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THE VICTORIA HALL

The hall's origins and early history are recorded in Charles  Jones' 1904 book Ealing: From Village to Corporate Town. He noted that following the start of building a new Town Hall for the Council: "One great desideratum for a growing district like Ealing, viz a public assembly room, was wanting...The happy thought occurred to me that a permanent benefit to the poor might be associated with a Jubilee Hall, and be a perpetual memorial of our beloved Queen."]

He put the idea to the Chairman of the Ealing Local Board, Edward Montague Nelson, who agreed "with alacrity". The Middlesex County Times reported at a public meeting at the end of January 1887 that the project was launched to what the paper reported as enthusiastic applause.

It was made clear from the start that no public money was to be involved in the project. While the Town Hall itself was being paid for largely from the sale of the old building, the Memorial Hall, as it was then called, would be paid for by public subscription. An initial sum of nearly £2,000 had already been raised at the time of the public launch, and more subscriptions promised. Mr Montague Nelson, who chaired the 1887 public meeting, said as part of his address: "It is fair to assume that from a hall which is to be built in this way by public subscriptions, on which there is no interest to pay on capital, there will be an income over and above its working expenses [which] should he vested in the existing Local Board, for the time being, as Trustee and devoted by them to local objects…. We might grant a substantial sum annually to, say, the Cottage Hospital and the Almshouses, to the School of Science and Art of which we have one; or a grant to the Free Library." The scheme quickly took off. "Although the whole of the £5,000 for the hall was not obtained at once, a proposal to raise the balance by debentures of £10 each, repayable out of the profits without interest, soon cleared off the remaining debt, and left the memorial hall free as a charitable bequest forever," notes Jones.

In July 2016, in the context of large budget deficit and the need to reshape its services, the council announced an agreement with a hotel developer to convert part of the Town Hall and the Victoria Hall into a boutique hotel. Continuing controversy led to an investigation started in 2018 by the Charity Commission to consider whether the Council has the right to sell the Trust's assets On 27 November 2019, the Charity Commission published a draft 'Scheme' that would allow the council to sell off the Victoria Hall, which is held by a charitable trust, to a developer. The scheme prompted criticism from campaigners and concern about the limited amount of time available in a consultation period that would run over the Christmas period.