Patrick Comerford
For many commuters and rail travellers arriving at Euston Station in London, the first buildings they see emerging on the opposite, south side of Euson Road are two prominent church or religious buildings: Saint Pancras Church on the corner of Tavistock Place, with its two striking sets of caryatids inspired by the Erechtheion on the Acropolis in Athens, and Friends House, the imposing but elegant centre of Quaker life in Britain.
I have known Friends House since the early 1970s, and I attended various meetings there in that decade. I also used the library to research the lives of Francis Comberford (ca 1620-1679) of Bradley Hall, a magistrate who became a Quaker in 1653 while he was living at Comberford Hall; his wife Margaret (Skrimshire) Comberford; and their daughter Mary Comberford (ca 1641/1642-1700), a Quaker mystic and visionary.
Mary Comberford wrote to the founding Quaker, George Fox, from Stafford on 19 April 1690, addressing him affectionately as ‘My dear friend,’ ‘Dear Friend’ and ‘My dear love in the everlasting truth …’ and sending ‘dear love to thy wife & children.’ George Fox died nine months later on 13 January 1691.
Friends House at 173-177 Euston Road is an imposing and elegant building in Bloomsbury and it is a hub for many events, meetings, conferences, and gatherings. It is easy to find, and I often use the café there as a venue when I am arranging to meet friends in London.
Friends House is a large and dignified building dating from the mid-1920s, designed by the Quaker architect Hubert Lidbetter (1885-1966) in a neo-Georgian style. It succeeded Devonshire House in Bishopsgate as the administrative centre of the Society of Friends or Quakers and as the home of Britain Yearly Meeting. It is a multi-use building, housing the central offices of British Quakers, with large worship spaces. But it is also a conference centre and it has a bookshop, a popular café, a courtyard and a garden that is familiar to many people.
Before 1926, the central offices of British Quakers were at Devonshire House on Bishopsgate. The Society of Friends had been renting rooms there since 1666, and before that it had been the London home of the Dukes of Devonshire. Over time, Quakers obtained the lease of the building and the adjoining ground and built purpose-built meeting houses and offices.
By 1911, the site was no longer of sufficient size for the number of people who worked there and a committee was set up to consider rebuilding or moving.
After a lengthy debate among Quakers, it was agreed to sell the site and Devonshire House site and look for new premises. Meanwhile, the freehold of Endsleigh Gardens came on the market. These private gardens on the south side of Euston Road, opposite Euston Station, were originally part of the Duke of Bedford’s Estate, and by 1923 they were owned by Sir Alfred Butt (1878-1962), a financier, theatre owner and the Conservative MP for Balham and Tooting. Butt sold the freehold of the gardens to the Society of Friends for £45,000 in 1923.
The choice of Endsleigh Gardens was controversial at the time because it was a greenfield site, and the London Society criticised the building of Friends House.
The east third of the site was later sold to raise money for the construction of the new building. The purchaser agreed to maintain a small garden between the projected buildings jointly with Friends but the planned temperance hotel failed to materialise. In return for permission to bring the building line forward by 20 ft, a 30-ft wide strip of land was surrendered for widening Euston Road by the London County Council.
After the site was bought, five Quaker architects were invited to submit outline plans for a new building: Hubert Lidbetter, Peter R Allison, C Ernest Ellcock, Ralph Thorp and Frederick Rowntree. The architect William Curtis Green, who had designed the Quaker adult school in Croydon in 1908, was the assessor.
The specifications included a large meeting house that could seat 1,500 people for Yearly Meeting, a smaller meeting house, office space and a library with strong rooms. Part of the new building was to be rented commercially to provide a regular income to cover maintenance.
The winning design was created by Hubert Lidbetter, and Friends House was built by Grace and Marsh of Croydon, whose founding partners were Quakers.
Lidbetter’s neo-Georgian design of Friends House is simple but elegant, in Portland stone and brick, with three distinct blocks, each with its own entrance: the east section, with the garden entrance, was designed for administration; the central block with the colonnaded entrance on Euston Road contained the large and small meeting spaces; and the west block, with its entrance onto Gordon Street, was created for letting out. This west block, now known as Drayton House, was named after Fenny Drayton, eight miles east of Tamworth, where George Fox was born in 1624.
The completed building won the RIBA Bronze medal in 1927 for the best building erected in London that year. The Architectural Review said it was ‘eminently Quakerly … [it] unites common sense with just so much relief from absolute plainness as gives pleasure to the eye.’
Friends House has numerous meeting rooms and conference halls of varying sizes. The meeting rooms are named after prominent Quakers and peace campaigners, including Bayard Rustin, Lucretia Mott, John Woolman, Ada Salter, Waldo Williams, George Bradshaw, Kathleen Lonsdale, Abraham Darby, Hilda Clark, Marjorie Sykes, Margaret Fell, Sarah Fell, Benjamin Lay, Elizabeth Fry and George Fox.
The collection in the library at Friends House dates from the 1650s, and includes the records and archives of Britain Yearly Meeting and one of the largest collections of Quaker books and material.
When Mahatma Gandhi visited Britain in 1931 for the Round Table Conferences on constitutional reforms in India, he made his first public speech in London in the large meeting house in Friends House.
Hundreds of women gathered at Friends House in 1938 to protest about the cost of living. One young housewife who spoke said: ‘We do not ask for strawberries and cream, we only ask for bread and butter.’
The Prime Minister of Jamaica, Norman Manley, spoke at a gathering at Friends House after the Notting Hill riots in 1958.
The first international conference on sanctions against South Africa was organised by the Anti-Apartheid Movement and took place in Friends House in 1964. The speakers included Oliver Tambo, then deputy president of the African National Congress (ANC).
Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at a reception in Friends House arranged by the Quaker Peace and Race Relations Committees shortly before he received the Nobel Peace Prize.
The offices of what was then London Yearly Meeting were broken into in 1971, probably by the South African Intelligence Services, and files of the Friends Peace and International Relations Committee on work in South Africa were stolen.
Friends House was Grade II-listed in May 1996. Then, in 2014, the large meeting house was refurbished by John McAslan and Partners and transformed into ‘The Light’, a 1,000-delegate capacity auditorium. A 200 sq m floor space and a skylight were created. At the same time, the small meeting house has been subdivided. The library and the public spaces still retain something of their original character.
In an echo of Lidbetter’s 1927 RIBA bronze medal, ‘The Light’ won an RIBA regional award in 2015.
The garden at Friends House links Euston Road and Endsleigh Gardens and is open from early morning to late afternoon. The garden was relandscaped in 2016, following a design by the Quaker horticulturist Wendy Price and John Mc Aslan and Partners inspired by the Waldo Williams poem ‘In Two Fields.’
A pathway was added, carved with a timeline of more than 20 key dates in Quaker history, highlighting significant points through three centuries, from persecution to permission to worship and marry; campaigning against slavery and landmines, and for mental health, justice, sexuality and sustainability.
Prominent Quakers named on the paving slabs include George Fox, Margaret Fell, William Penn and Elizabeth Fry, and the families who founded the Cadbury and Rowntree chocolate businesses and the Barclay and Lloyds banks.
Drayton House, the west part third of the building, has always been used separately. It currently accommodates the Department of Economics of University College London and the Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution.
Hubert Lidbetter was the most prolific architect of Quaker meeting houses in the 20th century, his career spanning the 1920s to the 1960s. He was a Quaker and trained in the office of the established Quaker architect Frederick Rowntree (1860-1927). His career took off when he won the competition for Friends House in 1923. He became Surveyor to the Six Weeks Meeting, which administers Quaker property in the Greater London area, in 1935, and held that post until 1957.
Lidbetter was experienced in the sympathetic restoration of old buildings, and as Surveyor he worked on historic meeting houses, as well as building new ones. He published a significant article on Quaker architecture, ‘Quaker Meeting Houses 1670-1850’, in Architectural Review (April 1946) and he was the author of the first book on the subject, The Friends Meeting House (1961).
Lidbetter designed at least 16 new meeting houses. His large urban meeting houses include Friends House, London (1924-27), Bull Street, Birmingham (1931-1933), Liverpool (1941, demolished) and Sheffield (1964, no longer in Quaker use). However, more typical of his work was the domestic neo-Georgian character of his many smaller meeting houses, mainly in and around London. His Grade II listed meeting house in Croydon (1956) is Arts and Crafts in inspiration
Martin Lidbetter (1914-1992) succeeded to his father’s post, continuing the practice into the 1970s. Besides designing meeting houses, the practice also undertook work for Quaker schools, and commissions for the Methodist and Congregational churches, the Baptists, and the Salvation Army. Their office buildings include the former headquarters of the National Union of General and Municipal Workers, a short distance to the east of Friends House. It was built in 1953-1957, and is now a Grade II building known as Bentham House.
• Friends House continues to be the primary venue for Britain Yearly Meeting. Friends House Meeting also meets in the building, and its Meeting for Worship takes place each Sunday for an hour from 11 am to 12 noon in the George Fox room on the second floor.
