Toynbee Hall

Shortly after their marriage in 1873, Samuel Barnett and his wife, Henrietta, moved to the Whitechapel district of the East End of London. Barnett was vicar of St Jude's church, where he saw poverty at first hand. Late-Victorian Whitechapel was known for its overcrowded living spaces and high criminal activity. In the area of Whitechapel alone, the mortality rate for children under the age of five was around 60% mostly due to the tight living conditions. Charles Booth, another social reformer, mapped London according to eight different social classes, finding that around 70% of people living in the East End were in the lowest three classes. 's Labour and Life of the People (1889).…

Toynbee Hall, the original building that houses the organisation of the same name, is located in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It was designed by Elijah Hoole in a Tudor-Gothic style, and was formally opened in January 1885. It was built on the site of a disused industrial school, and adjacent to the church of St Jude (built in 1845–46, but demolished in 1927). It was designated a Grade II listed building in 1973. The front of the building bears a Greater London Council blue plaque, erected in 1984, commemorating Jimmy Mallon, warden 1919–54. Since its foundation, the charity has expanded from the original building into a number of extensions and…

, Spitalfields), photographed for Jack London's book The People of the Abyss]] The international settlement movement began at Toynbee Hall, where a community centre was formed that attracted university students who wished to live or "settle" among the underprivileged in London's economically depressed East End. They came, according to Samuel Barnett, "to learn, as much as to teach, to receive as much as to give". Toynbee Hall rejected the concept of a community centre as a location for Christian proselytisingas seen in the efforts of the Salvation Army. This principle is reflected in the decision to name it after the social reformer, Arnold Toynbee, who had died in 1883, aged 30. As…