Mystery slips in good time
The Everyman Theatre on Hope Street stands on the premises of Hope Hall, which was once a dissenting chapel and Gospel hall in times past. In the early 1960s, Hope Hall was a popular venue for Beat poets and pop groups, and around 1964, two men who visited the premises in 1964 inadvertently stepped back centuries. The two men - Gordon and Sam, were builders who had been working on extensions at the club, and one afternoon they went down into the basement, only to be confronted by a very strange scene.
A motley group of scantily dressed men and women were dancing and singing merrily, seemingly oblivious to the two builders. Gordon and Sam also saw that the club's licensed bar and dance area was absent, and instead they saw bare floorboards and a dreary looking room. Sam felt there was something eerie about the dancing strangers, and quickly left the basement. Gordon soon followed him. When the two men went back to the club twenty minutes later with two other workmen, they saw that the dancing people had gone, and stranger still, the basement had reverted back to the club they knew.
In an effort to throw some light upon the curious incident, I delved into the history of Hope Hall, and discovered that when the place was a chapel in the 1830s, scandalous 'Love Feasts' were held in its basement. The orgies of 'free love' were 130 years ahead of their time, and were a glimpse of the promiscuous Flower Power ideals of the late 1960s. The Love Feasts at the Hope Hall chapel were instigated by the controversial Reverend Robert Aiken, but were soon banned after they came to the attention of a Mr Samuel Warren QC, who was outraged at the immoral and disgraceful goings-on.
