Friday, August 08, 2003
Famous places within 5 minutes walk of my house
Number 7 - where Gandhi stayed
In 1912 Doris and Muriel Lester opened Kingsley Hall, a small nursery school in Bromley-by-Bow. The school gradually expanded its services within the local community until soon a new building was needed, four stories high, complete with clubroom, dining room, kitchen, residential units and a space for worship.
Mahatma Gandhi left India only once during the last 30 years of his life, travelling to London in 1931 to attend the Round Table Conference. He refused to stay in a hotel, preferring to lodge among working people, and so chose to make his home at Kingsley Hall for 12 weeks. Huge crowds greeted his arrival, and Charlie Chaplin and the Pearly Queen and King of East London were amongst his many visitors. Gandhi spoke eloquently at the Conference, an international talking shop to discuss Indian independence, but was outmanouevred by representatives of the British Raj and supporters of the caste system.
"....besides doing his work with the Government, he spent a lot of time with us. He visited the Nursery School and all the children called him Uncle Gandhi. At six o'clock each morning, after his prayers, he took his walk along the canal, talking to workmen on the way.... There was something about him that always lives with the people."
In 1964 the famous psychologist R.D. Laing persuaded the Lester sisters to let him use Kingsley Hall for a unique and radical experiment. He established the Philadelphia Project here, a community in which seriously affected schizophrenics were encouraged to live free from medication or restraint. The experiment was not a success, for the locals at least, who suffered regular smashed windows, faeces pushed through their letter boxes and harassment at local shops. When Laing and his community finally moved out, six years later, Kingsley Hall was left trashed and uninhabitable.
In the early 1980s Richard Attenborough used Kingsley Hall as a set for his film Gandhi. During the filming he worked with local people to raise enough funds to carry out extensive refurbishment, and Kingsley Hall was reopened as a community centre in 1985. The building now houses the offices of the Gandhi Foundation, an organisation which continues to promote the peaceful protest and nonviolent action so successfully advocated by the great man himself, right here, seven decades ago.
In that settlement which represents the poor people of the East End of London I have become one of them. They have accepted me as a member, and as a favoured member of their family. It will be one of the richest treasures that I shall carry with me.
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