The predecessor to Queen Mary College was founded in the mid-Victorian era as a "People's Palace" when growing awareness of conditions in London's East End led to drives to provide facilities for local inhabitants, popularised in the 1882 novel "All Sorts of Conditions of Men – An Impossible Story" by Walter Besant, which told of how a rich and clever couple from Mayfair went to the East End to build a ”Palace of Delight, with concert halls, reading rooms, picture galleries, art and designing schools." Although not directly responsible for the conception of the People's Palace, the novel did much to popularise it.