ABSTRACT
In the years Toynbee Hall was founded, East End philanthropic experiment took shape out on the Mile End Road. The Beaumont Trust's extravagant plan to build a 'Palace of Delight' was London's most flamboyant charitable venture of the 1880s, and although its style contrasted in many ways with the Whitechapel settlement the two drew on common impulses. Just as Samuel Barnett's proposal for a university settlement in Whitechapel gained traction through related movements, so too did the People's Palace scheme prosper alongside contemporary movements for technical education and moralising recreation. The conclusions to be drawn about the moral, civic and social life of rich and poor population echoed Barnett's verdict on the more impoverished quarters around Whitechapel. By uniting different realms of public anxiety, the improvement of the condition of the urban poor and the maintenance of Britain's industrial supremacy, it promised to address the realms in a single ambitious centre of social improvement in the capital's industrial heartland.
