Attlee House

1971 red brick block of flats and offices, part of the Toynbee Hall estate, demolished for redevelopment autumn 2016

Attlee House
Contributed by Survey of London on Dec. 14, 2018

On 18 November 1971 the Queen opened a new building as part of the Toynbee Hall estate. Attlee House was an L-shaped building with an east-west range on the site of part of College Buildings, including the former Wadham House. The new building  linked by first and second-floor walkways at its west end to a north-south wing running from Wentworth Street on to the site of the old library that had adjoined Toynbee Hall.1 It was a plain red/orange brick building, four storeys high, erected to the designs of David Maney & Partners, architects.2 It mixed offices (for the Attlee Memorial Foundation) and residential (42 residents including six elderly single people, housed in studio flats, with one-room flatlets), with the St Leonard’s Housing Association for ex-prisoners on the top floor.3 Attlee House was demolished in 2016 in preparation for the joint Toynbee Hall and London Square redevelopment, with a block of flats named 'Leadenhall' currently (December 2018) being built on the site.4


  1. Tower Hamlets plannng applications online (THP): London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/2486/225: Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, T_oynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years_, London 1984, pp. 170-1 

  2. THP: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), GLC/AR/BR/13/1110025 

  3. Briggs and Macartney, op. cit., pp. 159, 162, 170-1 

  4. THP 

Attlee House demolition
Contributed by Shahed Saleem

Attlee House demolished
Contributed by Shahed Saleem