Come One, Come All to Exeter Hall.
It’s the 9th February 1907 and you find yourself in London. Perhaps you’ve been attending a matinee in one of the many theatres on The Strand. It’s pouring with rain and with your back to The Savoy you look across the street and watch as a long length of bedraggled rain-soaked women climb the stairs to the entrance of Exeter Hall. This strange sight is one of the first public marches for women’s suffrage organised by the suffragist Millicent Fawcett.
To see women marching is quite a surprise. What is less unexpected is the choice of Exeter Hall for a meeting about such an issue.
Before Exeter Hall existed, the site on the Strand held a menagerie of exotic animals kept above a shopping arcade but the lions' roaring kept frightening the carriage horses outside. In 1831 the menagerie made way for Exeter Hall which was wild in another way. It became the great meeting-house of Victorian conscience. Indeed, it was so central to the anti-slavery movement that the phrase "Exeter Hall" itself became metonym - a newspaper shorthand, for the entire abolitionist lobby.
Over the next seventy-odd years the same hall hosted temperance crusaders, the Anti-Corn Law League, and eventually became the London headquarters of the YMCA — a single building somehow containing most of the century's moral arguments with itself. The 1907 "Mud March” gathering turned out to be one of Exeter Hall's final meetings. Later that same year it was demolished to make way for the Strand Palace Hotel.