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"title": "2-6 Old Montague Street",
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"body": "<p>Two-storey buildings on this site were replaced in 1904–5 in their present form – three storeys with plain brick fronts, shops under dwellings latterly converted for offices. This was done for Barclay Brothers by Turner and Holditch, architects, and Albert Monk, an Edmonton builder. These are now the oldest surviving buildings on Old Montague Street.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1] District Surveyors Returns: London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4453/F/01/051: London County Council Minutess, 15 November 1904, p. 2676</p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-30",
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"id": 579,
"title": "Conservation and Restoration 1997",
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"body": "<p>In 1997 I was working on a self-employed basis with a conservation company which was a sub-contractor on the project. We were responsible for all the exterior work to the former Eastern Dispensary, but to get to our scaffold we had to climb out of a window on the first floor, and therefore we had a good view of the original decoration within the dispensary dating from the 1940’s when it was an entertainment centre for the armed forces and others. Having previously studied History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute, I was particularly concerned when alterations were carried out to the building during the restoration. These would result in a different aspect to the building from what the patients would have known when the dispensary was in use. We were told that the exterior alterations would reflect the nineteenth century engraving in \"The Illustrated London News\". However, nobody could say whether this design, which predated the building's construction, was fully realized.</p>\n\n<p>During restoration in the late 1990s, the heavy cornice was added to the exterior. Careful examination failed to show any archaeological evidence of there having been a cornice. If it fell off, or was taken down during the war, there were no signs of this. Quoin stones were supplied on pallets and affixed to all available corners on the upper storey. Also, mouldings were supplied as per the upper left window in the 1967 photo, and fixed around all the remaining unadorned windows on that level. In effect, details that existed on the original private residence which was the core of the building were repeated all around.</p>\n\n<p>To begin with, my work consisted in the mechanical cleaning off of deep deposits of black sulphation prior to an overall Joss clean. Sulphation was very deep and solid in the scrolls around the windows and the scallop shell above the side door. We had to we had to cart the bags of powder up the inside and out of the window. After cleaning, my job was to repair cracked and missing cement render, including building up of missing letters/ numerals at the top of the building.</p>\n\n<p>I remember one particular day when a passing off-duty building safety inspector looked in and was so horrified by the health and safety issues with work inside the building that he closed it down. We were all turned to for a general clean-up and hazard removal, while some people were sent away to get safety boots.</p>\n\n<p>A few years later, I went in to the building after its conversion into a pub and recommended to the staff in charge that some sort of story board was needed. Otherwise the significance of the building would be totally lost on people who came in from outside East London. Needless to say, the layout of the interior was greatly altered to create the pub.</p>\n",
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"title": "King's Arms Court",
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"body": "<p>King’s Arms Court has two four- to five-storey largely white-faced blocks on its west side, an affordable housing project of 2007–9 on a site much of which had been a car park since the 1980s. Stephen Davy and Peter Smith were the architects for the Toynbee Housing Association, which merged with the Community Housing Association in 2007 to form One Housing Group. The southern block comprises ten socially rented flats, the northern seventeen shared ownership flats. There is also an office facing Old Montague Street.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
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"id": 466,
"title": "Living as long-haired lefties in Black Lion Yard",
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"body": "<p>I had friends who were living in Black Lion Yard so I spent time there as well, and when one of them moved out I took over the room and lived there for a year or two. That was a room above a jewellery shop, it was pretty tatty but relatively ok, it was a nice building, it was a shame it was demolished. I lived in No.17.</p>\n\n<p>There were jewellers shops, the streets were filled with jewellers shops earlier, it was a place where people came from all over London to buy clocks, watches, rings, jewellery of all sorts, it was a big centre for jewellery. It always seemed odd to me that they would be next to each other where they would be competing, but it brought people in.</p>\n\n<p>I moved in in 1971 or 1972 and at that point the east side had been cleared or partly demolished, it was fully demolished while I was living there, and there was a couple of buildings used as cafes by local West Indian Guys. They'd be up and down the road selling dope, you could lean out of the window at No.17 where I was living and whistle and someone would flick up a bit of dope, and you'd throw down a 50p.</p>\n\n<p>Originally the jewellery shops were on both sides of the street, but by the time I moved in they were on the west side. When I moved in about half of the east side was gone, and when I was there they were demolishing the last part of the east side, I've got pictures of guys with hammers knocking bits down which I shot from my window looking across the street.</p>\n\n<p>Our landlord was Solly Granatt, he would go to Hatton Garden and then come back to his shop, he did a lot of diamond trading as well as the jewellery in the shop. There was no diamond cutting, it was purely retail. I think it was entirely Jewish run. </p>\n\n<p>There was a derelict dairy, a milking parlour at the end of Black Lion Yard. There were steps up and a couple of bollards where it meets Old Montague Street, and the dairy was in the corner. It still had the stalls and bits of stuff, no milking was taking place but there had been I think as late as the early 1960s. </p>\n\n<p>Most of the shop owners were pretty old, and were retiring as they closed down. Solly Granatt was going to retire but he died before he actually moved out, so at that point we turned from paying rent into a squat, because there was no landlord to collect our rent, so we just stayed there. </p>\n\n<p>We didn't have much communication with the other jewellers, they were very closed. Granite I got on well with, but I don't know his plans. I don't know where he was from but out of this area, Stanmore or Finchley. He had been in the shop a long time, I have a feeling his father had been in the same shop too. We didn't ask him much and he didn't talk much about that sort of thing. He'd ask me to walk him down to the tube if he had a lot of diamonds, there had been a few robberies. </p>\n\n<p>Because we were young dope smoking, squatty types, lefty, long-haired, flares, the other jewellers hated us, pretty much all the other residents didn't like us at all. We had parties, we had women round, generally we had a pleasant time. </p>\n\n<p>I moved out in autumn 1973. Solly went into hospital and died there, probably spring or summer 1973.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-30",
"last_edited": "2019-09-03"
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"id": 341,
"title": "Former nursery to rear of 12-20 Osborn Street",
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"body": "<p>Within a year or so of the opening of the clothing factory at 12-20 Osborn Street in 1961 a day nursery for the children of the factory’s employees was built to the rear, behind the Nag’s Head public house. This was converted to storage use in the late 1970s and demolished not long after. It has been succeeded by a building of comparable scale at the south end of a car park entered off Old Montague Street. This is used by the hotel that has succeeded the clothing factory.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: Historic England Archives, aerial photographs</p>\n",
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"title": "Robert Montefiore Primary School, Deal St",
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"body": "<p> </p>\n\n<p>Quotation from Survey of London: Volume 27, Spitalfields and Mile End New Town.</p>\n\n<p>\"This school was built for the London School Board. The contractors were Messrs. A. Reed and Son of Stratford, whose tender for a school for 1,200 children was for £16,945. The architect was T. J. Bailey and the date of opening was 10 February 1896. [^1] The building is three storeys high, built of stock brick and hard vermilion brick with some Portland stone dressings, the elevations being divided by pilasters into bays, each three windows wide. The ground storey is rusticated above a plinth of purple engineering brick and there is a moulded band at first-floor and roof levels. The playground on the roof is screened by a high parapet with rectangular openings containing decorative iron grilles. The thin crowning cornice carries stone vases. The south front is five bays wide with a low wing to the east. The end bays are treated differently, the eastern one being pedimented, with stucco ornament in the tympanum. The north front is asymmetrical with a huge segmental bow near the centre topped by a stone balustrade. To each side are dissimilar pedimented wings.\"</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: L.S.B. Minutes, 2 Nov. 1893, 27 Feb. 1896; L.C.C. Architect's plans</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Vallance Gardens was actually a densely packed burial ground for the Society of Friends, in an era when Quaker burials had no monuments. Recent work for Crossrail did not disturb these burials. I monitored work there during snow and into darkness in 2012-13. There is a map of the Quaker burial plots in this document: <a href=\"http://learninglegacy.crossrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/C261-Vallance-Road-Gardens-GWB-Fieldwork-Report-v1-31.10.12.pdf\">http://learninglegacy.crossrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/C261-Vallance-Road-Gardens-GWB-Fieldwork-Report-v1-31.10.12.pdf</a> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>The Nag’s Head Inn has early origins, how early remains unclear, but it was certainly on its present site by 1703, possibly long since; its main-road site is immediately opposite that of Whitechapel's medieval church. The inn later became the Nag’s Head and Woolpack, and was then improved by Thomas Whitehead around 1770 before becoming a Barclay Perkins establishment. There was a timber-built galleried range to the rear, very likely that depicted by William Bell Scott in 1842 (see <a href=\"https://nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/11869/courtyard-inn-whitechapel-london?artists[15135]=15135&search_set_offset=34\">https://nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/11869/courtyard-inn-whitechapel-london?artists[15135]=15135&search_set_offset=34</a>). The livery stable yard of what had become a coaching inn extended back to Old Montague Street (see <a href=\"https://nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/11868/courtyard-stable-whitechapel-london-dated-1842?artists[15135]=15135&search_set_offset=33\">https://nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/11868/courtyard-stable-whitechapel-london-dated-1842?artists[15135]=15135&search_set_offset=33</a>). Access from Whitechapel Road was on the inn’s west side. The brick-built inn was described as ‘old’ around 1915 when Lazarus Leber was the resident victualler. The stable yard (for thirty horses, and run by Abraham Levy) was still then faced by a gallery, ‘old wood buildings’ and a six-room cottage.[^1] Neo-Georgian rebuilding is probably datable to 1932, most likely to designs by F. G. Newnham, Barclay, Perkins & Co.’s house architect. An upper storey and the westernmost bay of the four-bay front were taken down after war damage and the west bay was reconstructed in 1959–60. Even so, that this was the site of the former yard entrance can still be discerned. In recent times, over a period the length of which has been disputed, the Nag’s Head has operated as a strip club.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives, IR58/84805/2217–9: Land Tax: London Metropolitan Archives, THCS/202–464: Ordnance Survey maps: Census</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/2305/01/0931; SC/PHL/02/1193: District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/THL/D/2/30/171: Goad maps: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Rashid Ahmed is a Rehab Support Worker on the Community Stroke Team at the Royal London Hospital, here he describes how the team work in the hospital and local area.</p>\n\n<p>\"[The Royal London Hospital] is one of the main hubs for taking on patients. We get patients from various parts of London. They’re not necessarily just from Tower Hamlets. However, once they're here and we're doing ward based work we might be treating patients from the borough and out of the borough. But once patients or ourselves are off the ward, we're community-based, we’re predominantly working on patients from Tower Hamlets.</p>\n\n<p>It is a huge facility we have here, with space and resources. We didn’t move in immediately once the hospital had opened because we had our own service changes within our department, and we probably came in probably a year or two later once the building was trying to open up and start accommodating and delegating space for specific services. We’re here now, yes. We’ve been here probably two, three years now.</p>\n\n<p>We're the stroke platform part of the neuro-team. We deal specifically with stroke patients. [We are based] on the second floor, we have one office dedicated to the stroke team…They’re also working on a ward based on the third floor. Where we are based now is one of the gyms of three or four gyms. This gym is used for neonatal patient’s exercise groups as well as in-house training.</p>\n\n<p>We certainly do use other parts of the hospital in terms of recruitment and training, our own personal development. We have other rooms dedicated for us when we need to have access to other rooms just for, like for example my timetable we try to schedule the patients and its therapist.</p>\n\n<p>Some rooms are equipped with projectors, computers. Other rooms don't have anything in it. Again there could be different group sizes, so you're fishing around for appropriate space for specific training rooms.</p>\n\n<p>The building we have now is far more superior [than the former hospital] in the sense that it's very modern, updated equipment, more space, even on the ward, even for patient specific rooms.</p>\n\n<p>However, when they built these departments, I think that this is just my own personal opinion, is that they need to accommodate more input from the people who will be working within the building. I don't know where they get their -- who their consultants they design this with.</p>\n\n<p>But they should consult with frontline workers because they’re the people who know what's needed. The space is always an issue regardless, even though we have more space it’s still an issue when you're moving around large pieces of equipment within rooms that we still consider to be spacious.</p>\n\n<p>But it is easier when you've got patients who are severely unwell and require more than one health professional within the room. It becomes quite tight when you have these specific treatments to help the patient recover. There’s a lot to take in when we're thinking about space and resources...</p>\n\n<p>We use the shops that are around here. Tower Hamlets, Whitechapel, is vast for food. We've got large options and variations for types of food that you might want. You might want Indian fried food, one might want sandwiches. There's options and the availability is there.</p>\n\n<p>We also have a restaurant on the site on the fifth floor. That’s an option for staff and families and carers. We also have a cafe on the Ground Floor. We're not short for options. There's a lot to choose from.</p>\n\n<p>Our team is made up of people who come from all different walks of life. Some people come from South London, some people are coming from Walthamstow. People come from different places or commute, some on bikes, depending on the time of the year, some with trains and underground. Yes, it's quite varied.\"</p>\n\n<p>Rashid Ahmed was interviewed by Shahed Saleem at the Royal London Hospital on 26.02.16. The interview has been edited for print.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-02-20",
"last_edited": "2021-02-23"
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"title": "Sugar in the Square",
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"body": "<p>In the early 1750s, on the SW corner of the school site, stood the sugarhouse of John Arney. It backed onto Well Street (Ensign Street), though its address for much of the time was 27 Wellclose Square and it was approached through an alley between Nos. 28 & 26.[^1] The risk of fire was great in the trade and the sugarhouse was brick built, though No. 26 and the frontage of No. 27, which was also part dwelling house, probably the men's room [^2], were still the old timber buildings original to the Square. On John Arney's death in 1775 the sugarhouse passed to his son Scheve, who, after a short partnership with Mr Wackerbath around 1784, went into partnership with Ludwig Witte in 1794. Scheve Arney died in 1800.</p>\n\n<p>Ludwig Witte, initially with his brother Henry, and then from 1807 with merchants Sir Charles Grave Hudson and later his son and heir, ran and improved the sugarhouse. The records of the Sun Fire Office show that in 1821 a new sugarhouse was being insured, as well as the old one. Witte became a very wealthy man, died in 1826, aged 81, and was buried at the German Lutheran Church in Trinity Lane. The younger Sir Charles continued to invest in the business, in partnership with Mr T. Hunt in 1825 and then Henry Jonas, until his death in 1827. Jonas was declared bankrupt by 1836.</p>\n\n<p>In 1851 John Wagener purchased the lease of '26-27 Wellclose Square and a former sugar bakehouse adjoining no.27, the cooperage in Wellclose Square, mews at rear of nos 20-26, and 14-15 Well St' from the son of the late Sir Charles Hudson Palmer.[^3] As a young German refiner he had for a short time in 1839 been working in partnership with others in Ellen St, and soon after by himself in Mansell St. Around 1850 he followed the trend to move his dwelling out of the East End by purchasing Great Langtons, Hornchurch, Essex.[^4] He then moved his business from Mansell Street to 27 Wellclose Square, and commissioned the surveyor Charles Dyson to draw up plans for an addition to the sugarhouse.[^5] This was built to abut the northern end of the wooden dwelling house and overlap the front of the existing sugar house by some 10 ft. The addition was 60ft tall with a 16ft basement beneath, and 31ft square, all set upon concrete foundations 4ft wide x 2ft 6ins deep. The brick walls were 23ins thick in the basement and the first storey, above that 18ins thick. The basement held two steam boilers, one 28ft by 7ft diameter, the other 19ft by 4ft 6ins diameter, and extended forward by 14ft below ground to provide a vault in which the stokers could feed the boilers, with simple metal grilles providing minimal light and ventilation. Of the six working floors above, the ceiling heights were shown as, bottom to top, 8ft 6ins, 7ft 9ins, 7ft 4ins, 7ft 4ins, 7ft and 7ft, with a pitched roof above. Each wooden floor, except the top one, was supported by six evenly spaced columns. Metal fire doors on each floor, including the basement, gave access to the older building. Each storey had four small windows, and there were large loading doors, in place of one of the windows, on the lowest and highest floors. A neat pediment fronted the pitched roof, the corner of which can be seen behind No. 26, along with the rooflines of both the earlier sugarhouses, in photographs dated 1911 and 1913[^6], and can be seen above the buildings fronting the Square in a 1920 photograph.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>Wagener closed the refinery in the early 1870s, and gave Charles Davidson, papermaker, a short lease for No. 27 and the sugarhouse.[^8] After John Wagener's death in 1884, his executors sold the whole site to William Woellwarth wine merchant.[^9] In 1911, No. 27 was occupied by Everett & Co, bonded carmen, contractors and shipping agents.[^10]</p>\n\n<p>Sugar was refined in Wellclose Square for around 150yrs from the 1720s, with at least eight different sugarhouses - Nos. 5, 10, 22, 27, 30, 35, 48 and 54.[^11]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <a href=\"https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/zoom-item?i=123856&WINID=1524067605950\">London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), SC/PHL/01/404/80/2400, </a>via Collage.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives/Ancestry, Land Tax Records</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/FAR/1/3/3/1</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Frank Lewis, <em>Essex and Sugar</em>, London and Chichester, 1976</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: London Metropolitan Archives, MBO/Plans/440, 441, 442</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: (1911): <a href=\"https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/zoom-item?i=123797&WINID=1524067605950\">LMA, SC/PHL/01/404/3671c, via Collage</a>; (1913): Photograph of 27 Wellclose Square by Henry Dixon, 1913, on front cover of Peter Guillery, <em>The Small House in Eighteenth Century London</em>, London and New Haven, 2004 (Historic England Archives, BB70/1068A)</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <a href=\"https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/zoom-item?i=123858&WINID=1524067605950\">LMA, SC/PHL/01/404/80/4185, via Collage 121630</a></p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/FAR/1/3/3/2</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/FAR/1/3/3/4</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <a href=\"https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/zoom-item?i=123816&WINID=1524067605950\">LMA, SC/PHL/01/404/74/13595, via Collage 121588</a></p>\n\n<p>[^11]: Mawer, Sugar Refiners & Sugarbakers: <a href=\"www.mawer.clara.net/ref6.html\">www.mawer.clara.net/ref6.html</a></p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-14",
"last_edited": "2019-03-05"
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{
"id": 374,
"title": "11-15 Casson Street",
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>The building at 11–15 Casson Street is of 1987–8, three three-storey neo-Georgian brick single-family houses for the Bangladeshi-led Spitalfields Housing Co-operative (later Association), designed by Solon Co-operative Design Group (Dean La Tourelle, job architect), with Seaborn Kahane Architects overseeing building work by Peter Ling Construction Ltd.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[1]: Goad maps: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 121743: Tower Hamlets planning</p>\n",
"created": "2017-06-01",
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"title": "55 Royal Mint Street and 84 John Fisher Street (Tower Mint Apartments)",
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"body": "<p>These four and five-storey blocks of 2009–10 were built as a shop, office and flats for Regnum Ltd, through Moss Architecture and Design and Andrew Towns-Wadey (Builders) Ltd.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1] Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2019-05-01",
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},
{
"id": 561,
"title": "1978: The turning point of Bengali politics in London’s East End ",
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"b_name": "Altab Ali Park, including the site of the parish church of St Mary Matfelon",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>The Bengali presence in the UK can be traced back long before the Indian subcontinent gained its independence in 1947. From the mid-19th century onwards a small number of Asian professionals, mainly doctors, businessmen and lawyers had established themselves in Britain. In the beginning of the 20th century the first large group of South Asians who came to the UK were seamen, known as lascars, including Bengali seamen recruited in British India to work for the East India Company. Groups of seamen and ex-soldiers settled nearer the docks of East End of London.</p>\n\n<p><strong>1940s-1950s: Welfare of fellow countrymen</strong></p>\n\n<p>Some of these seamen began to settle in London’s East End from the 1850s onwards. Evidence of the early settlement of Bengali seamen in London can be seen in the formation of organisations such as the Society for the Protection of Asian Sailors in 1857. But an early and influential Bengali figure connected to the East End of London was Ayub Ali Master, who lived at 13 Sandy's Row (1945-59). He ran a seamen’s café in Commercial Road in the 1920s and also then opened the Shah Jalal Coffee House at 76 Commercial Street. The Commercial Street premise is still there used as a trendy bar/restaurant known as Blessings in 2017. Ayub Ali Master turned his Sandy’s Row home into an advice centre of support for Bengalis which included a lodging house, a job centre offering letter writing, form filling and a travel agency. He also started the Indian Seamen’s Welfare League in 1943. As a result most seamen headed for Ayub Ali Master’s coffee shop which was usually the first port of call for help and guidance. By the 1950s the Bengali population gradually grew and mostly men, both seamen and others who arrived in the UK by ship and by air, had established the Pakistan Welfare Association which became the Bangladesh Welfare Association after Bangladesh’s independence from Pakistan in 1971. The Bangladesh Welfare Association is the oldest and largest community organisation with a membership of over 40,000. The Bangladesh Welfare Association building since 1965 is situated at 39 Fournier Street, next to historical Brick Lane Mosque, originally built for the minister of the church in 1750. It was the base of Huguenot charitable work with the local poor. Jewish charities were based here at the end of the 19th century. Until recently the Bangladesh Welfare Association building also happened to be the contact address for the Altab Ali Foundation.</p>\n\n<p><strong>1960s-1970s: Bangladeshi politics - Liberation War</strong></p>\n\n<p>From the early 1950s and throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, political developments in Pakistan and especially in East Pakistan, where Bengalis came from, were moving fast. Pakistanis were campaigning against military rule. In addition the Bengalis of East Pakistan felt that they were getting a raw deal within the framework of Pakistan. As result resentment grew against the Pakistani ruling elite based in West Pakistan. The cause of the people of East Pakistan was being championed by a party called the Awami League led by a young charismatic leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Awami League’s demand for self-autonomy soon turned into the full-fledged Independence War of Bangladesh in 1971. During the War of Bangladesh in 1971, the UK’s Bengali community played an important role in highlighting the atrocities taking place in Bangladesh, lobbying the British government and the international community and raising funds for refugees and Bengali freedom fighters. The Bengali community across the UK formed Action Committee’s in support of the liberation of Bangladesh. A key feature of this period was the support provided by members of the white British majority. Among some of them was our very own Peter Shore MP from East London. It is interesting to note that Bengalis were active in political activity before 1971 as they had supported Awami League’s Six Point programme in 1966, which demanded greater autonomy for East Pakistan and campaigned for Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s release following his arrest in 1968 in the Agartala conspiracy case. An important meeting venue for the Bengali activists during 1971 was the Dilchad restaurant near Artillery Lane in East London. The owner of the restaurant, Mr Mottalib Chowdhury, was a prominent social worker. There were hardly any Bengali students who did not receive help from him. His sons followed their father’s footsteps and still are active in community and social work.</p>\n\n<p><strong>1978: The Turning Point - Political mobilisation of the second generation</strong></p>\n\n<p><em>Bengali community activists and anti-racist politics</em></p>\n\n<p>From the mid-1970s many British Asians, including Bengalis who lived in the East End of London, were experiencing racism, social deprivation and a high level of unemployment. For the Brick Lane Bengali community, who had been under constant attack from racists since early 1970s, the murder of Altab Ali, a leather factory worker, in 1978 was a turning point, especially for the Bengali youth. The murder led to their mobilisation and politicisation on an unprecedented scale. On 14 May 1978, 10,000 locals marched from the then St Mary’s Gardens (now Altab Ali Park) to a rally in Hyde Park, walking behind the coffin of Altab Ali in a show of unity and strength against racial violence. The group then walked to 10 Downing Street to hand over a petition to the Prime Minister calling for action to be taken against racist attacks. This was one of the biggest demonstrations by the Bengali community since the rallies for the independence of Bangladesh in 1971. In the same period the Bengali community began to organise youth groups, community and campaigning groups and linked up with other anti-racist movements and organisations. The groups that came out of this struggle were the Bangladesh Youth Movement (BYM), Bangladesh Youth Front (BYF), Progressive Youth Organisation (PYO), Bangladesh Youth League (BYL) and the Bangladesh Youth Association (BYA) amongst others. In fact 1978 saw the emergence of the second generation of Bengali community activists who would later enter mainstream politics in the 1980s.</p>\n\n<p><em>Naming of Altab Ali Park and Altab Ali Arch</em></p>\n\n<p>Altab Ali Park has now become symbolic to the Bengali community. To mark the death anniversary, the Altab Ali Foundation was set up in 2010 to hold annual vigil on 4 May 2010 known as the Altab Ali Day. Usually hundreds of community leaders, activists and anti-racist activists attend in solidarity against racism and extremism in the East End. After a long standing demand from the local community, St Mary’s Gardens was renamed Altab Ali Park in 1998, an initiative brought forward by the Stepney Neighbourhood of Tower Hamlets Council to commemorate the racist murder of Altab Ali. Before that it was called St Mary’s, the site of a 14th Century white church called St Mary’s Matfelon from which the local area – Whitechapel- derived its name. It was bombed in the Blitz during World War II, and a lightning strike a few years later finished it off, only a few graves stones remain today. As you enter Altab Ali Park, from White Church Lane/Whitechapel High Street you will pass under the Altab Ali Arch. This Arch commemorates Altab Ali and other victims of racist violence. In 1989, David Peterson, a Welsh artist and blacksmith was commissioned by Tower Hamlets to make a wrought iron arch for the entrance of the park. The design is based on both Bengali and European architecture. It comprises of red coated metal wrapped around and interwoven through a tubular structure. This is meant to signify the merging of different cultures in the East End. Altab Ali Arch was erected on 25 – 27 September 1989 and unveiled on 1 October. A ceremony accompanied the unveiling in which there were speakers, Bengali music and stalls. A banner was commissioned from Cate Clarke which was hung from two trees facing Whitechapel Road. Hundreds of children from local primary schools, Osmani and Harry Gosling, made hats, flags, and ribbon accessories, and led procession through the arch after it was unveiled.</p>\n\n<p><strong>1980s: Community representations from the 1970s-1980s</strong></p>\n\n<p>In the 1970s and 80s, Bengali community politics moved away from preoccupations with political struggles in Bangladesh. Alliances were forged between some of the first generation and the younger activists. The energy of youth was consolidated in 1980 by the formation of the Federation Bangladeshi Youth Organisations (FBYO), an umbrella body that spearheaded campaigns for better housing, health and education and against racism. The FBYO was the first truly national campaigning organisation that made representation of Bengali interests and spoke for Bengalis across the borough and nationally. The youth seized the opportunity to gain both access to the local political system and to various funding streams channelled through the local council, the Greater London Authority and the education authority. They also saw the importance of building alliances with activists outside the Bengali community, such as other ‘Asians’ from Hackney, Newham, Camden, Southall, Bradford and those from the white majority community of East End. In the 1980s, 34 of the 112 community groups listed by local education authority in Spitalfields ward of Tower Hamlets were led by Bengalis. As Bengali community activism grew, many activists took prominent roles in community politics. Brick Lane became the centre of Bengali activism. Today Brick Lane has become a global icon, a branding concept as in ‘Banglatown’ and the ‘Curry Capital of Europe’. 1982 saw the first Bengalis elected to local council. Nurul Haque, an independent candidate from Spitalfields became a councillor defeating a Labour candidate. In the same year Labour’s only Bengali candidate Ashik Ali became a councillor from St Katherine’s ward. Today Tower Hamlets Council can boast the largest number of Black/Asian/Bengali councillors in any one borough. Today’s Mayor, Member of Greater London Authority, Member of Parliament and Member of the House of Lords are all directly linked to the legacy of the community’s effort, following the murder of Altab Ali, to challenge institutional racism and to enter mainstream politics in order to bring about meaningful changes for the greater welfare of the Bengali community.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-01-09",
"last_edited": "2021-03-30"
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"id": 158,
"title": "Sugar Refineries, 12 Church St / 157 Hanbury St",
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"body": "<p> </p>\n\n<p>Prior to the school being built the site was used for sugar refining for much of the 19th century. Horwood's early map c.1799 shows only four small buildings, likely houses, at the east corner of Church St (later Hanbury St) and Deal St. The later edition c.1812 shows a small sugarhouse to the east of the site. The first occupants of 12 Church St appear to have been Blankenhagen & Co 1804-5, followed by Herman Almeroth & Co through to 1813, and then the Burnell family for many years. The original building, under the title of Burnell, Geiss & Co, was destroyed by fire in 1821, but rebuilt and considerably increased in size. By 1873 the refinery occupied an area from Church St right back to Pelham St (later Woodseer St) and was run by James Bryant and Thomas Burns Dakin. [^1] Church St was renamed Hanbury St, and renumbered, in 1876. [^2] As 157 Hanbury St, Dakin ran it through to it's closure in 1888. It was one of the last refineries to close in the East End. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>It seems reasonable to assume that the original sugarhouse was purpose built. Although small, it would probably have been four or five storeys high, in brick, with small windows, and with loading doors towards the top. The later building would have been maybe seven or eight storeys, in part at least.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Sugar Refiners & Sugarbakers http://www.mawer.clara.net</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Wiki Hanbury Street http://wiki.casebook.org/index.php/Hanbury_Street</p>\n",
"created": "2016-10-27",
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{
"id": 160,
"title": "The Montefiore Centre, Hanbury St",
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"body": "<p> </p>\n\n<p>The building continues its use as an establishment for education and training, having been opened in 1896 as the Deal Street Elementary School and renamed later as The Robert Montefiore School. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets website http://www.towerhamletsarts.org.uk</p>\n",
"created": "2016-10-27",
"last_edited": "2017-05-22"
},
{
"id": 506,
"title": "245–249 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>Premises here known as Waterloo House were rebuilt in 1903. Walter Gladding was the builder at Nos 245–247 for McKay and Ryland, linen-drapers, and J. H. T. Keeves built for himself at No. 249, which explains the minor elevational irregularity in this substantial six-bay four-storey building with flats above shops, plain except for red-brick trim that includes first-floor relieving arches on Gladding’s bays. The drapers’ shop extended by 1907 to include Nos 243 and 249. No. 247 now houses the Feast and Mishti Bangladeshi restaurant.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/HHL/1/1; Building Control file 15476.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-11-17",
"last_edited": "2017-11-17"
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{
"id": 553,
"title": "Shopping-mall schemes",
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"street": "Durward Street",
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"body": "<p>From 1972 to 1988 there were plans for a large shopping mall to the north of Whitechapel Road and Whitechapel Station. These were initiated by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, which owned land north of Durward Street and was in the process of acquiring Greater London Council owned property, and planned co-operatively with London Transport, which owned most of what lay to the south of Durward Street. A first scheme incorporated substantial office and residential elements and proposed building above the railway line. The factories north of Durward Street and the housing between Durward Street and Winthrop Street were cleared in the early 1970s, leaving just the coal-drop viaduct, Rosenbergers and Brady House on Durward Street, Brady Street Dwellings, and a garage immediately south of the Jewish Burial Ground in Bethnal Green.</p>\n\n<p>The Shankland Cox Partnership put forward four development options in 1975, soon reduced to three, ranging in extent from just the east side of Whitechapel Station to Brady Street, to all the way to Vallance Road in the west. Redevelopment planning extended well northwards into Spitalfields and Bethnal Green. Abbott Howard, architects, took forward a preferred scheme before 1979 when the Council briefed Sam Chippindale Development Services to prepare a plan for almost fourteen acres ‘loosely based on a Brent Cross/Arndale theme’; Chippindale, a founder of Arndale, had not previously been active in London.[^1] Through Trip and Wakeham Partnership, architects, this had become a huge project (larger in fact than Brent’s Cross) extending to the northern boundary of the parish, intending 800,000 square feet of retail including six or seven department stores, 300,000 square feet of office space, flats and parking for 1800 cars and a bus station.</p>\n\n<p>There was perceived competition from Surrey Docks, but all seemed set to go ahead in 1983. However, two big retailers pulled out and Chippindale, voicing doubt (the project ‘hadn’t got a cat in hell’s chance of succeeding’[^2]), was sacked in 1985. The scheme’s commercial viability was further questioned, but concerned at being the only London borough both not to have a large retail centre and expecting a population increase in the 1980s, the Council issued a new development brief. Competing proposals included a scheme by Inner City Enterprises submitted with the Tower Hamlets Environment Trust on behalf of the Whitechapel Development Trust. This became known as ‘the community plan’; its architects were CZWG. A more commercial rival (more offices and parking, less residential) from Pengap Securities Ltd working with Chapman Taylor Partners was favoured. Pengap was taken over by the Burton Group in 1987 and the project was passed around, to former Pengap directors as Wingate Property and Investment, then to Chase Property Holdings and on to Trafalgar House with Consortium Commercial. The scheme they submitted and gained permission to build in 1988 would have had a large domical central feature and a nine-storey tower on Brady Street. It would also have meant clearance of 235–245 and 287–317 Whitechapel Road. But negotiations unravelled and by the end of the year the project had died, its abandonment said to be connected to proposals for the Grand Metropolitan owned Albion Brewery site. Meanwhile there had been vast quantities of fly-tipping on the empty land, to a depth of 2–3m.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>What had been the Kearley & Tonge site south of Vallance Gardens was used for car auctions, as a lorry park and as a Sunday market for second-hand goods in the 1980s and 90s. A spin-off from Brick Lane’s then gentrifying market, this was misleadingly referred to as Whitechapel Waste, and more accurately described as the 'kalo' (Bengali for black) market.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Transport for London Group Archives (TfLGA), LT000682/089</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 1 Nov 1985</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: TfLGA, LT000682/089: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), cuttings and pamphlets 022: The Spitalfields Trust newsletter, 1990</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THLHLA, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Whitechapel Shopping Centre Development Brief, 1986: http://philmaxwell.org/?p=13334: Juber Hussain at <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/616/detail/\">https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/616/detail/</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-01-04",
"last_edited": "2020-09-21"
},
{
"id": 744,
"title": "St Paul’s Whitechapel Church of England Primary School",
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"body": "<p>In 1858 the Rev. William Weldon Champneys, Rector of Whitechapel, proposed attaching schools to St Paul, Dock Street, which had opened in 1847. Five years later, an infant school opened on the first floor of 21 Wellclose Square (it soon moved to No. 12), and St Paul’s newly appointed rector, the Rev. Dan Greatorex, raised an alarm about attempts by the Anglo-Catholic clerics based at St George in the East, the Rev. Bryan King and the Rev. Charles Fuge Lowder, to gain control of his district and to buy the Danish Church of which they were then tenants, for an extension of their Romanizing project. With support from the Bishop of London, A. C. Tait, Greatorex was able to secure control of the district in 1864 for St Paul, Dock Street, and thus to evict Lowder and the churchmanship he represented from Whitechapel. Greatorex and his chapel wardens acquired the former Danish church through the Bishop of London’s Fund in 1867–9 for the purpose of providing Church of England schools for local working-class and poor children, especially those of seamen. First funds were secured and an appeal was launched with a target of £4,500.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>What was to be St Paul’s National Schools were intended for a district with a population of 9,668, mostly seamen, dock and wharf labourers and their families, estimated as being a third Anglican, a third Catholic and Jewish, and a third of ‘no distinctive sect’. The schools would accommodate 150 boys, 150 girls and 300 infants, and ‘counteract the vice and demoralization which abound’.[^2] Greatorex’s building committee embraced notables from both Whitechapel and Wapping and included the Rev. James Cohen, Rector of Whitechapel, Lacy Hipwood, Secretary, Charles Addingham Hanbury of Truman’s brewery, Augustus W. Gadesden and William Straw of Leman Street, John Whyte of Upper East Smithfield, Henry Sadler Mitchell of Prescott Street, Joseph Loane, a Dock Street surgeon, John Butler, a haberdasher of 42 Wellclose Square, William Henry Graveley, a City surveyor, Capt. Francis Maude, Chairman of the Sailors’ Home, Capt. George Troup, and Thomas Joyce and Robert Henderson from Wapping. </p>\n\n<p>First plans were for conversion of the church, with an inserted floor for boys’ and girls’ classrooms above space for infants, and the addition of a large new east range, at an estimated cost of £6,000. By April 1869 it had been agreed that the chapel could not be converted, its north wall being said to be badly out of upright, and that it would be necessary to erect a new building, though ‘not without regret’,[^3] as was claimed, and not without opposition that favoured an open recreation ground. The architects were Greatorex and Co., the rector’s brothers, Reuben Courtnell Greatorex and Simeon Greatorex, of Westbourne Street Mews, Hyde Park Gardens. The contractor was Thomas Ennor of Commercial Road, and Joseph Fairer made the schools’ clock. Gadesden laid the foundation stone on 21 December 1869 and the Prince and Princess of Wales (Princess Alexandra being Danish) opened the schools on 30 June 1870, with a roll of 143 boys, 165 girls and 283 infants. The final cost of the building all told was recorded as £7,193 10s, with £7,955 3 9 having been raised.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The Gothic schools building, of stock brick with red- and white-brick and Portland stone dressings, occupied the whole of the church’s walled plot (125ft by 75ft) and reused church foundations. There were long boys’ and girls’ classrooms either side of a spine wall, raised on arcades above undercroft playgrounds. Infant classrooms were in a separately roofed east range. Houses for the master and mistresses flanked the twin west entrances above which there rose a clock tower. Open trefoils mark all the gables, and some original window tracery survives. Cibber’s figure of Charity breastfeeding an infant stood on the stone plinth in the central recess below the dedication stone until 1908. Lettering is in relief, not inscribed, and a ship surmounted the clock tower’s weathervane.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>Attendances rose to 199 boys, 168 girls and 382 infants in 1874 before declining to 97 boys, 111 girls and 198 infants in 1891; large numbers were Jewish. By this time support came from the Whitechapel Foundation, then the London County Council took on responsibility. Improvements were mooted as necessary in 1905 and loans were approved. The infants’ department was altered in 1908, externally by the raising above the eaves of the three central windows of the east elevation, internally by the removal of an organ, probably rescued from the Danish church. There were also two triple-seraph sculpted bosses in the schoolroom’s ceiling, one of which still survives. These works were overseen by T. J. Bailey for the LCC, with G. E. Weston as the builder. Attendances fell to 174 mixed and 82 infants in 1929, and a reorganisation scheme that was approved in 1939 fell foul of the war.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>In the planning of wider post-war reconstruction, consideration was given to moving the school in the 1950s. Instead, it was extended to the south in 1960–2, with Thomas F. Ford & Partners as architect and William Verry as contractors for an assembly hall and kitchen. Princess Margaret opened the hall on 20 February 1962. It has laminated timber arches with the profile of an inverted ship’s hull. A copper model of a fully rigged ship on the south entrance elevation of the hall was a weathervane on St Paul, Dock Street, repaired and regilded in 1953, and moved around 1990. An advertisement for a new Headmaster in 1966 sought ‘Liberal-Catholic’ churchmanship for a ‘challenging multi-racial area’.[^7] A prefabricated nursery room went up in gardens to the south-west in 1970. The school was listed in 1973 and numerous minor alterations followed. The playground undercroft had its former openings definitively bricked up in 1985–6 with the original tracery emulated. A major refurbishment programme in 2010–11 overseen by Wilby & Burnett, architects, included T-plan brick-faced classroom extensions to the south-west (nursery and reception) and east (first and second years).[^8]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), P93/PAU2/030–034,117,123,127,136–7</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: The National Archives (TNA), ED103/111/1</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, P93/PAU2/145</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: TNA, ED103/111/1: LMA, P93/PAU2/127,137,140–1,143–5, 198/1–4: <em>The Builder</em>, 10 April and 17 July 1869, pp. 291,569; 9 July 1870, p. 551: <em>Illustrated London News</em>, 9 July 1870, pp. 37,42</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, P93/PAU2/137,195/1–4</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LMA, P93/PAU2/104,132–4; District Surveyors Returns: TNA, ED21/12137,35341,57371; ED49/5165: London County Council Minutes, 30 May 1905, p. 2083; 10 Oct. 1905, p. 1071; 13 Feb. 1906, pp. 246–7; 19 Nov. 1907, p. 1093; 22 Dec. 1908, p. 1481; 19 May 1909, p. 1226</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: LMA, P93/PAU2/247</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/THL/D/1/138; L/THL/B/1/2/30; Buildilng Control file 25297; P/RAM/6/29: LMA, P93/PAU2/248: <em>Church Times</em>, 27 Feb. 1953: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-09",
"last_edited": "2021-05-14"
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{
"id": 674,
"title": "Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue",
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"body": "<p>The Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue was founded and built in 1897–9 on a ninety-year lease of land previously occupied by a house and workshop from where a ginger-beer maker and a dealer in tea chests had traded, immediately southwest of Hodge’s sugar refinery. This was a ‘model’ synagogue project whereby the Federation of Synagogues oversaw the amalgamation of three small chevros through appeals that condemned existing premises as unsuitable for public worship. With costs estimated at £3,500, the Federation contributed £500, members raised £700 and Samuel Montagu put down £200 of his own money. No doubt, Montagu supplied much of the shortfall. He was made Honorary President, while Charles N. Rothschild performed the opening ceremony. Solomon Michaels, a clothier, was the Acting-President. </p>\n\n<p>The somewhat obscure City-based William Whiddington was the architect. Whiddington had a successful if unexciting practice in shops, offices, factories and warehouses in and around the City and West End. He specialised in dilapidations and light and air cases. It is not known how he landed his sole ecclesiastical commission for a synagogue, but it is notable that his offices were in the same streets (Finsbury Pavement and Queen Street, Cheapside) as those of Nathan Solomon Joseph, the United Synagogue architect. The Fieldgate Street congregation would probably not have been able to afford Joseph’s fees. Lewis Solomon, the Federation’s architect, does not seem to have been involved.</p>\n\n<p>Responsibility for building work appears to have been passed around. James Sydney Voak of Tredegar Road notified the District Surveyor, but Sheinman & Noah of Cannon Street Road (probably Jewish to judge by the names, and possibly associated with Samuel Lissner, also on Cannon Street Road and active elsewhere on Fieldgate Street) were contracted in April 1898 and paid £860 for erecting and furnishing the synagogue. Finally, Charles Richard Gurr of Chiswick was paid £1,344. Cast-iron columns were supplied by H. Young & Co., of Eccleston Ironworks, Pimlico.</p>\n\n<p>A ‘house’ in front of the synagogue, designed to be four storeys but reduced to three in execution, comprised a shop, a first-floor caretaker’s flat and a top-floor committee room. To the right of the shopfront double iron gates opened outwards for two entrances, one for women leading directly to a staircase accessing the gallery, and one for men giving onto a corridor to the main floor of the synagogue behind. The long room that formed the shulwas spacious, well-lit and ventilated, with accommodation for 280 men below and 240 women in the three-sided gallery. On two tiers of paired Corinthian columns, the ceiling rose to a part-glazed seven-sided central vault. The floor plan was in accordance with Ashkenazi tradition, the bimah (reading platform) being in the centre flanked by high-backed benches on the long walls. Extra rows were inserted behind the bimah. However, here, as in some other East End synagogues, the constraints of a long thin urban plot with access from the south made correct internal orientation of the Ark containing the Torah scrolls towards Jerusalem challenging and impractical. Against the back wall at the north end, the Ark had a tall upper tier with large Luhot (Decalogue tablets) flanked by Lions of Judah and topped by a semi-dome. Above there was a large round window.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>This synagogue, which had the official Hebrew name of Sha’ar Ya’akov (Gate of Jacob), came to be known as the Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue to differentiate it from the several smaller synagogues along the street. It was badly damaged in the Blitz. A first phase of essential repair with new steelwork and concrete roofing for the main hall was carried out in 1947–8 through Lewis Solomon & Son, architects, with S. H. & D. E. White, civil engineers, and R. H. Rhodes Ltd, builder. Work on the hall and gallery, retaining the Corinthian columns, was completed in 1952 by Ashby and Horner Ltd, builders, under the oversight of another successor firm, Lewis Solomon, Son & Joseph, and the synagogue’s chairman, Nathan Zlotnicki. After an interval for fundraising and ‘lengthy and strenuous negotiations’, rebuilding of the ‘house’, now redenominated a ‘communal centre’, was carried through in 1959–60, Ashby & Horner giving it a reconfigured ground-floor layout and a plain front, brick above a rendered lower storey. New dedicatory inscriptions were put in place above and beside the main entrance. For many years the synagogue stood in isolation, continuing to thrive through amalgamations.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Despite the rebuilding, the character of the synagogue’s interior was sustained. In large measure this was thanks to the leadership of the Rev. Leibish Gayer, stalwart here through the later twentieth century. Monument-lined, the passage along the east wall led back, as before, into the shul where the marbled columns and some old pews survived. The remade Arkbore humbler Luhot and carved and gilt-painted Lions of Judah. Left of the Ark was a stone Royal Family prayer tablet, a tradition imported from seventeenth-century Amsterdam that endured especially in more anglicised synagogues. Above the Ark two high-level round windows were given Star of David stained glass. There were also Star of David light fittings, and a large ceiling lantern lit the whole space. Panelled gallery fronts served as donation boards, bearing commemorative inscriptions. </p>\n\n<p>The synagogue had a reduced capacity of just 150, and attendances continued to fall gradually away as the local Jewish population declined. By the turn of the twenty-first century a movable curtained trellis mechitzah was installed at the rear of the ground floor for a dwindling number of elderly women, so that they no longer had to climb the stairs. A substantial membership endured, but regular services had stopped by 2009. The Federation sold the building to the East London Mosque in 2015 by when it had come to be enclosed and dwarfed by the expansion of its young neighbour. In a conversion of 2016 designed by Makespace Architects, furnishings were removed and a new shopfront was created for a Zakat Centre (for the receipt of donations to charity). The Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue had been a remarkable survival, the last active synagogue in Whitechapel proper, and a reminder of the character of the numerous back-room synagogues that were once widespread in and around Whitechapel.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Jewish Chronicle (JC)</em>, 23 June 1899, p. 2; 21 July 1899, pp. 18–19: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), Building Control file 40634: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns; ACC/2893/113 and 120: Post Office Directories: Charles Welch and W. T. Pike, <em>London at the opening of the twentieth century</em>, 1905, pp. 205, 298: Survey of the Jewish Built Heritage in the UK & Ireland: Sharman Kadish, <em>The Synagogues of Britain and Ireland: an architectural and social history</em>, 2011, pp. 153-4</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: THLHLA, BC file 40634: LMA, ACC/2893/118–22: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 31 Dec. 1965</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>JC</em>, 26 Jan 1990: Paul Lindsay, <em>The Synagogues of London</em>, 1993, pp. 51-3: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-02",
"last_edited": "2021-07-26"
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"title": "Rashid Ahmed's thoughts on new housing in the area",
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"body": "<p>Rashid Ahmed is a Rehab Support Worker at the Royal London Hospital, here he shares his thoughts on the new housing being built in Goodman's Fields, and in the area more generally.</p>\n\n<p>\"Housing has always been a problem for people, for residents of Tower Hamlets. Having heard that, \"Oh, we're building new properties for the locals\", that's not necessarily the case, because Tower Hamlets has always had a burden of a housing list for years.</p>\n\n<p>It's not new, it's not a phenomenon, it's always been the case, but it's never accommodating the community needs. We don't need two, three bedroom flats, luxury flats. We need three to four, maybe even five or six bedroom houses and flats for the large families that need it.</p>\n\n<p>I want to stay here, I want my family to stay here because my family wants to stay here. My friends want to stay here, their children want to stay here, everyone wants to stay. You don't want just to be uprooted because of financial reasons.</p>\n\n<p>Everybody wants a bigger house, everybody wants a garden, no one is going to say no to it. The question is this, is that do you want to be uprooted or moved because you have no option? Do you understand? If you want a garden and a bigger house doesn't mean that you’re going to have to leave London to access that by compromising your family, your social network, all the other services that you have access to, and move into a strange remote area you have no idea what it could provide for you and your children.</p>\n\n<p>Then develop a whole new social network not knowing what type of culture this area might have. Because you might be living in Britain, doesn't mean that there's a culture that's universal from place to place because it isn’t like that.</p>\n\n<p>We know exactly what the future is looking like for us and it's looking bleak, simply because of the fact that we don't know who decided to quadruple or even beyond that the land prices, and alongside the house prices.</p>\n\n<p>Londoners don't have a hope here of surviving or living in Tower Hamlets. For me, I’ve said to myself and I say to young people, “Listen and look at what the demographics is looking like for Londoners who were born and raised here for five to 10 year's time.”</p>\n\n<p>I've heard for years people saying there's no place to build flats, we don't have homes for you. Every time I look and I should be documenting the expansion of new estates and new properties in Tower Hamlets..</p>\n\n<p>..So it depends on how we’re talking about it, because to me it seems that when you start defragmenting people from their neighbours, and the people that they grew up with and they have close ties with as a community. And you start splitting them up, and you start re-housing them, and they start settling down. You’ve broken up -- you’ve taken the power away from the community. It takes generation to develop a community and this is why there isn’t a community anymore, people--</p>\n\n<p>..We’re talking about quality of work, quality of life, and the competition with rent prices we’re not going to survive that. I’m working and I’ll be consistently working. [In] years to come my salary won’t survive my rent, I will struggle. We’re talking about gentrification, I will have no option but to move out.</p>\n\n<p>I think that the fact that you’ve come and you’ve asked me this I feel quite honoured that I can actually voice for vulnerable people. I’m not someone who’s at risk per se at the moment of losing my home, or losing my job. I’m in a secure job I’ve been working at the NHS, I think probably just over eight years now.</p>\n\n<p>But my concern is for people who aren’t in my position, to people who aren’t on the housing list, who are being forced out away from their families and their friends, and their place of work. Even if they re-house you and you have a job here, now you’re talking about an additional cost of having to travel in.</p>\n\n<p>So those people like the nurses, doctors, the junior doctors, and in other departments of the health service who might not be on a higher salary, don't they need protection?</p>\n\n<p>…It’s a fantastic borough. Tower Hamlets, there's no place like Tower Hamlets as it stands. We don't know what it's going to look like in five years, 10 years to come. Tower Hamlets is a vibrant place to live and grow up in, it's a fantastic place to have a child from.\"</p>\n\n<p>Rashid Ahmed was in conversation with Shahed Saleem on 26.02.16. The interview has been edited for print.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-02-20",
"last_edited": "2021-08-17"
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