constructed as part of the same development; the philanthropist John Passmore Edwards donated the first thousand books to the library's collection. It was at first intended to include public baths on the ground floor of the hall, with a galleried assembly hall on the first floor, but this aspiration was abandoned in 1891 on the grounds of cost. Instead, a second public…