If you've ever wondered about the history of the rather attractive building on the South side of Richmond Avenue, just next to Dowrey Street, read on! After years of painstaking research, Jenny has finally unravelled its story, which is tortuous, with ups and downs and interesting lessons about the social history of the area. You can download Jenny's detailed account here:
Download "The Two Mission/Parish Halls of Holy Trinity Church"
It turns out that the present building, Beckett House at 98 Richmond Ave, was originally the Mission Hall (basically a church hall) for Holy Trinity Church, but that it was preceded by an earlier church hall, St George's Hall, at 89 Richmond Avenue, on the North side of the road, opposite - see OS map c1909 below (St George's marked by red dot).
St George's Hall was built in 1853 and served as the venue for a wide range of church hall activities for 56 years, principally as a well known Youth Institute, until 1909 when it was replaced by the new Mission Hall. Thereafter, St George's suffered a slow but inexorable decline serving inter alia as a store for the Church Missionary Society, a timber yard and some sort of factory. It was demolished in the 1980s and replaced with the flats at 89 A-D of today. We do not have a proper photo of the original building, just a rather dismal image from 1965 when a brick curtain wall appears to have been erected in front of the original facade.
The present day Mission Hall was a larger building built in 1909 by Dove Brothers using the architect JS Alder, who appears to have had some reputation for late gothic churches and church halls. Like St George's Hall, it was used for a variety of activities and was for many years evidently an important part of the social fabric of the Cloudesley Estate. But like Holy Trinity itself (made "redundant" in 1978) it appears to have slowly declined, physically and functionally, reflecting the declining role of the church in the education and entertainment of the local community, until in 1969 it was redeveloped as a Montessori School with residential flats above (one of which was occupied by the Association's own Florence Salberter, now moved to the Lake District!). It's still a fine building, though, as the following photos show.
