Bishopsgate Institute
What do Paul McCartney, Ernest Shackleton, Edward Elgar, the London Topographical Society and the City of London Boy Scout troop have in common? The answer is a striking building which, amid the massive changes around Liverpool Street and Bishopsgate over the last few years has presented the same face to the world (pretty much) for more than a century.
Now the Bishopsgate Institute is to embark on the most important stage in its history. A large-scale capital programme will transform the building into a state-of-the-art Institute for the 21st century. The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) has already shown its support for the project with a £1.5 million grant. The Renewal campaign launches on 5 February 2008 at 7pm, with many of the campaign patrons, including the Viscount Churchill OBE, Professor Dan Cruickshank, Baroness Hilton of Eggardon and former labour MP Stan Newens in attendance.
Today, the Institute offers short leisure courses for adults, a cultural events programme, a specialist library devoted to London’s East End and radical history, and a grants programme for local organisations. Over the years it has hosted musical concerts, old-time dancing, table tennis and more besides. That it exists at all is down to the vision of one man, who swept together the funds from dozens of moribund charities to create an institute for the working person in the City.
The Shoreditch side of Bishopsgate was a slum in the late 19th century. The railway companies had carved out Liverpool Street, Broad Street and Bishopsgate stations and the lines that served them, casually destroying hundreds of homes. Their residents had no choice but to cross into overcrowded Shoreditch. As so often in the Victorian East End, a far-sighted local vicar stepped into the breach. Rev William Rogers, Rector of St Botolph’s from 1863-96 had already founded schools for the poor, including the Bishopsgate School for Girls, in Spital Square.
But Rogers’ magnum opus was to be the Institute, and it was a triumph of will that he made it happen. Rogers was an expert at winkling out funds - he had squeezed £7500 from the railway companies for their demolition of All Saints Church in Skinner Street. Now he turned his eye to the myriad small charities that had been established over some four centuries in the City. Sometimes it seemed that every City worthy who died had left cash to fund a foundation in his or her name. By the late 1800s it was a mess, and there were mutterings in the City that funds had been misappropriated or diverted from their original purpose.
There was the sum of £2 left by Joan Ford in 1644 to establish a ‘love feast’ at which warring neighbours could meet and be reconciled. By 1878 this had expanded into a ‘charitable dinner’ costing around £60. There was an endowment to provide flannel petticoats. The Reverend Pitt had provided for 60 penny loaves to be distributed to the poor of his parish each Whitsunday from his grave in Elwin’s Garden, Broad Street Buildings (which by now was under Liverpool Street Station. In all, 52 charities, the oldest from 1481, the most recent from 1862, were folded into the Bishopsgate Foundation under the auspices of the practical Rogers, who noted ‘It is not that we scatter shillings, deal out soup tickets and write orders for flannel petticoats. We do neither these things nor the like of them.’
A board of local businessmen, traders and other worthies set aside £1014 for pensions for 39 poor of the parish, £400 for emergency medical relief for the poor and £260 for rents. The rest would go to the new institute. Land between Bishopsgate and Brushfield Street was bought for £28516, and a similar sum again on a building by architect Charles Harrison Townsend. The hybrid of Art Nouveau and Arts and Crafts styles shocked many, though history has treated the design well. Townsend would go on to design the Whitechapel Gallery and the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill, south London.
The foundation stone was laid on 13 May 1893 by Rev Rogers; 18 months later the Institute was opened by prime minister, Lord Rosebery. The building had a lending library with 20,000 volumes in place and a reading room, strictly segregated and with porters patrolling the centre to make sure the sexes never met. The Institute had its eccentricities - not least a ‘closed-access’ lending system, whereby the librarians fetched the volumes for readers. Autocratic librarian Charles Goss, who would run things for 44 years until retiring in 1941 at the age of 77, opined that the readers ‘can never make up their minds and merely get in each others’ way’. They also had a nasty habit of stealing the books.
The Institute offered evening lectures, with big names such as Hilaire Belloc and Ellen Terry. There were classes in book keeping, languages and shorthand. And lunchtime concerts and organ recitals became popular, with the magnificently names Reginald Goss-Custard at the keyboard. During World War II the ARP would meet at the Institute for target practice, and around the same time the City Music Society was established in the building. The Bishopsgate Club, born in 1947, brought snooker, table tennis and old-time dancing.
Today, the Institute offers more than 120 courses in languages, leisure, performing arts, self development and exercise. The debates and lectures are a must for anyone interested in East End history - upcoming subjects in 2008 include Sylvia Pankhurst, Fascism in London between the Wars, the East End Underworld, and the 1921 Poplar Rent Strike. There are lunchtime classical music concerts, and of course there is the library. And over the next five years, a £7m project will equip the Institute for the next century, with new learning spaces, a cafe, classrooms, studios and much more.
You can find out more at www.bishopsgate.org.uk. The Bishopsgate Institute and Foundation is at 230 Bishopsgate, EC2M4QH.