Retro: A glimpse inside an elusive hall

David Cliffe • Published 9 Dec 2009 08:00 0 Comments

I HAVE wondered what the inside of the Victoria Hall looked like for some time, and now, thanks to a piece of card found in a box of old photographs, I know.

The hall came to my attention when I was doing some work on a collection of glass lantern slides which had belonged to the parish of St John's with St Stephen's.

Among them was one showing the St John's jubilee celebrations of 1923.

In fact, it was the jubilee of the opening of the rebuilt St John's Church in Watlington Street, which is now the Polish Roman Catholic Church.

There had been a previous St John's Church, which had opened on the same site in 1837, but which had proved to have structural problems. The 1923 slide shows the dignitaries on the platform, with the Bishop of Oxford in the centre.

Behind the platform is a kind of apse - a bit similar to that of the Wigmore Hall in London.

In front of the platform is a line of potted chrysanthemums, because the jubilee was in November.

If you use the internet, you can see it on the library website - www.readinglibraries.org.uk

Go to the catalogue, and search for "John's institute."

On the present card, we can see the roof structure with the tie-rods, the gas-lights, and that platform with the apse.

One might well ask where the windows are - they are not obvious from this drawing, by the architect of the building, Mr W Ravenscroft.

The hall was built in Fatherson Road (between King's Road and London Road) in 1876 by the Victoria Hall Company (Reading) Ltd. Presumably, they expected to receive a return on their investment from renting the hall for various events.

In 1901, they leased it to the Salvation Army for seven years.

At the end of this term, the Victoria Hall Company went into liquidation, and the hall was put on the market.

The buyer was St John's Church, who used it as their church institute for 65 years.

The church was encouraged in this enterprise by the profits it was making in running the temperance refreshment stall at Cemetery Junction, which you can also see on the library website - try searching for "temperance refreshment".

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