6 Constructing new spaces

In June 1839, the Chartists of Heckmondwike and Liversedge in the West Riding announced their plans to build a ‘People’s Hall’. The Northern Star commented that the decision to build the hall was prompted ‘in consequence of the Radicals of Heckmondwike and Liversedge having been ejected from public houses and schoolrooms through the influence of the “conscientious and liberal” Whigs and despotical Tories’. Their initial motivation was thus a product of exclusion, but their wider aims were inclusive. Funded by one-pound shares, the hall was primarily intended to host their meetings and activities, but it was also to be ‘confined to no sect or party, but for the benefit of the people at large’. This was not a ‘Radical or Chartist Hall, but a People’s Hall’. Upon construction, the people were nevertheless defined by class and gender: the building became Heckmondwike working men’s hall.¹

With greater longevity and funding than their predecessors, radicals were able to move beyond ‘spaces of making do’. Owenite socialists, Chartists, trade unions and the other social movements that emerged in the 1830s hired or constructed detached buildings for their sole use. These sites of meeting functioned not just for immediate campaigns, but for longer visionary goals. These were spaces to enact an alternative economy, a freer religion, an egalitarian education and for entertainment. Association rooms, working men’s clubs and halls of science reflected a holistic view of how politics should shape communities and their everyday life. They offered a new definition of public space.² Owenite socialists used halls of science to challenge the dominant political economy of the elites; they offered an alternative to the middle-class controlled mechanics’ institutes. Through the conviviality and mutuality of working men’s halls, the trade unions provided an alternative to the drudgery of factory work. The Chartists attempted to create a holistic way of life with entertainments, shopping and education in their own halls, shops, chapels and schools. The more radical dissenting sects continued to look to this world and the next against the alienating class hierarchies of Anglican churches and the increasing conservatism of traditional Methodism.

Historians have underplayed these elements of social movements, focusing rather on hagiographies of their leaders and their role in major campaigns such as the Chartist petitions to parliament in 1839, 1842 and 1848. But as more recent studies of Chartism have shown, the associational and social elements of political movements were neither ancillary to the main goals of achieving representation in parliament nor a response to political failure. Social activities were an integral part of building the movement.³ The ‘localities’ columns of the Northern Star and the Poor Man’s Guardian advertised week after week the wealth of social activity that supported political agitation at its very height as well as in between each peak. Class identities and solidarity were formed through everyday life as well as through points of struggle. And during and between waves of agitation, new spaces provided room for the movements to develop and expand outwith the restrictions placed on oppositional action by anti-radical elites since the 1790s.

Nonconformist chapels continued to provide venues for many different oppositional groups, such sites often being the largest indoor space available in villages and the ‘neighbourhood’. The postwar Reformers’ chapel in Middleton was succeeded by the Primitive Methodist chapel (founded 1835) at the top of Barrowfield (itself a frequent political meeting site). The Chartists met at the Reformers’ chapel in support of the imprisoned Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens in January 1839 and in February 1840 to arrange a memorial to the queen to request a pardon for the Welsh Chartists transported to Australia for their part in the Newport rising.⁴ Queenshead Northern Union in the West Riding used the New Connexion Methodist chapel and the Baptist schoolroom for their meetings. The Baptists later refused the Chartists further use of their schoolroom, but the Primitive Methodists offered their chapel as a replacement venue.⁵ Chapels were nodes of co-ordination for evangelical itinerant preachers, and Chartists were able to use their ready-made networks to spread their own message. William Thornton from Halifax, a regular speaker for Bradford Northern Union, preached every week at Mount Carmel chapel, Little Horton, and Zion chapel, Birstal.⁶ Independent Methodists were particularly sympathetic hosts in Oldham and surrounding towns in Lancashire. The sect, like the Kilhamites and Primitives, was formed after Wesleyan leaders attempted to suppress revivalist activities in fear of being associated with political radicalism as well as theological heterodoxy. The Manchester Wesleyan Leaders’ meeting expelled over four hundred members in 1806, enforced a ‘no-politics rule’ for sermons and reassured the Home Office of their loyalty to the monarchy. The Independent Methodists therefore provided a natural home for both political and religious dissent.⁷ Their schoolroom on George Street in Oldham continued its long-standing role as a venue for meetings of the Radical Reform Association, temperance tea parties and meetings for the Ten Hours campaign.⁸

Dr James Scholefield’s congregation provided another important haven for radicalism through the difficult years following Peterloo all the way until Chartism. The combination of a committed activist over a long time and a community who had already risked much in their dissent sustained their position through thick and thin. Scholefield’s Cowherdite Bible Christians were an offshoot of the Swedenborgians, founded by William Cowherd (now better known as a pioneer of vegetarianism). The Cowherdites took on many of the children of radicals turned out by Methodist Sunday schools after Peterloo. Scholefield was a preacher and medical doctor who became renowned for his treatment of the poor during the 1832 cholera epidemic.⁹ He constructed Christ Church chapel on Every Street near the expanding industrial area of New Islington in Manchester. The chapel formed part of a complex consisting of a two-storey house with an attached large circular hall, nicknamed the ‘Roundhouse’. The round form of the chapel, as in the case of Richard Carlile’s Rotunda in London, was intended to facilitate a more direct and less hierarchical relationship between lecturer and audience. It was overtly political from the start, with the opening ceremony taking place on 16 August 1823, the anniversary of Peterloo (an event which Scholefield had witnessed and had given evidence about at Hunt’s trial), and at which eight children were named after Henry Hunt.¹⁰ The radical Working-Class Political Union held their district meetings in the schoolroom ‘under the chapel’ during the agitation for the reform bill in late 1831. A public meeting to consider the cause of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, addressed by the cotton spinners’ union leader John Doherty and radical R. J. Richardson, took place in the chapel in April 1834.¹¹ Scholefield sustained the religious and political independence of his congregation and took them with him into Chartism. Scholefield went on to represent Ancoats on the new Manchester corporation.¹²

Scholefield’s chapel continually constructed and reimagined radical heritage. In 1842, on the anniversary of Peterloo, 16 August, at the height of the plug strikes, the trades’ congress and the Chartist Convention, Feargus O’Connor inaugurated the erection of a monument to Henry Hunt in the burial ground of the chapel. The monument demonstrated the Chartists’ wish to construct their connection with the postwar radical movement using a physical ‘landmark of memory’. The Northern Star featured an engraving of the monument prominently on its front page, intimating that the authorities’ actions against both Chartists and the trade unions boded another massacre.¹³ The siting nevertheless reflected their exclusion from public space: despite the Liberal authorities continuing to connect their identity with the legacy of Peterloo, they would not have allowed a radical monument associated with universal suffrage on St Peter’s Fields (where they were constructing the Free Trade Hall, associated with Smithian economics not the rights of workers). So the Chartists had to erect their monument in their own locale on the land of a sympathiser. The construction of a landmark of memory worked in the short term. In 1847, the Northern Star reported the funeral of ‘Mr Rothwell, the oldest Radical in the town’: ‘His last wish was that the Chartists of Manchester should follow him to his last home and that he might be buried in the vault under “Hunt’s monument”’.¹⁴ From 1897 to 1963, the old chapel was the venue for the Manchester University Settlement. The fate of the monument, by contrast, illustrated the fate of the radical movement it represented: funded by penny subscriptions, it was by necessity cheaply built and difficult to maintain, leading to its collapse a couple of decades later.¹⁵

A contrastingly charismatic leader was Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens, who established a network of chapels in Ashton-under-Lyne, Stalybridge and surrounding villages in the Ashton and Huddersfield circuits. Stephens, after seceding from his appointment to the Ashton Wesleyan Methodist circuit, erected his own chapel in Charlestown to accommodate 1,100 people in 1837. Its siting was an obvious choice: the rapidly expanding industrial settlement of Charlestown had a long tradition of radical and dissenting independence.¹⁶ The chapel became the central place in the district for radical activity. By 1839, the Stephensites had ten preaching stations and thirty-one preachers in the Ashton circuit alone. Stephens and his supporters were therefore able to mobilise their movement quickly and effectively by building upon a well-established community of believers. Stephens headed the anti-new poor law campaign in the district and then became even more notorious for his forthright sermonising on behalf of Chartism. He was arrested by Bow Street runners sent up from London in December 1838.¹⁷ As the first notable radical leader to be imprisoned, the campaign to free him became a national Chartist concern. Upon his release on bail in March 1839, Stephens intended to give a defiant sermon justifying his actions in his Charlestown chapel, thereby drawing national attention to this industrial village, connecting national with local. Thousands of people assembled, causing the sermon to be adjourned to Ashton market place.¹⁸ The structures and connections of the breakaway Methodist sects were again key to the rapid organisation and pan-regional spread of Stephens’s defence fund. The Stephensite Chartists borrowed chapels or Sunday schools under working-class control to deliver Sunday sermons and take a collection. Such sermons brought small townships into national notice in the spring of 1839. At Lees near Oldham, Chartists held a meeting in support of Stephens at the Arminian Independent room, and across the Pennines, fundraising sermons were preached in his honour, for example at Mount Carmel chapel in Little Horton outside Bradford.¹⁹ Stephens repudiated Chartism after his arrest, resigning his seat in the Convention, and was subsequently vilified by the movement. In August 1839, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.²⁰ The Charlestown chapel nevertheless remained a site of meeting. Several delegate meetings of the plug strikes were held in the ‘Chartist meeting room’ in the summer of 1842, and in September, Richard Pilling, another Ashton leader, was arrested as he addressed a strike meeting in the chapel.²¹

Many religious congregations preferred to promote issues of social justice, temperance and anti-poverty rather than risk loyalist censure by allowing radical reformers to meet regularly in their premises. So Oldham Providence Independent chapel held a meeting to support Michael Sadler’s factory bill in January 1832, while in November 1836 the Methodist New Connexion chapel hosted a meeting to support the campaign for a ten-hour working day, addressed by the paternalist manufacturers John Fielden and Richard Oastler and chaired by ultra-radical William Fitton.²² The new poor law was an even more cross-party issue, and anti-poor law campaigners met at many chapels, including the Methodist chapel at Wigton in Cumberland, where the female radical society agreed a memorial to the queen against the new poor law in December 1838.²³

Socialists and Chartists sought to construct buildings to facilitate their utopian visions of a radical religious community. Socialists envisaged multi-purpose sites which would combine radical services with self-education in lectures, a library and newsroom. At Huddersfield, 120 one-pound shares had already been collected by October 1829 for the erection of a ‘neat, plain and spacious’ chapel. It was never completed, but it foreshadowed the building of the Owenite Hall of Science a decade later.²⁴ The Chartists, as in many endeavours, had the longevity and funds to set up their own chapels, predominantly in Scotland, but also in about twenty places in England. The significance of these chapels lay in their emphasis upon full lay ministry, in reaction to the clerical and classist hierarchies of the established church and the increasing self-preserving conservatism of the Methodist sects.²⁵ They sought, if ephemerally, to offer some kind of democracy in religious practice and belief. At Northowram, a township north of Halifax, the Round Hill Primitive Methodist Chapel severed its connection with the Connexion and formed a Chartist church. Keighley Primitives made a similar break to offer Chartist-oriented services.²⁶ In Oldham, the chapel ‘lately occupied by the Primitive Methodists’ on Grosvenor Street became a central meeting place for many radical groups. It held anti-new poor law meetings in early 1837 and a meeting of the working classes to support the striking Glasgow spinners in November 1837. The Owenite socialists took over the chapel and renamed it the Socialist’s Institution, with a series of lectures in the first week of January 1838. Later in the month, Richard Carlile gave a series of lectures in the Institution, and Robert Owen, Lloyd Jones and Feargus O’Connor lectured there in 1838–9. Socialist tea parties were held every Easter Monday. Operative ultra-radicals and Chartists also used the Institution for meetings between 1838 and 1840.²⁷

By 1840, authorities’ suspicion of Owenite socialists was roused not so much by their association with trade unionism as by their social and pseudo-religious activities. What worried Anglican clerics in particular was the secularism which they saw was the result of socialists creating an alternative sphere of activities on Sundays for the working classes.²⁸ In early 1840, the bishop of Exeter rallied his peers against socialism. He presented correspondence to the House of Lords, complaining of the erection of a social institution in Leicester. The Home Secretary, Marquis of Normanby, retorted by stating that socialism was not on the increase.²⁹ Clergy and other Anglican notables indignantly wrote in their droves to the Home Office to contradict him. Liberal antiquarian John Easby of Manchester, for example, boldly informed Normanby that his statement was an ‘error’, and then listed the places where socialists had a ‘fixed place of meeting’, either a hired room or meeting house, visited each Sunday by lecturers. These included: Liverpool, Bolton, Ashton-under-Lyne, Rochdale, Oldham, Preston, Wigan, Warrington, Stockport, Heywood, Hyde, Leigh, Middleton, Macclesfield, Mottram, Blackburn, Sheffield and Huddersfield. For Manchester, he reported,

In 1836 they assembled in small numbers in Salford, comparatively unknown, increasing, they engaged Mr Bywater’s room in Manchester (one of the largest in the locality) for Sunday discussions. Average attendance [is] 600, although one penny was exacted for each person’s admission. Now they have six [paid lecturers] at a salary of 30/- each. Average attendance now in the Carpenters’ Hall [is] 800.

Easby noted that the socialists were increasing ‘so rapidly that they have purchased land, and have nearly completed a very large Hall near St. Matthew’s Church’.³⁰ Mr Bywater’s ‘large room’ on Peter Street was situated on the edge of St Peter’s Fields and was neighboured by various chapels, including the Methodist New Connexion and the Swedenborgians. It held up to 2,000 people, and hosted lectures by Richard Carlile upon its opening in November 1836. However it is clear that Mr Bywater was less concerned about the particular tenets expounded in his rooms than collecting his rents, and the venue also hosted a meeting of the operative dyers during their strike in April 1837 and a ‘Great Protestant meeting’ railing against ‘Papists’ in January 1839.³¹

The erection of social institutions and working men’s clubs from the 1830s was a breakthrough in political movements’ control over space. Many groups sought to break their reliance on renting, as well as the use of hard-earned money to line the pockets of Rachmanish landlords. Constructing their own buildings provided an opportunity for socialists, Chartists and trade unions to at least attempt the construction of temporary utopias in spaces where they could seek their goals of education and liberty. The Carpenters’ Hall in Manchester was built by the voluntary labour of its joiners and carpenter members, who raised £4,500 for the construction, and backed by socialist trustees and anti-new poor law campaign leader R. J. Richardson. Located on Garratt Road off Granby Row Fields, near Piccadilly, a site also used regularly for open air meetings by trades and striking workers, the 6,000 capacity building included a gallery, organ loft and several ante-rooms.³² Edward Royle points to its success as a shared endeavour between Owenites and Chartists. It hosted Chartist meetings, especially during the agitation of 1839, and the Chartists took over the running of the venue in 1842.³³

Radicals in Oldham had been able to get elected to the vestry, which uniquely enabled them to use civic sites such as the sessions room in the Terrace Buildings and the town hall, where several prominent Chartist leaders gave lectures in 1842.³⁴ But they lost control of vestry government in 1843, which led the Chartists to resolve to build their own hall. Oldham working men’s hall cost £1,600, financed in part by one-pound shares. The symbolism of this act was made overtly clear at the laying of its foundation stone in April 1844. Feargus O’Connor took a role deliberately subverting the ritual and authority of local civic leaders who attended every ceremonial bricklaying in this period of urban expansion. His typically triumphant address underlined the centrality of physical space and the meaning of place to political conflict: ‘You will remember what it was that made you think of building this Hall. You were denied the use of that Hall which your labour and money had erected. Thus has persecution, at all times, defeated its objects’.³⁵

In 1840, the Sheffield Chartists similarly declared, ‘we make ourselves independent of every other body or class, we cannot do so unless we have our own meeting, reading and lecture rooms’.³⁶ William Hill, editor of the Northern Star, reported on his trip to the town in 1843:

There is no nonsense about the men about Sheffield. They are men of the right sort. The Town Hall had been refused us, and the ‘lads’ were compelled to put me in their own room, in Fig Tree Lane. They have had it tastefully beautified since I was there. It is now a very handsome room; but rather wanting in size.³⁷

The Fig Tree Lane rooms were the beating heart of Sheffield Chartism, with weekly meetings being held there from 1839 to 1844. The lane was a hundred yards or so downhill from Paradise Square and close to the parish church and Cutlers’ Hall; the Quaker meeting house was also situated on the lane. The ‘association room’ adjoined the Fig Tree tavern, most likely at number 21, where Chartist George Cavill, newsagent for the Northern Star, was registered in 1845. Chartists held a meeting with the trade unions at the room during the plug strikes in August 1842. A Chartist youth group met on Sundays at the rooms from March 1842, and the female Chartists held evening meetings and lectures there.³⁸ The Chartists also were quick to adorn the space with symbolism. After the imprisonment of Samuel Holberry for his involvement in the Sheffield rising in 1840, the Chartists created a shrine there, with a bust of their martyred leader and banners inscribed with the name of Wat Tyler, whom Holberry idolised.³⁹ A branch of the rival middle-class Complete Suffrage Union was formed at a meeting in Paradise Square in February 1842 and they hired their own political institute for their lectures.⁴⁰

Other social institutions and Chartist rooms were less specifically designed for their tenants, not least because they were part of pubs or other buildings with multiple uses. Indeed, O’Connor’s speech in Oldham was predictable hyperbole, as Oldham Chartists and trades also met throughout this period in the Socialists’ Institution on Grosvenor Street and the prominent Albion Hotel on High Street, among other pubs.⁴¹ Huddersfield Owenites’ first social institution was a room in the George and Dragon on Manchester Street, but it proved too cramped for the burgeoning movement and magistrates threatened the landlord with the loss of his licence. Dickinson’s room on King Street, the base for Huddersfield Political Union in the early 1830s, became the association room for the Northern Union and Chartists in 1839.⁴² An anonymous source reported to the Home Office in July 1839 that the socialists in Bradford ‘have taken a large Room from a person named Butterworth calculated to hold 1500 persons which was formerly used as a preaching room for the [Radical] Associationists’.⁴³ Chartists used the room for central committee meetings on Saturdays, and itinerant socialist preachers gave sermons and lectures on Sundays, so the site was also dubbed the Democratic Preaching Room. The growth of Chartism prompted the committee to reorganise their structure into sixteen divisions in late October 1839, which they decided in ‘their room’, and the venue continued to be used for public meetings in November 1839 and to elect delegates to the National Convention in December 1839. Owenites and Chartists sought a more ambitious enterprise in 1840, planning a working men’s hall which would have included a complex of committee rooms, shops, and a large lecture theatre. By October, a hundred shares had been sold to fund the venture. The complex was however never constructed. Nevertheless, the utopia was still achieved in a way: the different functions were built separately by 1841, and functioned as envisaged, albeit not under one roof. Butterworth’s room maintained its purpose as a centre for oppositional information: in October 1842, for example, the Northern Star reported that it opened on a Sunday ‘for the reading of several political works; the Evening Star, Northern Star, Chartist Circular, Labourers’ Library and Democrat always to be had’.⁴⁴

The West Riding was unusual for the number of Oddfellows’ lodges who allowed radical groups to meet in their halls. Barnsley Chartist diarist John Hugh Burland recorded that the Oddfellows’ Hall in Barnsley hosted a meeting to support the striking Glasgow spinners in February 1838; a public dinner on New Year’s Eve 1838 to welcome back William Ashton, a former linen weaver transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1830 for having taken part in a strike; and a public meeting to raise a subscription for Reverend Stephens in February 1839. Feargus O’Connor gave lectures in the hall on his regular visits to Barnsley in 1839.⁴⁵ When the Bradford Chartists found all other meeting places closed off to them in 1839, the Oddfellows rented their hall for their use. However, the magistrates summarily threatened to revoke their licence if they continued to let the Chartists use the hall. Initially the Oddfellows denied the rumours about the threat of the magistrates, and wrote to the Northern Star claiming, ‘you may still hail with delight the erection of the only building in the town of Bradford that is pro bono publico–open to all and influenced by none’. Unusually, the Oddfellows decided to prepare for confrontation with the authorities, which they avoided only because the Chartists themselves decided to withdraw.⁴⁶

Halls of science epitomised the visionary schemes of working-class social movements in this period. Halls of science were built in Manchester, Huddersfield, Ratcliffe Bridge, Sheffield, Macclesfield, Bradford, Liverpool, Leeds, Halifax, Honley and Stockport between 1839 and 1841. The ‘very large Hall near St. Matthew’s Church’ in Manchester (see figures 11 and 12) mentioned by John Easby was constructed on the edge of Camp Field on the Mosley estate and leased to Samuel Kay (the long-time secretary of Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, and one of the founders of the Portico Library and Royal Institution) and William Clegg (the Owenite business associate of the Fieldens of Todmorden and treasurer of the South Lancashire anti-new poor law association).⁴⁷ Though this book has been wary of the spatial turn’s practice of describing buildings as ‘texts’, a sure exception can be made for the halls of science.⁴⁸ In Manchester, ‘Hall of Science’ was carved on its door lintel, while ‘sacred to the investigation of truth’ lined the side of the long edge of the building. Owenite socialists sought a new truth that challenged the individualistic profit-motive of the developing ‘Manchester School’ of laissez-faire merchants and manufacturers, as demonstrated by their Free Trade Hall. More directly, the ‘truth’ was a more communitarian, ‘moral’ and even democratic education than was offered by the paternalist middle classes in their mechanics’ institutes. Owenites could not however afford to be exclusive and hired out their hall for Chartist meetings, as well as for trade unions during strike agitation.⁴⁹

Halls of science were particularly distinctive in style and features, directed by Robert Owen’s theories on architecture as realised at his utopian experiment at New Lanark in Scotland. All the halls were built in a neo-Classical style, relatively plain but with pediments and porches, demonstrating a similar but alternative permanence and trustworthiness as the buildings most alike in appearance, banks. Interiors were planned around a high-ceilinged central hall with adjoining kitchens, library and meeting rooms.⁵⁰ The scale and ambition of the constructions were reflected in their size, appearance and contents. The halls showed off workmen’s skill in craft and creating beauty in a political demonstration of the worth of their labour. The prospectus of Huddersfield Hall of Science boasted that ‘the lecturers’ platform is to occupy a position directly in front of a splendidly stained glass window executed by Mr Joseph Smith of Manchester’.⁵¹ With a six-foot high stage lit by gas, the Manchester Hall of Science was a monument to the modern age and the belief in mutual improvement.⁵² The Liverpool Hall of Science cost £5,000 and included seating for 1500 people in an upper-storey lecture hall. According to the prospectus, on the roof there was ‘a leaded platform, 19 feet by 72 feet, on which there will be an observatory for astronomical purposes, and this platform commands a beautiful view of the town, the river and the docks’.⁵³

The job of raising money and organising the construction of these new sites was in itself a political act. The halls of science in Manchester (which cost £6,000), Liverpool, Halifax and Stockport were financed through share clubs and building societies.⁵⁴ The investments reflected the confidence in their success and longevity as well as a strong tradition of building societies as a form of mutual self-help and alternative economy, although more individualistic than strict Owenite economists would have liked in theory. Hyde Institute or social institution was set up by a committee of ten men, including a weaver, a factory overlooker, two shoemakers and a stonemason, headed by John Bradley, a clogger from Blackburn who became ‘the leading Chartist in Hyde’. They secured a long lease on a piece of land, and the hall was opened by Robert Owen with a programme of lectures, processions and sermons by Reverend Stephens from 9 to 11 September 1838. Owen’s speech expressed his vision of unanimity: ‘this is the first building of the kind ever erected in this part of the country and will very likely do much towards the softening and wearing down the sharp edges of petty differences and prejudices that have hitherto too commonly characterized the people of this and every other district’. Just over a month later, however, the committee had to mortgage the institute and its lease for £350 at 5 per cent interest to a widow and shopkeeper from Dukinfield. The Chartists used the institute extensively during 1838 and 1839.⁵⁵

These buildings were not intended as subversive statements, but rather as positive alternatives to the limited options available to the working classes. The first toast proposed by Abel Heywood at the dinner to celebrate the opening of the Manchester Hall of Science was to the queen, followed by a recitation of the national anthem.⁵⁶ J. F. C. Harrison interpreted these experiments as a form of escapism, a psychological reaction among former craft workers against the ‘disruption’ of industrial and political forces. The move indoors more generally has also been seen as reflecting a desire for respectability among the Chartist and other working-class movements. Eileen Yeo argued strongly against these interpretations, asserting that the Chartists and Owenites were not conducting a retreat from capitalism. Rather, ‘they felt that they were creating alternative and competing cultures in a still-molten situation’.⁵⁷ This image of the shape and government of early Victorian towns as still in a state of flux, where many different possibilities were still available, is a more useful way of understanding the political battles over space than a hard and intractable story of inevitable class exclusion. Owenites, Chartists and trade unions had some agency to fight back, both in practice and symbolically. Their goals were not otherworldly; they sought what they regarded as an achievable alternative to middle-class paternalist and capitalist culture through collective self-help and democratic control.

The halls were the outward sign as well as the venue for moral and physical improvement among the working classes. The dedication of the shareholders and trustees of Oldham working men’s hall was aimed at ‘the accommodation of all classes of society, the improvement of manners, the refinement of the taste, the elevation of the moral character’.⁵⁸ This was often tied in with temperance. Temperance groups opened their own coffee houses and halls, which were also used as venues by political groups as an extension of their culture, such as Holland’s Temperance Hotel in Burnley, where a Chartist was arrested during the agitation of 1842.⁵⁹ Education mattered for Owenite socialists as reflective of Owen’s vision of a communitarian new moral order, but it also mattered for all working-class political groups as part of the much longer tradition of auto-didacticism and Sunday schools. Emma Griffin states that reading groups were the most frequently mentioned clubs in her sample of nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies, testimony to the strong desire for mutual improvement that also provided a space and materials for free thought.⁶⁰ The village of Royton near Oldham, for example, with its long-established community of radical activists, continued to use the ‘Old School Room’ for oppositional political activity, including an anti-new poor law meeting in January 1838 and Chartist lectures in April 1839.⁶¹ The main spaces within the new socialist and Chartist halls were designed around large lecture rooms and schoolrooms used for Sunday and evening schools, for adults as well as children. These were not just alternatives to but in direct opposition to the middle-class provision of education and religious teaching. Radicals believed that mechanics’ institutes taught a singularly technical curriculum fit only to make workers into controllable and efficient cogs within the industrial economy, as well as perpetuating a governance dominated by employers and upper-class subscribers as a form of paternalistic philanthropy. The local Owenite leadership in Manchester, some of whom had been students in the Mechanics’ Institute, founded a breakaway ‘New Mechanics’ Institute’ in 1829. The New Mechanics’ Institute was radically democratic in its organisation, electing representatives from the students to sit on its board. It was the first attempt by the Owenites to build a hall of science, collecting over 600 one-pound shares for the new venture in 1832, though this first attempt was never completed.⁶² Over thirty members of the Mechanics’ Institute in the new railway town of Crewe resigned when its trustees removed the Northern Star from the newsroom in 1844; they formed their own institution but it lasted only a year. More successfully, Reverend J. R. Stephens and his followers founded Stalybridge People’s Institute to compete with the Mechanics’ Institute in 1841. The plaque on the front of the ‘stark, stonebuilt, chapel-like’ building was inscribed ‘The People’s School, 1841’. Like much Chartist and socialist rhetoric, by ‘people’ it sought to cross class boundaries, but in practice was defiantly working class in its usages and membership.⁶³ Yet the popularity of such institutions and activities demonstrates that the working-class pursuit of knowledge was driven not just by class identity but by a variety of desires and interests.⁶⁴

Owenites, Chartists and co-operators constructed their own spaces of an alternative economy. Protesters had long enforced a ‘moral economy’ of fair prices for workers, including food riots, boycotting and exclusive dealing. Co-operative stores and trading associations offered an alternative to corrupt dealers, the truck system of monopoly dealing and the hegemony of the ‘shopcracy’ outside protest and in everyday life.⁶⁵ The co-operative societies were not just fundraising schemes for the movements. The weekly meetings of the societies encouraged communitarian principles in an ideal of democracy.⁶⁶ A Chartist co-operative shop was established in Hull as early as April 1839, and in December, Chartists held a public meeting in Stockport working men’s club to discuss establishing a joint stock provision store, known as the ‘Patriot’s Store’, to ‘obtain all the necessaries of life and the first quality and the lowest possible price’.⁶⁷ As Peter Gurney has argued, Chartist co-operation differed from Owenite practices in its political aims: Owenites sought to foster a communitarian utopia gradually, while Chartism was about much more direct and immediate ‘radical transformation of an existing, corrupt state’.⁶⁸

Political groups nevertheless used normal commercial and workspaces for meetings, out of ‘making do’. Leeds Chartists hired a room in the fish market, part of the Bazaar and New Shambles. The Northern Union room was in operation from autumn 1839. It was the venue for the formation of the Women’s Radical Association in October 1839, and the Chartist headquarters during the general election of June 1841.⁶⁹ In Manchester, the New Cross division of Chartists took a former cheese room in Smithfield market, which subsequently served Richard Carlile as a radical chapel and then became an educational institution and finally a temperance hall. Sir Oswald Mosley, lord of the manor, refused a meeting of ‘the unemployed’ at the market in December 1842, which adjourned up the road to St George’s Fields. Following incorporation and the lord of the manor losing control over the markets, the Chartists regularly held public meetings at Smithfield during their last push for the Charter in 1848.⁷⁰ In Carlisle, the rooms housing beam engines situated next to the river Caldew were used for political meetings by the Radical Association. The Female Radical Association held a public meeting at ‘Mr Sinclair’s Beaming Machine’ on 17 December 1838, where Mrs McIlwy moved the first resolution to practise exclusive dealing.⁷¹William Farish recalled in his autobiography that the beaming machine room in Water Lane was ‘a common resort of the ardent spirits of the first Reform period and a sort of political barometer in Chartist days’.⁷² This is likely to have been William Blythe’s beam machine, as he seconded a resolution held in the room in June 1842. The meetings were held on Monday and Friday evenings throughout 1841 and 1842. The radicals then based themselves at 6 John Street, a building that remained in working-class hands as a reading room until 1933.⁷³

Chartists and socialists succeeded in attracting large numbers of adherents because of their holistic appeal to the everyday life of the working classes. No social movement spreads widely by focusing solely on sombre and single-minded political activism. The halls of science and political institutes were designed as much as spaces of entertainment as for political meetings and debates. Theatres, music halls and other sites of performance were also amenable sites for political meetings.⁷⁴ Audiences were familiar with the elements of counter-theatre associated with these spaces. Chartists attempted to cultivate a different sort of atmosphere. Radical oratory could be serious but it also could be sarcastic. It sought respectability, though it could still be forceful and noisy, with loud responses from the audience. Walton’s Music Saloon on South Parade, Leeds, opened as a concert venue in 1837. It was hired out to various groups, including the Leeds Tradesmen’s Conservative Association, but gained most notoriety as the venue for socialist meetings. Reporting on a series of socialist lectures in June 1838, the Northern Star praised it as ‘the best room for public purposes that we have in Leeds’, in terms of both comfort and appearance, and noted that ‘a large and powerful organ occupies the upper end of the room, and its tones are put into requisition by the Socialists, on Sundays, to vary and enliven their proceedings’.⁷⁵ The Owenite Leeds District Board of the Association of all Classes held their annual conference in the saloon in May 1840.⁷⁶ The Chartists also used the rooms to prepare for the mass meeting on Peep Green in October 1838, and held a dinner to celebrate the release of their leaders from prison in September 1840. The economic slump of the early 1840s however forced Walton to sell up, and the middle-class trustees of the Mechanics’ Institute bought it for educational uses but probably also in order to evict the Owenite socialists.⁷⁷

More unusual commercial venues provided a particularly useful combination of large open space with shelter from the rain. In Manchester, these included the Riding School on Lower Mosley Street and Batty’s Circus on Great Bridgewater Street. The latter venue was part of William Batty’s touring circus empire in the North. His Manchester site was a permanent building ‘capable of holding three to four thousand persons’, which hosted the circus season during the winter and then was hired out in spring and summer.⁷⁸ The Ten Hours campaign hosted a public meeting at the circus in March 1837. The Chartists hired the site almost exclusively for their meetings from spring 1839 until the circus burned down in March 1842.⁷⁹ The most infamous meeting occurred on the evening of Tuesday 23 April 1839, held in support of the National Convention. The Northern Star reported that the ‘immense building was literally crammed, notwithstanding every person had to pay for his admission’, and that the building was decorated with ‘two or three flags having suitable mottos … one of which was one of the flags that waved in the breeze on the memorable field of Peterloo’. R. J. Richardson, Bronterre O’Brien and others gave physical force speeches, for which they were later arrested for sedition.⁸⁰

Though such events were serious, Chartists and socialists also appealed through leisure. The socialists of the silk manufacturing town of Congleton in Cheshire, for example, could hardly be described as completely sober and humourless when they held a ball in a mill that lasted until three o’clock in the morning, much to the annoyance of the constable who was stationed outside until it finished.⁸¹ The Henry Street Association room in Ashton-under-Lyne was ‘open every Saturday night at seven o’clock, for singing, dancing and reciting and is well fitted up for such amusements’.⁸² The New Moral World reported on the week’s activities at the Chartist Institute in Hyde in September 1839: ‘On Saturday 7th we held a Social Festival, which was well attended, and the rational amusements seemed to give pleasure to all present. Selections of music, songs and glees, recitations and the mazy dance’. On the Sunday, visiting Chartist lecturers gave three lectures to ‘very large audiences, composed of Chartists, Methodists, Socialists and many of the supporters of the Reverend J. R. Stephens’, indicating the shared interests among the movements. Three hundred people attended a tea party on the Monday and a concert by the members of the Owenite branch on the Tuesday. The paper acclaimed, ‘Thus for the first time have the working class of Hyde had the opportunity of enjoying rational amusement in their large numbers, in their own building and of bringing together many who have hitherto held aloof from us’.⁸³ This was very much part of lively and rich associational life, which included individual associations’ uniformed brass bands, expressing a community spirit and local identity.⁸⁴

These leisure activities were political acts. They enacted an alternative to the restrictive and exclusive world of polite society. Huddersfield Choral Society, for example, expelled any member who attended meetings at the Hall of Science, and thus the musical activities of the hall provided a more welcoming outlet for their talents.⁸⁵ They brought the theatre of the mass platform indoors in another form. As Chase has highlighted, the Chartist enthusiasm for theatre and radical entertainments ‘blurred the line between performance and protest’.⁸⁶ For example, the Northern Star reported that at Christmas 1841, ‘the trial of Robert Emmett Esq was performed in full costume by the Chartists’ in the Pole-lane schoolroom, Failsworth. This alternative pantomime had particular political resonance for the large number of Irish immigrants in the Oldham out-township, and notably the schoolroom was situated at the same place that had seen United English activity at the turn of the century and the infamous Paine-effigy burning in 1792. The am-dram group then performed the play in the Primitive Methodist schoolroom of the neighbouring village of Hollinwood on New Year’s Day 1842.⁸⁷ Such activities were a successful way of maintaining solidarity and networks, and attracting new members to the movements. Leon Faucher, the French industrialist visiting Manchester in 1844, noted that the socialists ‘increase the number of their adherents by oratorios and festivals, by rural excursions and by providing cheap and innocent recreation for the working classes’.⁸⁸

Chartists used symbolism and ritual to construct a radical narrative in these spaces. At Chartist dinners the room was customarily adorned with portraits of radical heroes. The interior of the venues for such events was in part shaped by the Northern Star because it included prints in special issues to paste up on the walls, and its own reports obviously focused on these more than other elements of the decoration. For commemorations of Henry Hunt’s birthday in November 1842 at Mossley near Oldham, the Chartists’ meeting room, it noted, was ‘beautifully decorated with evergreens and a large number of Star portraits; also two banners with full length portraits of Feargus O’Connor and Henry Hunt which had been kindly lent by the Manchester Chartists, and a beautiful transparency of the Northern Star painted for the occasion’.⁸⁹ But as Matthew Roberts has argued, this invention of tradition was selective and constructed to portray a particular radical story that included Thomas Paine and Hunt, while excluding other groups such as the seventeenth-century Levellers and the British artisanal Jacobins of the 1790s. Chartists aped elite rituals of commemoration of national heroes in civic patriotism. In doing so, they deliberately ignored working-class or more controversial forebears. In a search for respectability, therefore, the leaders demonstrated a continued adherence to ‘gentlemen leaders’.⁹⁰

Working-class radicals and socialists were not the only groups hiring and erecting their own buildings. Middle-class liberals took over large complexes to conduct their own campaigns, and then used their wealth to construct overtly symbolic landmarks to their politics. In Manchester, Newall’s Buildings was a large complex of rooms over shops situated on the corner of Cross Street and Market Street, next to the Exchange, and thus at the heart of the commercial centre of power. As well as a library and picture gallery for exhibitions, the buildings also hosted the Stamp Office, which waged ‘war’ on the unstamped press in the 1830s, for example, prosecuting Edward Gleave for selling unstamped publications in 1834.⁹¹ Radicals made an application to use the buildings, together with the manor court room, for Feargus O’Connor’s visit during his mission to set up a national Radical Association in December 1835. The administrators of both venues rejected their request as they could ‘not be used for political purposes’, and the radical meeting had to be held in the large room of Albion Mills tavern. The nascent branch of the Northern Union managed to hire a room in the buildings in August 1838 in order to plan the mass Chartist demonstration on Kersal Moor.⁹² From then on, however, the administrators preferred a more respectable tenantry. From December 1838, Newall’s Buildings became the main committee room for the Anti-Corn Law League, and after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the buildings became the base for the supporters of Richard Cobden and the Liberal party electoral committee.⁹³

The Free Trade Hall in Manchester was the ultimate physical landmark to a single-issue political campaign. The very site as well as the symbolism of the building was loaded with political signification and challenge over the meaning of place. Cobden initially gave use of his land on the edge of St Peter’s Fields for a temporary pavilion for the anti-corn law conference in 1840.⁹⁴ There could be no more obvious act of claiming of place: the liberal middle classes appropriated the site of Peterloo for their own aims and to oppose the Chartists associating the site with the campaign for universal suffrage. The original Free Trade Hall was erected in 1843, accommodating 10,000 people in a luxurious interior and imposing exterior. The Manchester Guardian boasted that the classical columns were ‘the same as those used by Mr Barry at the Manchester Athenaeum, and we believe in the new houses of parliament’.⁹⁵ The connotations of ancient grandeur were thus combined with an imitation of national government. In 1853, the Leaguers cemented their victory at the princely cost of £40,000 for a rebuilt stone-clad building that still stands on Peter Street, a permanent monument to Mancunian liberalism.⁹⁶

The prospectuses for halls of science often justified their necessity with the claim that ‘the want of large public rooms wherein the working class might assemble with their wives and children, to acquire and communicate useful knowledge, and wherein they might have innocent recreation and rational amusement at so trifling an expense as to be within the means of the poorest when employed, has been long felt and is generally admitted’.⁹⁷ Female activism was an integral part of Chartism and Owenite socialism. There were over 150 female Chartist associations in England, reviving the activities of their predecessors who had campaigned a generation previously.⁹⁸ The movements against slavery and for factory reform in the early 1830s gave women the experience to translate into Chartism, but the real forging fire was the anti-new poor law movement, which involved women in more active tactics of demonstrating. William Farish of Carlisle recalled in his memoirs, ‘As in 1819, so in 1838, the Cumberland women were well to the fore, subscribing, signing petitions and collecting as well as the men’. Carlisle Female Radical Association formed in December 1838 at Sinclair’s beaming machine room, the usual workshop site of meeting of the male radicals. They claimed a membership of 400. The continuity of ‘veteran’ female leadership seems to have been particularly strong. Peggy Catherall, who, as the Goddess of Freedom, had presented the cap of liberty to the chairman of the Radical Reformers in 1819, joined the deputation that presented an embroidered scarf to Feargus O’Connor twenty years later. They were the only female society explicitly named as giving a contribution of five guineas to the National Convention in February 1839.⁹⁹

The role of women in the reform movements nevertheless remained problematic for the leadership. The 1832 Reform Act explicitly excluded women from the vote, but the more complex issue for radicals was their own definition of representation. Some women were highly active. Mary Holberry, for example, was arrested along with her husband Samuel for their part in the Sheffield rising, but was discharged a few days later, having refused to betray any information about her husband.¹⁰⁰ But Chartists drew from their predecessors’ rhetoric of domesticity and emphasised women’s role in educating their children as citizens.¹⁰¹ Benjamin Rushton of Halifax recalled in his memoirs how when he moved to his uncle’s house to work as a warehouse-boy, it was his aunt, whom he described as a ‘famous politician, a Chartist and a great admirer of Feargus O’Connor’, who first introduced him to politics. Yet Chartists and socialists differed over whether citizenship was a human right shared by all or a status to be earned as patriarchal head of the household.¹⁰²

How women activists negotiated gendered practices in the spaces of meeting is also difficult to ascertain. Catherine Hall contended that radical sociability became increasingly institutionalised in the first half of the nineteenth century, and thus presented more challenges to access by women, not least in the form of unsuitable meeting hours and the taint of irrespectability. As Christina Parolin points out in relation to the supporters of Richard Carlile in London in the 1830s, Hall’s model applies more to the middle classes than to the working classes, for whom respectability had different meanings and applications.¹⁰³ Female radical groups still regularly met in pubs, and the environment was not alien to women who were also active in friendly societies who had long used such spaces. Hull Female Patriotic Society held weekly meetings on Monday evenings in the Chartist headquarters, the Royal Oak, Blackfriargate, from November 1838, so regularly that later accounts of their activities referred to the ‘Female Patriotic Society Rooms’. Committee business was interspersed with religious elements and other entertainments. At their meeting on 8 July 1839, the cash accounts were audited, then ‘a patriotic hymn was next sung and then a short prayer was offered up, imploring the Great Creator of the Universe to protect and assist their glorious cause’.¹⁰⁴ The picture of female participation is thus not as clear cut as ‘tea parties versus pubs’ suggests. In Elland in the West Riding, the Radical Association Room hosted the public meeting where twenty-nine women enrolled in the new Female Radical Association in March 1838. Perhaps in these more tightly knit communities, with a large proportion of women working in factories, a tradition of family activism meant that this development was easily accepted as a natural extension of the role of the head of the household. The Elland female association was headed by Elizabeth Hanson, wife of the prominent local reformer Abraham Hanson, who had been active since 1830 and who became secretary and then chairman of Elland Radical Association. Elizabeth herself was already well known for her activism, having taken a direct part in the anti-new poor law campaign only the previous month when she and other women ambushed several assistant new poor law commissioners outside the workhouse. As Chase argues, Chartism enabled her and her husband to find ‘a place on a wider political stage’.¹⁰⁵

Tea parties and other ‘respectable’ entertainments were designed with women in mind. At Manchester, for example, ‘a great many females’ were present among the 500 attendees at a radical tea party at the Carpenters’ Hall in honour of the birthday of Henry Hunt on Monday 4 November 1839. Yet although it is difficult to find out how women felt about using such venues, there is some evidence of various types of separation. Although celebrations to commemorate Hunt’s birthday were mixed gender events, toasts in the honour of radical leaders past and present at such occasions served to construct an ideal manly type for the fraternity of Chartists, and while women also took part in the ritual, they were never the subjects nor the proposers of the toasts.¹⁰⁶ Male and female Chartist branches were segregated by time of use. On Wednesday 20 November 1839, the Chartists held a public tea party in Bradford Oddfellows’ Hall, but ‘females took tea in the hall and the men were obliged to go to the Schoolroom adjoining’. The Wapping branch of the Bradford Chartists met at the North Tavern on Sunday evenings, while their female counterparts met at the same pub on Wednesday evenings.¹⁰⁷ Working-class women, despite their rhetoric of ‘militant domesticity’, were marginalised from Chartist leadership. They acted as delegates to only the most local of radical bodies, and all the delegates to the National Conventions were men.¹⁰⁸ The ‘people’ included everyone, but the leadership had to be male, though this was as much an understandable tactical choice to ensure the best chance of being accepted as part of the governing body politic as it was a result of male prejudice.

The new buildings were a huge achievement for the political movements of the 1830s and 1840s. They nevertheless ran into two problems: financial and legal insecurity, and attempts by the authorities to close them down. Working-class halls were built on financially precarious foundations. The standard one-pound share was, even with the incentive of weekly instalments, a major ask of working-class supporters. As with many aspects of working-class finances, funding relied on an ‘economy of makeshifts’, including mortgages from friendly societies and Oddfellows (Bradford), profits from co-operative stores (Sheffield), and more desperate ways of eking money out of those using the halls, as at Bradford where even the tea kettle and trestle tables incurred small charges.¹⁰⁹

In many towns, the working class fought against the odds in attempting to construct their own spaces out of elite control. In Huddersfield, the Owenites faced difficulties securing the land for their hall, as almost all the town belonged to the loyalist Anglican Ramsden family. Bradford Gas Company, run by members of the corporation, refused to supply the Hall of Science with gas. Manchester Hall of Science was targeted by an arson attempt while it was still being built.¹¹⁰ After Owen laid the foundation stone on Camp Field, Reverend William Kidd, the incumbent of nearby St Matthew’s church, formed a committee ‘for the counter-action and suppression of that hideous form of infidelity which assumes the name of Socialism’. Within a week of the hall’s opening in June 1840, he prosecuted the three door stewards for ‘having received money for the admission of persons to lectures on Socialism’, in contravention of 39 Geo III c.79, that is the Unlawful Societies Act of 1799. The Owenites claimed that the hall was licensed as a religious place of worship and was therefore exempt, but being atheists, they were unable to take an oath in court, and were each fined £20.¹¹¹

Owenites and Chartists knew they were treading a fine line of legality. Local authorities continued to put pressure on publicans to prevent and suppress their meetings. In Oldham, Butterworth recorded in October 1841 that ‘Mr James Dawson of Lees who was fined £20 for presiding at a Chartist meeting held in an unlicensed room at Lees, has been committed to three months imprisonment to Salford Gaol for non payment of the fine’.¹¹² The prosecution of Dawson continued to have an impact, as a November 1842 issue of the Northern Star explained how to apply for a licence, as the newspaper had ‘frequently been applied to for information upon this subject’, especially since the prosecution. The column outlined the pro forma application for registering a place of worship according to the act of 22 Geo III c.155 (29 July 1812), thereby reinforcing how Chartists and other groups were using the act to register their meeting rooms as dissenting chapels and schoolrooms.¹¹³ In 1844, the mayor of Hull banned the popular freethought lecturer Emma Martin from giving a talk against Christian missions, and he physically locked her out of the lecture room. When she hired the Cross Keys Hotel instead, its publican was fined and the radical bookseller Richard Johnson was charged for taking money at the door of an unlicensed room, again contrary to 39 Geo III c.79. Johnson appealed to the Queen’s Bench, supported by a committee led by the radical printer Henry Hetherington, who attempted to use more recent legislation to claim that the local police superintendent did not have sufficient authority to initiate prosecutions. However, the appeal was rejected and the magistrates were awarded their costs.¹¹⁴ That they were prepared to go to the highest authority demonstrated that this was not just a minor scuffle over a padlock but a fight over free speech; the authorities’ fear of a socialist, secularist female lecturer showed how far ideologies and forms of radical organisation had evolved since the 1790s.

Further legislation threatened societies’ solvency. An 1843 act (6 & 7 Vic c.36) enabled scientific, literary and fine art societies to gain exemption from local rates on land and buildings if they registered with the county solicitor in charge of registering friendly societies. Mechanics’ Institutes and Lit and Phil societies took advantage of this new exemption, and the Sheffield Hall of Science was able to register with the West Riding quarter sessions in 1844.¹¹⁵ By contrast, the Manchester overseers of the poor wrote to the Poor Law Commission, singling out the Hall of Science as ineligible because its rules allowed any profit or property to be divided among its members. This was contrary to the stipulation in the act that the society should be non-profit making (which ironically the halls ended up being). Their main concern was for the loss of income to the union rather than from any political motives, as they listed the Portico Library and the Athenaeum as also ineligible for the same reason. The Poor Law Commission ruled in the overseers’ favour and the hall had to pay the rates. Its building association was never able to repay its loans and in 1847 the socialists let it out as a musical hall while they decamped to a small cottage off Deansgate.¹¹⁶ The financial risks involved in such enterprises were heightened by the fact that under the legislation following the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824, legal protection did not apply to labour combinations and their funds, which must have dissuaded the most careful workers from depositing their hard-earned savings with such bodies (a lesson learned the hard way when the Chartist National Land Company collapsed and lost the entire contributions of more than 44,000 shareholders).¹¹⁷

Within weeks of opening, the Oldham Hall of Science had to be let out as a casino and was finally sold for half its original cost to the temperance society, a failure attributed in part to competition from the Chartist working men’s hall, which also closed within two years, reopening as a theatre.¹¹⁸ Although working-class leisure sites were sorely needed, the Oldham case perhaps suggests that the town was not big enough for the both of them. In Huddersfield, the large cost of the Hall of Science was difficult to maintain during the severe economic depression of the mid-1840s. The Owenites let out the hall on alternative Sundays to the Chartists, but by August 1847, they admitted financial defeat and sold the buildings to the Unitarians, dispersing its library of over two hundred books.¹¹⁹ At Hyde, the trustees mortgaged out their institute, and in 1841, its owners put it up for auction, ‘as the Hyde Chartists had neither paid off the mortgage nor paid any of the five per cent interest’. No buyer was found until 1844, when Reverend Charles Prescot, the rector and JP of Stockport, bought the building for the Anglican diocese. The application stated, with an obvious overtone of vindication at their failure, that the building was ‘originally intended for a mechanics’ institute in which the Chartists, Socialists, and other seditious, irreligious and unprincipled men were in the habit of meeting’.¹²⁰ In Sheffield, the Hall of Science reported in 1842 that its Rational School was to close, largely because George Holyoake had ‘grown tired of it’. The Owenites maintained their hall in Rockingham Street, but did little with it from the mid-1840s.¹²¹ The O’Connorite Chartists could also only sustain their own base for so long. By 1847, their rooms were incorporated into the Fig Tree Inn by the licensee Joseph Knapton, who placed an advertisement in the Sheffield Independent ‘that he has opened the above house and the large Room adjoining, originally known as the “Chartist Room”’, which, ‘from its size, is well adapted for the holding of Public Meetings, Lodge Meetings or Clubs, being capable of accommodating from 450 to 500 persons’.¹²² The momentum waned as the movements struggled to deal with the financial and legislative problems and the sheer physical effort of organising a holistic alternative way of life in these buildings.

Owenism, Chartism and other movements were able to reach the non-activist sections of the working classes more deeply and widely than their predecessors through the activities of everyday life. They offered opportunities for education, entertainment and consumption that sought to change the individual much more than occasional attendance at a mass meeting could. Self-education and the study of culture was a form of struggle for most of the panoply of social movements in the 1840s.¹²³ Eileen Yeo emphasised that the halls of science were a physical expression of working-class culture and identity.¹²⁴ It is debatable however whether the buildings could represent what was in fact a complex ‘culture’, of which communitarianism, utopianism and auto-didacticism were only one part. Middle-class and conservative initiatives such as mechanics’ institutes and operative Conservative societies were also popular, offering similar opportunities with a different political complexion. Whether the socialist and Chartist halls ultimately changed the character of everyone who stepped foot in them is also hard to prove. There are few surviving recollections that testify to their influence. Emma Griffin’s study of working-class autobiographies underlines the role of mutual improvement and trades societies in training future Chartist leaders in political skills, but does not suggest anything about the halls, particularly for the rank and file.¹²⁵ Moreover, there were only so many hours in the day, and most of those were filled with the struggle to get on with the challenges of everyday life and work. Nevertheless, these sites and their usages were an expression of independence. They were testimony to the determination of reformers to oppose the restrictions of government and local authorities on their freedom to meet and to speak.