York Hall, Bethnal Green
The opening of Spa London at Bethnal Green’s York Hall is another welcome stage in the saving of this East End landmark. York Hall has meant different to the generation of East Enders who have used it. For many it’s the spiritual home to London boxing. For others it meant the luxury of a Turkish bath … or simply the luxury of a bath in other than a tin tub in front of the front-room fire!
But for years, the grand old building was in terrible decline. Terminal decline it sometimes seemed, and there were dark rumours about plans to tear it down and redevelop the site. Happily, that’s not come to pass, and a three-year programme of modernisation is now coming to an end.
Public baths and washhouses are pretty much a thing of the past these days - understandable when every house has its own bathroom. But when York Hall was opened in 1929, by the then Duke and Duchess of York (later to become King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and she, later still, to become the Queen Mother), a bath in the house was an undreamed-of rarity in most East End domiciles. And that meant a weekly trip to the public baths at York Hall.
York Hall, an imposing edifice with its long red-brick frontage, with plinths and cornices of Portland stone, was a late arrival on the London bathhouse scene, though there was a huge revival in interest in the health benefits of public bathing in the 1930s (that was when many of London’s lidos were laid out; most of those too have now been closed, with others in sorry states of repair).
The real heyday had been in Victorian times, the Public Baths and Wash Houses Act of 1846 allowing local parishes to provide public baths and laundries. The importance of hygiene (cholera was, of course, an ever-present threat in Victorian London) was being recognised, and this was the only way working Londoners could get a regular wash.
But the East End beat the 1846 Act to it. Robert Cotton, Governor of the Bank of England, had founded the Committee for Promoting the Establishment of Baths and Wash-Houses for the Labouring Classes in 1844. It built its first washhouse in Whitechapel that year. They soon set to planning a second, the Goulston Square Washhouse, part of which survives as the Women’s Library in Old Castle Street. A second Public Baths Act was passed in 1897, and now Bethnal Green got its own washhouse, built between 1898 and 1900 in Cheshire Street. A redbrick building clad in Portland stone, it somewhat anticipated the later York Hall in its style.
York Hall was an impressive arrival on the scene in 1929. The main hall was a boxing venue of course, and is to this day. The home of countless ABA championships, as well as televised professional bouts, it was a proving ground for the likes of Charlie Magri and Terry Marsh, Nigel Benn and Rod Douglas, John H Sracey and Terry Spinks - many fighters graduating from local boys boxing clubs such as Repton. There were the Turkish Baths and slipper baths, a brace of swimming pools and (each set in its own cubicle) huge baths where (for a shilling or so) East Enders could soak away a week’s grime. They would enjoy a huge tub in its own private cubicle - the attendant rushing up and down outside, using a special key to top up the hot and cold on demand. If you get a chance to see the film ‘Quadrophenia’ you’ll see that Londoners were still scrubbing up in the public bathhouses till well into the 1960s, but indoor bathrooms put an end to all that.
The demise of public bathing was only one of the problems that beset York Hall. Amid fears that the building might be closed, Tower Hamlets Council pointed out that the boxing bouts and bathers went nowhere near to covering the £600,000 a year running costs of the huge old building. Ray Gerlach, the Council’s director of environment and culture, described the saving of York Hall as “the most complex issue I have tackled in 25 years: an out of date building, a borough that needs a sporting venue and we have to recognise the unique national significance of York Hall. But what is not acceptable is for Tower Hamlets residents to subside people who travel in from the leafy shires to watch a boxing match and then go away again.”
But now, the three-year, £4.5m improvement of York Hall is almost complete, with a new gym and reception area, and a 33-metre swimming pool joining Spa London. The bathers of the 1930s may not have recognised some of the modern treatments (saunas and Turkish baths are joined by an Ice Fountain, Kneipp Hose and Monsoon Showers) but they would be pleased to see that Bethnal Green still has its own, communal bathhouse.
August 1st, 2008 at 12:23 pm
What this article fails to highlight is that the entrance fee has risen from £8 to £21 and that there is a time limit of three hours per visit.
The Turkish Baths used to be a gathering point for a wide cross-section of Londoners and, for the regulars, as much a social event as a communal bathing experience.
Its conversion to a modern spa, run by corporate management, was perhaps inevitable if it was operating at a loss; but the demise of the old Grand Dame of East London will be mourned by many.
I wonder what happened to Old Billy…