Oxford House
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This week’s Somali Festival, organised by and based around Oxford House, writes another chapter in the
116-year history of one of the East End’s great charitable institutions.
The ‘East End Squires’ who set up Oxford House in 1884 might have a little trouble recognising their manor today. Weavers Fields, the venue for Saturday’s outdoor festival, was then home to street upon street of back-to-back terraced slums.
And the clientele of Oxford House has changed as Bethnal Green has changed. A century ago, many of the people using the House would have been Jewish; today it boasts a large Somali contingent.
In the new millennium, the aim is to encourage “a sense of community in a multi-ethnic society”. But how did the whole thing begin?
Howling wilderness
A century ago, Bethnal Green was one of the most miserable districts in the capital. A visiting vicar wrote: “Bethnal Green! A howling wilderness; drunkenness in the back streets; fights in the squares; starvation in the alleys; pauperism rampant; religion nil.”
No wonder that when the new Bishop of Stepney, Arthur Winnington-Ingram, attemp-ted to set up mission services, he was told by a local priest: “It won’t do any good, nothing does any good round here.”
The early inspiration for Oxford House was based on a mix of Victorian muscular Christianity and an upper class sense of duty toward the lower orders.
James Adderley, the first active head of the settlement, wrote: “Our social system is based on the assumption that there is a leisured class in every locality who will see that the laws are carried out and keep the social life going… there is no such class in London where it is most wanted.”
Squires of the east
So was born the famous rallying cry for young Oxford gentlemen to undertake missionary work to Bethnal Green: “Come and be the squires of east London.”
The impetus for the new settlement came from Keble College Oxford, hence the name. The scholars of Keble had, for years, been contemplating an Oxford church settlement based in a London parish, so that tutors and trainee clergy could learn at first hand about the problems of the city’s poor.
The first two graduates arrived in 1884, taking up residence in a converted school
set among the old weavers’ houses. Oxford House soon gained a reputation for being friendlier and more relaxed than the rather more earnest Toynbee Hall settlement.
Things really started moving with the arrival of Winnington-Ingram as the new Head of House. He set about fundraising and, in 1892, the present building was opened.
The ‘squires’ lived in the house as well as working there. One of the first, Ernest Bramwell, wrote of his first impressions: “What a nice house, what splendid clubs for working men.
“In the House were Oxford and Cambridge men, all had different jobs assigned to them. They were all full of the Head’s enthusiasm, and there was a delightful spirit of friendship and welcome.”
Religion was important too, of course. Nobody was obliged to attend chapel, “but everybody did” wrote Bramwell.
One of the most successful ventures was the Webbe Club, which had a huge waiting list of local lads wanting to get involved in the running, rowing, boxing, billiards and darts clubs.
But the years after the war and up to the 1970s saw a long, slow decline, as the numbers of students willing to take up a year’s missionary work in the East End dwindled, and Oxford House itself started to question its role in a much-changed Bethnal Green.
A new lease of life came in the 1970s and ’80s, as new director David Clarke reinvented the House as “offices, a pub, a cinema, a church, a school, a gym, a youth club, an arts centre and a meeting place rolled into one”. Oxford House became involved in teaching new skills – including writing, typing, film-making, printing and photography.
Gallery and theatre
Today, it is essentially an arts centre and this year was awar-ded £1m of Lottery money to build a new art gallery and
theatre.
And as present director Kim Adams says: “Unlike many other Lottery-funded arts ventures – the English National Opera, for example – we will be open all hours for local people.”
That’s the spirit of the modern Oxford House – a hundred different things to different people, and every one welcome, irrespective of age, gender, culture or creed.