People's House

By the beginning of the 20th century the capital supported about 20 People's Houses: these provided entertainment, educational clubs for middle-class intelligentsia, petty officials, students, soldiers and workers, etc.

Costly, taking years to build and lavishly decorated, they were designed to provide a focal point for civic pride, venues for meetings and public events.

Notably these were built according to neo-Gothic style, as promoted by Augustus Pugin and John Ruskin: Pugin believed the harmonious style of the architecture could influence morality, while Ruskin in his book The Stones of Venice examined the architecture of the Italian Renaissance mercantile republics, believing it expressed the spirit of freedom.

Architects adopted these ideas in their building of People's Palaces in the north of England and in Scotland, both to assert the cultural credentials of those regions and to provide an improving influence over the citizens of burgeoning industrial towns.

[7] In 1899 Joseph Rowntree and Arthur Sherwell proposed that People's Houses should be built as part of a programme by the Temperance Party to provide "recreations of the simplest and least exacting kind, such as would specially appeal to those to whom the stress of their daily lives leaves little inclination for anything more than physical relaxation and cheerful intercourse":[8] that is, a viable alternative to the public house.

In Western Continental Europe, the "people's house" is a generic term used to refer to proletarian community centres located in almost all cities.

While the movement itself was short-lived and the branches were few, Thrane's attempt was succeeded by the first "workers' societies" (Norwegian: Arbeidersamfunn) by parish priest Honoratus Halling in 1850, which were less politically radical.

However, when Danish agitator Marcus Jantzen came to Norway in 1873 to establish a social democratic union, he and his acolytes were prohibited from discussing politics, so meetings organized by Jantzen were held in the open air in Tjuvholmen; by this time, the labour movement in Norway had taken off and largely associated with labour or socialist parties with similar woes of space for meetings, thus increasing the demand for separate facilities.

In Spain, the casa del pueblo ("people's house") is a general term for local branches of both the PSOE party (although the term has been officially retired from most PSOE offices save for those in the Basque Country) and the Unión General de Trabajadores; in addition, the CNT-AIt trade union makes use of similar branch offices, although they are largely described as ateneo popular or ateneo obrero ("people's university" and "worker's university" respectively).

The first casa del popolo ("house of the people") built in Italy was in Massenzatico, a small village in the nearby of Reggio Emilia, on September 9, 1893.

The casa del popolo was inaugurated by Società Artigiana Cooperativa di Villa Massenzatico, in front of some of the most important Italian and European Socialist Party representants as Camillo Prampolini, Filippo Turati and Emile Vandervelde.

The Democratic Party perceived the People's Houses as a strong political institution among the civilians which propagated the RPP's point of view.