About

The Willesden Trades Hall has been one of the quiet constants of British working class history. Built in the Edwardian era and acquired by the Trades and Labour Hall Society in the 1920s, the building on the High Road has served as the organisational nerve centre for some of the most significant episodes in twentieth century British political life, the General Strike of 1926, the Hunger Marches, the Grunwick dispute of 1976–78, and the Kent Miners during the strikes of the 1980s. Sylvia Pankhurst founded the Willesden branch of the Communist Workers Movement here in 1924. When Nelson Mandela came to London in 1962 to build international opposition to apartheid, it was this hall he had been invited to address.

The building has been largely untouched since its early twentieth century configuration, and it shows, in the best possible sense. The ground floor holds a meeting room of the kind that feels worn in rather than worn out, with the accumulated atmosphere of a hundred years of organised labour. A mezzanine level above houses former offices. The building culminates on the first floor in a very large congregational hall with vaulted timber ceilings, a genuinely impressive space, raw and unrestored, with the particular quality of light and texture that only decades of benign neglect can produce. Some ad hoc partitioning and decoration has been added over the years, but the essential fabric is intact and the period character is undisturbed.

The hall is currently in a state of considered disuse. It reads as derelict on camera, exposed surfaces, worn finishes, the residue of decades of occupation and will require little or no dressing for productions set in institutional interiors from the 1920s onwards. For drama, music video, or editorial work requiring a space that carries genuine history rather than a fabricated approximation of it, Willesden Trades Hall is a rare find.

Restoration work is underway under the stewardship of the Willesden Trades Hall Charity, with Adjaye Associates appointed as lead architects. Productions booking now are working with the building in its current unreconstructed state.