Cleveland Hall was built with a legacy from William Devonshire Saull, an Owenite, and in 1861 replaced the John Street Institution as the London centre of freethought.

[1] George William Foote in his Reminiscences of Charles Bradlaugh recalls coming to London in January 1868 with "plenty of health and very little religion".

She was not what would be called a woman of culture, but she had what some devotees of 'culchaw' do not possess - a great deal of natural ability..."[5] A few weeks later Foote heard Bradlaugh speaking at the hall.

Mill, Esq., The Late Robert Owen: a Tribute to His Memory and an Appeal to Women to Consider their Interests in Connection with the Social, Political and Theological Aspects of the Times.

For a year from November 1865 the hall was leased for Sunday evenings so that the American Unitarian abolitionist Moncure Daniel Conway could "address the working classes."

[1] In 1870 the Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle noted that the Reverend Charles Adolphus Row was delivering a course of lectures in defence of the gospel at Cleveland Hall, Fitzroy Square, the former secularist centre.

[13] On 25 June 1871 the spiritualist Mrs Emma Hardinge Britten delivered a lecture at Cleveland Hall while under inspiration of a spirit, in which she described the third and higher spheres.

[20] In the 1870s and 1880s various groups of political refugees came to London, including French communards, German socialists, Russian Jews and Italian anarchists such as Tito Zanardelli.

[22] On 18 July 1881 an anarchist congress was held at the Cleveland Hall, Fitzroy Square, at which the American Marie Le Compte, Louise Michel, and Prince Peter Kropotkin spoke.

It is the headquarters of the orthodox Anarchists, most of the foreign speakers belonging to this persuasion; but a Collectivist also spoke, and one, at least, from the Autonomy section who have some quarrel which I can't understand with the Cleveland Hall people.

[31] The mission held coffee concerts, lantern talks and a social hour for young men and women after the Sunday evening service, as well as many other activities.

[31] Clara Sophia [Mary] Neal ran a club for working girls at Cleveland Hall two or three evenings a week.

She said, No words can express the passionate longing which I have to bring some of the beautiful things of life within easy reach of the girls who earn their living by the sweat of their brow...

If these Clubs are up to the ideal which we have in view, they will be living schools for working women, who will be instrumental in the near future, in altering the conditions of the class they represent.