The Tate Institute

The Tate Institute opened in 1887 as a social club and community centre for employees of the Tate Sugar Refinery, which opened in 1877 and remains in operation in Silvertown today. The building included an 800-seat hall, various meeting rooms, nine bathrooms, a reading room and a billiard room and cost £5,000. It was designed in a Domestic Revival style as a secular and apolitical space for the Tate factory workers and offered an alternative meeting place to the many local pubs. Sir Henry Tate is quoted in the Stratford Express in 1887 that he ‘hoped that the building would allow [the workers] to become better chemists, better electricians, better sugar refiners, better men, whatever the social class to which they belonged’.

The institute was sold in 1933, 12 years after Henry Tate and Sons and Abram Lyle and Sons merged to become Tate & Lyle. It became a public library between 1938 and 1961 while the ground floor was still used for social events. During World War II, the building served as an air-raid post. From the 1960s it was a social club with still bar/pub and snooker hall in use until the early 21st century when it was acquired by Newham Council. Since then it has been derelict but in partial use since – formally and informally – by artists.

Silvertown (named after S. W. Silver & Co’s rubber factory) developed from early 19th-century-marshland to a thriving industrial community. The area suffered badly during the Blitz, closed to commercial shipping in 1981 and declined. The Tate refinery opened in 1877 and is now as one of the largest sugar refineries in the world, producing 1.2 million tonnes of sugar a year. Lyle’s Golden Syrup opened nearby in Plaistow Marshes (Royal Docks) in 1882 and continues to be produced at the site today. The two companies merged in 1921.

A community group ReSpace projects recently signed a 25-year lease from Newham Council to redevelop the Institute into a multi-purpose community hub. The hall will be a hall for hire with makers’ workshops, a community café and enterprise hub (coworking space), and a ‘Sweeter Sounds’ Music Studio. The garden will become a micro-nature reserve with raised beds and planting.

HOLT is restoring the historic features of the building including the original decorative plaster panels to the south-east turret, reinstating the historic building sign ‘TATE INSTITUTE’ in the south gable in render, reinstating the ornate iron lamp standards and brick piers flanking main entrance to reflect the grandeur of the original entrance.