Toynbee Hall is a charitable institution that works to address the causes and impacts of poverty in the East End of London and elsewhere. Established in 1884, it is based in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, and was the first university-affiliated institution of the worldwide settlement movement—a reformist social agenda that strove to get the rich and poor to live more closely together in an interdependent community. It was founded by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett in the economically depressed East End, and was named in memory of their friend and fellow reformer, Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee, who had died the previous year.
Toynbee Hall
Samuel and Henrietta Barnett, founders of Toynbee Hall: a portrait by Hubert Herkomer
An East End street in 1902 (Dorset Street, Spitalfields), photographed for Jack London's book The People of the Abyss
Toynbee Hall, circa 1902
Commercial Street, London
Commercial Street is an arterial road in Tower Hamlets, east London that runs north to south from Shoreditch High Street to Whitechapel High Street through the East End district of Spitalfields. The road is a section of the A1202 London Inner Ring Road and as such forms part of the boundary of the London congestion charge zone.
Commercial Street, looking south. The spire of Christ Church is to the left, Spitalfields Market to the right. (February 2007)
The Peabody dwellings in Commercial Street: a wood-engraving published in the Illustrated London News in 1863, shortly before the building opened.
