Kingsley Hall

• 1. Introduction

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  Kingsley Hall sits on Powis Road in Bromley-by-Bow, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and in its century of existence it has sheltered hunger marchers, hosted Mahatma Gandhi, and housed one of the most radical experiments in psychiatric care the twentieth century produced. A building whose membership cards once declared it "a place of fellowship in which people can meet for social, educational and recreational intercourse without barriers of class, colour or creed" has lived up to that promise in stranger and more consequential ways than even its founders could have imagined. How did two sisters from a wealthy family come to build something like this in the East End? Who walked through its doors, and what happened when they stayed? And what does it mean that the room where Gandhi slept is still preserved today, exactly as he left it?

• 2. The Lester Family

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  Their grandfather Henry Lester started work as a bricklayer's labourer at the age of eight. His son, also named Henry, began at the Thames Ironworks at Blackwall and Canning Town at ten years old. He later owned a ship repair yard in Blackwall and used that wealth to help finance his children's early social work. Both men were devout Baptists, and from that combination of hardship remembered and faith kept, grew a family disposed to return something to the neighbourhoods that had shaped them.

  Doris and Muriel Lester grew up in wealth and comfort, yet that East End connection ran deep. Their brother Kingsley died in 1914 aged twenty-six, and the money he left behind carried a specific instruction: it was for work in Bow towards "educational, social and recreational" purposes. The sisters used it to buy a disused chapel on the corner of Eagling Road in 1915. Local volunteers re-decorated and fitted it out. The place became a gathering point for, as the sisters described it, friends and neighbours, workmen, factory girls and children.

  In 1912, before Kingsley died, Doris and Muriel had already started a Nursery School at numbers 58 and 60 Bruce Road. Children were fed, clothed and cared for at a charge of one shilling, five pence a day. When mothers could not afford even that, wealthier supporters sponsored the children through a network the sisters had built. The older Henry Lester bought a cottage in Loughton, then a countryside district of Essex, naming it Rachel Cottage after his deceased wife; it served as a holiday place for families from Bow and for nursery children.

  By 1923, enough money had been saved to build the Children's House on Bruce Road. H. G. Wells opened it. The foundation stones represent values the Lesters held dear: Vision, Nature, Rhythm and Music; Beauty, Health, Education, Motherhood, Internationalism and Fellowship. That building still runs as a Nursery School today.

• 3. Building Powis Road

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  During the General Strike of 1926, the original chapel-based hall became a shelter and soup kitchen for striking workers. The demand on the space made clear that something larger was needed. A new building was commissioned on Powis Road, funded through a combination of donations from people in the neighbourhood and contributions from wealthier patrons. The architect was Charles Cowles-Voysey.

  A stone-laying ceremony took place on the 14th of July 1927, and the guest list tells its own story about the world the Lesters had assembled around their project. Sir Walford Davies laid the brick of Music. Sybil Thorndike laid the brick of Drama. John Galsworthy laid the brick of Literature. George Lansbury laid the brick of Sunday Evening Service. Gilbert Bayes laid the brick of Art. George M. Ll. Davies MP laid the brick of Politics. Each stone was an argument that community life could hold all of these things at once, that a neighbourhood centre in Bow need not confine itself to the practical.

  Kingsley Hall on Powis Road opened on the 15th of September 1928. The building included residential cells as well as a clubroom, a dining room, a kitchen, an office, and a space for worship. Cowles-Voysey himself laid the brick of Architecture at the ceremony, which means the man who designed the hall also laid a stone into its foundation. The hall was granted Grade II listed status in September 1973.

• 4. Gandhi in the East End

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  In 1931 Mahatma Gandhi accepted an invitation to stay at Kingsley Hall while attending talks on the future of India. He had refused to stay at a hotel; Muriel Lester had previously visited his ashram in India, and he came on the condition that he could live with the working class. He took a small cell-bedroom on the roof, sleeping on the roof itself when the weather allowed.

  Lylie Valentine, who was a participant in activities at the hall that year before later becoming a nursery worker, described the atmosphere in her pamphlet Two Sisters and the Cockney Kids. She recalled that when he arrived, all the people in East London seemed to wait outside to see him. Beyond his government work, Gandhi spent time in the nursery, where all the children called him Uncle Gandhi.

  His mornings began before dawn. He took a walk of roughly an hour at a brisk pace, covering much of the local area along the Lea and the canal network. He particularly enjoyed the route along the Sewerbank, now known as the Greenway, through Stratford to Plaistow, because of the elevated views it offered. Crowds of well-wishers joined him, including many children, and on occasion he visited the homes of local people. Muriel Lester observed that he enjoyed the swift repartee of Cockney wit and was never at a loss for a reply.

  Gandhi lived at Kingsley Hall for twelve weeks. His visitors during that stay included Charlie Chaplin, George Bernard Shaw, the Pearly King and Queen of east London, David Lloyd George, and the Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Lang. He also visited the Dagenham site during those weeks. On leaving, he wrote in the hall's visitor book: Love surrounded me here. Press reports that he had been accompanied by a goat were, the source notes plainly, pure invention. In 1954, English Heritage placed a Blue plaque on the facade of the building in his honour. Muriel Lester later accompanied Gandhi on his anti-untouchability tour through earthquake-shaken regions of Bihar in 1934.

• 5. Marchers and the Welfare State

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  In 1935, Ellen Wilkinson led the Jarrow March to London, and some of the marchers were put up at Kingsley Hall. The hall's response was characteristically practical: the community collected their pennies and opened the jumble store for the men. As one account framed it, it was the poor helping the poor.

  Muriel Lester's work extended well beyond the East End. She travelled to the Far East, the United States, China, Japan and India to report to the League of Nations on drug investigations in those regions. She retired from full-time work in 1958, and in 1963, on her eightieth birthday, she became a Freeman of the Borough of Poplar. Muriel Lester died in 1967. The Bishopsgate Institute in London now holds the Muriel Lester Archive.

  After World War II, with the welfare state having taken on much of the social function that Kingsley Hall had pioneered, the hall continued at a quieter pace as a youth hostel and community activity centre. The Lesters' work had in some sense helped create the political conditions that made parts of their work unnecessary. That shift set the stage for the hall's next chapter, which arrived in 1965 when R. D. Laing and his colleagues came asking to use the building for something its founders had never imagined.

• 6. The Philadelphia Association Experiment

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  In 1965, R. D. Laing and his colleagues asked the Lesters for permission to use the hall as a therapeutic community for people in psychosis. The experiment was influenced by the World War II Northfield experiments in psychiatry. The Philadelphia Association, as the group was known, proceeded from a conviction that psychosis was not an illness simply to be eliminated through electric shocks, then favoured in Western psychiatric practice, but a state of trance that in other cultures might be valued as mystical or even Shamanistic. Residents in the grip of psychosis were treated with kindness and sincere effort, and given space to explore their inner chaos rather than have it suppressed.

  The initiative had been suggested by Mary Barnes, an artist and former nurse who became the first resident as patient. Along with the resident psychiatrist Joseph Berke, Barnes later wrote Two Accounts of a Journey Through Madness, describing her time at Kingsley Hall and her use of her mental condition as the basis for painting and creative expression. That account became the basis for the play Mary Barnes, written by David Edgar, which brought the experiment to wide public attention in the 1970s. Another notable resident was the Norwegian author Axel Jensen.

  The activities of the residents made the surrounding community largely hostile to the project. Reports of harassment were regular. After five years, from 1965 to 1970, the experiment was wound up and the hall was boarded up. During the 1970s the building was severely damaged. The project remains one of the most discussed episodes in the history of anti-psychiatry, and its methods continue to be argued over by clinicians and historians alike.

• 7. Revival and the Gandhi Foundation

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  In the 1980s, Kingsley Hall became a location set for Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi. Attenborough united with the Kingsley Hall Action Group during the filming to raise the funds needed for extensive refurbishment. Many people from the local community contributed their skills and labour.

  Kingsley Hall was reopened on the 2nd of March 1985. The week leading up to the reopening included events marking the return of the building to community use. Since then the hall has hosted youth groups, arts and photography workshops, holiday outings, advice surgeries, wedding functions and educational projects. In 1995 two major burglaries saw vandals break in and burn down the offices; staff and volunteers continued running programmes despite the destruction.

  The hall now houses the office of the Gandhi Foundation, which pursues interests of international peace in the tradition of its namesake. The room where Gandhi stayed has been preserved. The hall is run by a trust and is registered as a charity. A second site bearing the Kingsley Hall name, the Kingsley Hall Church and Community Centre on Parsloes Avenue in Dagenham, was built by the Lester sisters in the neighbouring London Borough of Barking and Dagenham and underwent redevelopment in 2018.