HOXTON HALL: COMMUNITY ARTS TO CREATIVE HEALTH
Image: Hoxton Hall interior, by Bettina Dela.
Hoxton Hall in East London has an unbroken history of being at the heart of its local area since it opened as a music hall in 1863.
I have to declare my interest in writing this article as I have been involved in Hoxton Hall since 2017 as a trustee. In 2022 I left the board to help run the organisation on an interim basis while we found a new management team as we emerged from the difficulties of the Covid epidemic. I no longer work for the organisation but remain close to it.
In thinking about this collection on community arts for the Museum of Unrest, I have been struck by the clear links between Hoxton Hall’s current mission to become a centre for creative health, and the community arts programme that developed there in the 1970s. I am also interested in how this all links though to a continuous history of community support from the 1870s onwards. For this article I spoke to the Chief Executive, Stuart Cox, who joined in 2023, and to the Chair of the trustees, David Sulkin OBE, appointed in 2024, who was part of the community arts team in the 1970s.
Hoxton Hall has a busy programme of music, theatre, cabaret, comedy, and variety events, with an active youth arts programme and other community activities, such as the regular Strictly Hoxton dance and music events for older people. Hoxton Hall also runs and manages the next-door building, Hoxton Works. It houses a variety of small businesses and cultural organisations including Cardboard Citizens – a theatre company working with homeless people, Counterpoint – a national agency working with refugees and the arts, other music and visual arts companies working with young people a design studio and a firm of architects.
Performance of “Unbound” Oct 2024. Photo Credit: Danny Kaan.
MUSIC HALL, TEMPERANCE, AND THE QUAKERS 1863 – 1970
The building is a rare example of an early music hall, which is still intact. It was rescued from dereliction in 1976 and beautifully restored in 2015. A review of the Hall’s opening night on 7 November 1863 in The Era noted ‘There is seldom an evil without an attendant good result resulting therefrom. A fact that may be seen to be exemplified by the opening of a new Hall, situate in the High Street of Hoxton. This Hall has been erected by Mr James Mortimer for the specific object of affording to the humbler classes an entertainment that shall combine instruction with amusement.’
Its stint as a music hall didn’t last too long as, although initially successful, it was closed down in 1871 due to allegations of rowdy behaviour and changes in fire regulations. In 1878, it was taken over by the Blue Ribbon Temperance Army, passing in 1893 into the ownership of the Bedford Institute Association, a Quaker charity. It was part of a network of nine such centres that sought to alleviate the dire poverty faced by the people of London’s East End. Hoxton Hall is still owned by a Quaker Trust but run by a separate, independent, Hoxton Hall charity.
Hoxton Hall exterior and street scene in 1906.
Harvest Festival Celebration 1906. Photos: Hoxton Hall archive.
In 1910 the Bedford Institute Association added a set of new buildings adjoining Hoxton Hall. They doubled the amount of space available for charitable work which included discussion and education groups, advice and support for the community, a reading room and occasional performances in the Hall.
There was further expansion in 1929, when the Girls Guild for Good Life, an offshoot of the Bedford Institute, built the Queen Mary Hostel next door to provide accommodation for young working women, which later became Hoxton Works.
From the early 1940s until 1973 the warden at the Hall was May Scott, a Lancashire Quaker whose commitment and guardianship was legendary in Hoxton – especially in the war years. So much so that the Hall was known locally as May Scott’s. May was passionate about the arts and allowed young professionals to use the Hall as long as they agreed to give something back to ‘her people’.
COMMUNITY ARTS IN THE 1970s
At the start of the 1970s Hoxton Hall was doing a wide range of work with its local community still run, single handedly, by May Scott. At this time May was thinking of retirement and so, when she was approached by a part-time theatre group, Nevern Square, made up of a group of teachers interested in the social impact of theatre, she agreed to their proposal to start creating plays for and with local people to perform at Hoxton Hall.
Terry Goodfellow, a founder member of Nevern Square, had discovered Hoxton Hall while working at Shoreditch Secondary School in nearby Falkirk Street, and eventually became the warden of Hoxton Hall when May Scott retired. May was naturally possessive of her Hall and her community after such long service but had full confidence in Terry Goodfellow and other members of the group, all of whom gave up secure teaching jobs to create the Hoxton Hall Community Theatre and Education Project. It was May who negotiated the visionary change of direction with the Quaker management group, the descendants of the founding fathers of the Bedford Institute Association. The new project was designed to run on co-operative lines. Although Terry was the warden, he led by consensus and collective agreement.
David Sulkin joined the project in 1974. I asked David to tell me about the work of the company at that time:
“I was asked to join the group as an extra. I was not part of Nevern Square. My role was to contribute to the professionalisation of the group, bridging the gap between teaching and performing skills. There was money to pay me for six months. In the end I stayed for four years.”
It’s worth remembering that money was provided long-term by two large and beneficent charities – the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Monument & Linbury Trusts. There was no Arts Council money nor significant support from the London Borough of Hackney.
We devised almost all of our plays by talking to people to establish the themes that demanded to be explored in the community. There was a children’s drama group, a teenage drama group and an adult drama group and sometimes they worked all together.
Hoxton Hall Adult Drama Group, Summer 1977. Photo: David Sulkin archive
We took on challenging, visceral issues. For example, one play was about a man whose flat was infested by rats, but the Council didn’t believe him deciding that the rats existed in his imagination. He ended up being sectioned. We created another play about the terrors of the battlefield in World War One because there were still people alive who had been through it. For that one we took inspiration from the work of Tadeusz Kantor, with a group visit to see a show by him, “The Dead Class”, at Riverside Studios. We created two plays for primary aged children about a tyrant called the Boss of Zog and his even more malign Auntie Zogina.
The Garden Plot – a show for children. Auntie Zogina (David Sulkin), the Boss of Zog (Jon Rake) and the Mad Professor (Barclay Price). Spring/Summer 1977. Photo: David Sulkin archive
We tried to align the plays to make sure they addressed local issues in a community that was then dominated by the National Front. People were having terrible problems with the physical condition of their flats, and the levels of economic poverty and deprivation were appalling. The constant presence of the National Front in the area was intimidating – particularly for Black people, who wouldn’t walk down Hoxton Street. Black children from Shoreditch School were told not to go down Hoxton Street after school and certainly never after dark.
Hoxton Street, 1970s. Photo: David Sulkin archive
We were a co-operative of seven people in all. Terry Goodfellow was a spiritual, deeply principled man who helped everybody. He was perfect as the leader of this organisation because people of all backgrounds loved him. The older people loved him, the market traders loved him, and he was also a good actor. As a result of our agreement to follow principles of unanimity and to follow Quaker practice, it sometimes took time to reach decisions and, to make it even more complicated, major decisions – about the fabric of the Hall, for example – had to be approved by the committee of Quakers.
We all had ancillary jobs – e.g. an adult literacy scheme, the old age pensioners’ luncheon club, the hiring of props and costumes, the management of adult education classes [which were funded by Hackney] and an after-school play club. We were all involved with the old people, including the weekly Friday afternoon tea-time knees-ups in the Hall, with old time music hall songs, home-made butterfly cakes and always lots of laughter. We also benefitted from several committed long-term volunteers who helped with many aspects of the Hall’s programme.
Older People’s group, Hoxton Hall, 1970s.
Hoxton Hall Creche users, 1970s. Photos: David Sulkin archive.
For me, coming to work at Hoxton Hall was a revelation and a shock. I was shocked that people lived in such isolation and poverty and the particular impact this had on young people. Shoreditch School was a struggling, low-achieving school. Hoxton Hall became a kind of young people’s lifeline where they could feel at home and begin to express themselves. Of course, realistically, there was some small, low-level crime but that was part of the way of life in Hoxton … but so too was loyalty and camaraderie.
Looking down Hoxton Street, late 1970s. The derelict plot on the left is now a thriving community garden, run by The Hoxton Trust. Photo: David Sulkin archive.
There was also an extraordinarily high level of adult illiteracy in Hoxton. It was usually a secret that people – especially men – could neither read nor write. Some of the members of our adult drama group couldn’t read but they learnt their lines by repetition. Making a play was their path to expressing themselves, a way of learning. I helped teach adults. I remember we had a little room close to the entrance where you could see people individually or in pairs. Often people didn’t want anyone else to know why they were coming to us.
We had good links with other arts provision in the area – for example with Free Form in Dalston Lane, with the bookshop and publisher, Centreprise, in Kingland Road and with the Shakespeare Festival, which celebrated the local link to the site of The Theatre at Curtain Road. We also collaborated on outdoors events at Bridport Place with a touring company run by Guy Holland. The other key life-changing element was the week-long summer holidays to the country or seaside for the adult drama group where the members improvised and discussed projects for the coming year.
THE PRESENT DAY – A CENTRE FOR CREATIVE HEALTH
Hoxton Hall continued to develop its community arts programme over the following decades, with a growing emphasis on work with young people. Stuart Cox joined as a new Chief Executive in January 2023, bringing a strong commitment to building further links with the local communities.
I asked Stuart to tell me about his vision for Hoxton Hall, and how he thought about the links back to this earlier work:
“When I hear David and others talk about earlier work at Hoxton Hall, I do see that there’s a through line. It links to me personally because my grandad grew up two streets away. I feel my connection with this community in my bones as I’m walking around the building, particularly when I’m on my own, I’ve never had that before.”
I have become passionate all through my career about people having culture who wouldn’t normally have that. All the work I’ve done, I love telling people about theatre and what it can do to make you feel good. Over the past couple of years, we’ve looked to develop much more widely into the community. It feels part of the heartbeat of this area, and I always think of Hoxton particularly Hoxton Street as the venue and not just the hall.
I want to open up the Hall to all ages, building on the wonderful youth work we have done for many years. I want to reach older people, disabled people, the LGBTQ communities. This area has changed, it is much more diverse.
Border Crossings Embroidery workshop for Hoxton Hub Fun Palace 2024. Photo: Sean Pollock.
Acting Out youth drama rehearsal Nov 2023 for Wind/Rush Generation(s) for National Theatre Connections. Photo: Akil Wilson.
Sound Out! Music showcase produced by Hoxton Hall’s youth music participants. Photo: Akil Wilson.
You think about wellbeing, health, happiness and belonging somewhere. That’s why creative health is a good way of looking at Hoxton Hall (see below for more information on Creative Health). This kind of way of working has existed for so many years and there have been many different names for it. It’s so interesting to hear about how the community arts work developed in the 1970s. And back to May Scott who was the warden from the World War 2 years through to the early 1970s… I hear people talking about discos and drumming and tea dances all going on. People still talk about her now. People living in this community still talk about her with reverence, so there must have been something in what she did!
There’s been so much that I hear about the history of Hoxton Hall which is so good, that sounds great and fun – for me it’s about bringing an element of that back – thinking about language and where we are now and the complexities of the world. I feel like looking at it through a modern lens which for me is Creative Health. You are looking at structures, language, and how culture impacts on wellbeing and partnership working. Artists are not health workers, but you are looking at a much more structured approach and I find that very relevant here.
One of the key things I am really inspired by is that Hoxton Hall is such a place-based venue – Hoxton Hall on Hoxton Street, right in the centre. I want to bring people from further afield to look at what we are doing in the community and see it as exciting. Our youth programme is starting to look different because we are working in partnership with more organisations, for example with Family Action and with Ronnie Scott’s who are coming in to deliver free workshops. We are doing podcasts on mental health – for example “Hoxton Talks – How creativity helps wellbeing and mental health” which was launched by the young people at Hoxton Hall, with 6 episodes created over the past year, talking with artists, producers, and therapists plus peer discussions.
We are opening up again to older people with Strictly Hoxton, which started as a wild experiment two years ago and now it’s a proper full on year round project. It is quite contemporary and diverse – a balance between performance, workshop and happening. We have had circus, vogueing, drag queens, and a visit by musicians from the Philharmonia Orchestra. This work developed into a new project “Creative Health Commissions” which began in December 24 commissioned by Mortar a creative health organisation, funded by Arts Council England. Our part of the project has been delivering dance workshops to foster balance, coordination, posture, confidence, happiness, flexibility, and strength. A group of 13 women over 55 has been formed who have been meetings weekly to dance with practitioners D’relle West and Aaron Anderson. They are now working towards a performance at Hoxton Hall, linking with other creative health activities in the community.
Strictly Hoxton event. Photo: Sean Pollock
The partnerships that have come out of it are great. We don’t work in silos but in partnerships – creative community health – everyone brings their expertise.
We are also so lucky to have Hoxton Works next door as part of our organisation, with all the interesting organisations based there whose work links with ours so closely. The potential there is amazing.
CREATIVE HEALTH AND COMMUNITY ARTS
The Creative Health movement has gained significant momentum in recent years A recent report commissioned by the Greater London Authority (GLA) interestingly makes a clear link between the community arts movement and creative health, seeing a clear through line from the emergence of the community arts movement from the 1960s onwards to the creative health movement of today.
London’s Creative Health Sector | London City Hall
The GLA report was commissioned from London Creative Health to investigate the evolution, scale and maturity of the creative health sector in London, and offers this definition of Creative Health:
The idea that creativity, culture and heritage can improve our health and wellbeing and increase equity is increasingly accepted. This way of thinking and working is known collectively as creative health… Across London people are practicing creative health by animating hospitals and care homes, transforming social work, activating creativity in the community, and providing professional development for healthcare staff.
The GLA is looking to establish London as a Creative Health City Region, as Manchester has done already.
Hoxton Hall is contributing to this by working with the Arts Development team at the London Borough of Hackneyto develop a Hoxton Creative Health Hub. The network has grown considerably over the past two years, with many local cultural organisations and health providers involved.