Short answers, pulled from the story.
Kingsley Hall was founded by sisters Doris and Muriel Lester, who began community work in the area in 1912 with a Nursery School on Bruce Road. The hall took its name from their brother Kingsley Lester, who died in 1914 aged twenty-six and left money specifically for educational, social and recreational work in Bow.
Mahatma Gandhi stayed at Kingsley Hall in 1931 while attending the Round Table Conference on the future of India. He had refused to stay at a hotel and came on the condition that he could live with the working class, residing for twelve weeks in a small cell-bedroom on the roof.
In 1965, psychiatrist R. D. Laing and his colleagues, operating as the Philadelphia Association, used Kingsley Hall as a therapeutic community for people in psychosis. The experiment rejected electric shocks in favour of non-restraining, non-drug approaches, giving residents space to explore their mental states; it ran for five years, closing in 1970.
Mary Barnes was an artist and former nurse who suggested the idea of the Philadelphia Association community at Kingsley Hall and became its first resident as patient. She later co-wrote Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness with psychiatrist Joseph Berke, which became the basis for the 1970s play Mary Barnes by David Edgar.
The stone-laying ceremony on the 14th of July 1927 included novelist John Galsworthy, actress Sybil Thorndike, composer and conductor Sir Walford Davies, politician George Lansbury, and the architect himself, Charles Cowles-Voysey. Each stone was inscribed with a value such as Literature, Drama, Music, or Architecture.
The Gandhi Foundation has its office at Kingsley Hall in Bromley-by-Bow and pursues interests of international peace in the tradition of Gandhi. The room where Gandhi stayed during his 1931 visit has been preserved, and a Blue plaque was erected on the building's facade by English Heritage in 1954 to honour him.