ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors show how the cultural mission to impoverished neighbourhoods manifested in physical architecture and built space. The Oxbridge references of Toynbee Hall's quadrangle and creeper-covered walls, the instructive statuary of Queen's Hall at the People's Palace, and the elevated height and steep roofs of the Bermondsey Settlement were all tangible expressions of the moralising intentions underlying the late-Victorian cultural mission. Metaphors of radiance and enlightenment were invoked endlessly in descriptions of the settlements that followed on Toynbee Hall's model, as when Walter Besant called them 'lamps in a dark place'. 'The proper work of Hall', commented a perceptive visitor in 1890, 'is not among the miserably poor, but it is rather to cultivate intelligence and self-respect among those who are fairly independent'. Like the impressions that prevailed among various observers, the rudimentary statistics the author suggest an audience of employed, respectable and self-improving East Enders, none of them affluent but none in desperate poverty either.
