Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
13
Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old St •
T
020 7739 6176,
W
shoreditchtownhall.org.uk •
!
Old Street
The former
Shoreditch Town Hall
is
a self-confident Victorian edifice, now host to a
whole number of events and exhibitions, particularly cabaret, theatre, comedy and
dance, plus the stylish
Clove Club
restaurant (see p.377). The town hall's tower features
Progress, torch and battleaxe in hand, and, in the pediment, Hope and Plenty, reclining
beside the Shoreditch motto “More Light, More Power”, adopted in recognition of the
borough's progressive policy of creating power from rubbish incineration. The source of
this power, the Shoreditch Electric Light Station, still stands on nearby
Hoxton Market
,
sporting the wonderful motto
E pulvere lux et vis
(Out of the dust, light and power).
The old refuse destructor now houses Circus Space (
W
thecircusspace.co.uk), the
country's leading college for jugglers and acrobats.
Geffrye Museum
Kingsland Rd
Museum
Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm • Free
Almshouse
First Sat and first & third Wed of month • £2.50 •
T
020 7739 9893,
W
geffrye-museum.org.uk • Hoxton Overground
Hoxton's chief attraction is the
Geffrye Museum
, housed in a grandiose enclave of
eighteenth-century ironmongers' almshouses, set back from Kingsland Road. In 1911,
at a time when the East End furniture trade was centred on Shoreditch, the almshouses
were converted into a museum for the “education of craftsmen”. The Geffrye remains,
essentially, a furniture museum, with the almshouses rigged out as period living rooms
of the urban middle class, ranging from the oak-panelled seventeenth century, through
refined Georgian to cluttered Victorian. You'll also pass through the original central
Georgian
chapel
, with its tiny Neoclassical apse and archetypal stone-coloured wood
panelling; round the back of the chapel, an enclosed balcony overlooking the garden
serves as a reading room.
Further on is the museum's twentieth-century
extension
, with four “snapshots in
time”, beginning with an Edwardian drawing room in understated Arts and Crafts
style, and finishing off with a minimalist 1990s loft conversion. The extension also
houses a pleasant licensed
café-restaurant
, serving inexpensive British food, and
hosts excellent temporary exhibitions on the lower ground floor. Out the back, the
gardens
show the transition in horticultural tastes from the seventeenth-century
knot gardens to today's patio garden, culminating in a pungent, walled
herb garden
(April-Oct only).
To get a feel of what the living conditions in the
almshouses
were like, one of them
has been restored to its original condition and can now be visited on certain days
(see above), though numbers are limited and visits are by timed entry only.
Wesley's Chapel and House
49 City Rd • Mon-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun 12.30-1.45pm • Free •
T
020 7253 2262,
W
wesleyschapel.org.uk •
!
Old Street
Striking an unusual note of calm on busy City Road is the largely Georgian ensemble
of
Wesley's Chapel
and House
set around a cobbled courtyard. A place of pilgrimage
for Methodists from all over the world, the chapel was designed in 1778 by George
Dance the Younger and heralded the coming-of-age of the followers of
John Wesley
(1703-91), who had started out in a small foundry east of the present building.
he
chapel
forms the centrepiece of the complex, though it is uncharacteristically
ornate for a Methodist place of worship, with its powder-pink columns of French
jasper and its superb, Adam-style gilded plasterwork ceiling, not to mention the
colourful Victorian stained glass depicting, among other things, Wesley's night-time
conversion, with his brother still in his dressing gown. The chapel has often attracted
well-heeled weddings: one Margaret Hilda Roberts got married to divorcé Denis
Thatcher here in 1951, and later paid for the new communion rail.
he
Museum of Methodism
(same hours) in the basement tells the story of Wesley
and Methodism, and there's even a brief mention of Mrs Mary Vazeille, the
