Toynbee Hall is a charitable institution that works to address the causes and impacts of poverty in the East End of London and elsewhere.

Established in 1884, it is based in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, and was the first university-affiliated institution of the worldwide settlement movement—a reformist social agenda that strove to get the rich and poor to live more closely together in an interdependent community.

[1] It was founded by Henrietta and Samuel Barnett in the economically depressed East End,[2] and was named in memory of their friend and fellow reformer, Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee, who had died the previous year.

Toynbee Hall continues to strive to bridge the gap between people of all social and financial backgrounds, with a focus on working towards a future without poverty.

Shortly after their marriage in 1873, Samuel Barnett and his wife, Henrietta, moved to the Whitechapel district of the East End of London.

[11] The international settlement movement began at Toynbee Hall, where a community centre was formed that attracted university students who wished to live or "settle" among the underprivileged in London's economically depressed East End.

[2]: 377  As at most settlement houses, its social workers—students from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, among others—resided at Toynbee Hall and sought thereby to get to know their neighbors and their needs on a more intimate, personal level.

[15] Toynbee Hall rejected the concept of a community centre as a location for Christian proselytising—as seen in the efforts of the Salvation Army.

Gertrude Himmelfarb lists some of the activities offered by Toynbee Hall in a typical month: "evening classes on arithmetic, writing, drawing, citizenship, chemistry, nursing, and music (...); afternoon classes for girls on dressmaking, writing and composition, geography, bookkeeping, needlework, hygiene, reading and recitation, French, singing, cooking, and swimming; and evening sessions devoted to the discussion of legal principles and current social issues".

In 2006 Toynbee Hall launched Capitalise, a pan-London free debt advice service to support 20,000 people a year with their money worries.

[citation needed] Toynbee Hall, the original building that houses the organisation of the same name, is located in Commercial Street, Spitalfields, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.

[22] The front of the building bears a Greater London Council blue plaque, erected in 1984, commemorating Jimmy Mallon, warden 1919–54.