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"body": "<p>The first rebuilding of the the war-damaged site of the 1880s warehouses, six of which survive further up Middlesex Street at <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/348/detail/#38-to-48-middlesex-street\">Nos 38 to 48</a>, was a solitary four-storey showroom and workshop building at 16-20 Middlesex Street put up in 1954-5 by the Demolition and Construction Co. Ltd for Winifred and Lucy Mendes to the designs of the cinema architect George Coles.[^1] It was similar to many low-cost post-war rebuildings, such as <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/387/detail/\">84</a>, <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/319/detail/\">87</a> and <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/384/detail/\">94</a> Whitechapel High Street, brick-faced with strips of steel-framed windows set within slim concrete framing. From the late 1950s to 1977 the shop was in workshop use for the Modern Knitwear Co. Ltd and known as Modnit House.[American Import and Export Bulletin, 1960, p. 465] Nos 16 to 20 Middlesex Street was demolished in 2016 as part of the redevelopment of the site for the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1750/detail/#travelodge-london-city\">Travelodge London City</a>. </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Planning applications online (THP): London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), Building Control file 15309</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>American Import and Export Bulletin</em>, 1960, p. 465</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>With its distinctive roofline and seven storeys rising sixty feet above ground level, Tower House is a local landmark and towered above its neighbours when first built. Initially called Rowton House, Whitechapel, the building opened in August 1902 and was the fifth of six ‘Rowton Houses’ established in London between 1892 and 1905 to provide decent, low-cost accommodation for single working men. Known as Tower House from 1961, during the late 1970s the building was found to be inadequate as housing and began to decline; in 1983 it was acquired by the Greater London Council on behalf of Tower Hamlets Council. After various schemes to adapt it for use as a public building and supported housing fell through, Tower House was sold to a developer and converted to upmarket apartments in 2005–8.</p>\n\n<p><em>Rowton Houses in London: ‘Hotels for Working Men’</em></p>\n\n<p>Rowton Houses were large model lodging houses founded by Montagu (‘Monty’) Lowry Corry, later Lord Rowton (1838–1903), Tory politician, nephew of the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, and former secretary to the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Known as ‘hotels for working men’, they were a response to the capital’s housing crisis of the 1880s, intended as superior alternatives to the common lodging house, where the poorest Londoners slept in dormitories over a shared kitchen.[^1] Like other kinds of model housing, Rowton Houses were intended to be models of hygiene and order, and as models for other organisations to follow. Rather than being purely charitable institutions, they were designed to turn a modest profit for shareholders, on the model of five percent or ‘remunerative’ philanthropy. The local and national press, and medical, architectural, sanitary, and municipal journals were broadly supportive of the Houses’ improving aims and reported on them at length, usually from information and images supplied by the company which built them.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Rowton Houses were not intended to be the cheapest lodgings. Common lodging houses cost from around 4d per night in London at this time and the London County Council (LCC) initially charged 5d at its municipal lodging house. Rowton Houses insisted that their enterprises were not charitable or philanthropic organisations but poor men’s clubs or hotels.[^3] At the opening of the Whitechapel House, the chairman, Richard Farrant, was reported as saying privately that ‘the Carlton and Reform Clubs might have superior upholstery but that there was not a club in London where a man could live so comfortably, economically, and healthily as at the Rowton Houses’.[^4] The press made frequent approving comparisons with gentlemen’s clubs and, in many ways, including the exclusion of women, the suites of dayrooms and the encouragement of male sociability, Rowton Houses did resemble all-male elite clubs.[^5] This was not just a means of differentiating from the competition. In 1899 the company had successfully challenged the LCC in the South Western Police Court over the latter’s claim that Rowton Houses were common lodging houses rather than poor men’s hotels, thus exempting them from the inspection and regulation required of common lodging houses.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>At Rowton House, Whitechapel, 6d bought a clean bed for the night (or 3s 6d for a weekly ticket), access to cooking facilities or cheap meals, washing facilities, barber’s, tailor’s and shoemaker’s shops, lockers, and to suites of day rooms for recreation and rest. One reporter described the House ‘as almost a little township in itself’.[^7] As was summarised at the opening in 1902, ‘the primary conception has been adhered to of giving each man a separate cubicle with a separate window under his control; and such privacy and such a bed that, in the words of Lord Rowton, an Archbishop might sleep there in decency in comfort’.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>As the nephew of Shaftesbury, Rowton was familiar with experimental model housing schemes around the country. Shaftesbury, and later his son Evelyn Ashley, were presidents of the Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes, and Rowton attended the opening of this Society’s new men’s lodging house, Shaftesbury Chambers, off Drury Lane, in 1892.[^9] Shaftesbury and his sons Evelyn and Cecil were also involved with the Artizans’, Labourers’ & General Dwellings Company Ltd (ALGDC) in its early years, which, under the chairmanship and direction of Farrant, had become the largest model dwellings company by 1895.[^10]</p>\n\n<p>In about 1890, Rowton had surveyed conditions in common lodging houses in the East End for the Guinness Trust, newly founded by Edward Cecil Guinness (later Lord Iveagh), and of which Rowton was the first Chairman. As a result, Rowton is said to have pondered the idea of his own scheme of improved lodgings for working men.[^11] Early in 1890 he wrote to the LCC to ask whether the Council would sell about a third of an acre in the Shelton Street, St Giles, clearance scheme near Drury Lane for the erection of a common lodging house.[^12] The LCC was planning its own model municipal lodging house, which opened in 1893 on Parker Street as part of the Shelton Street scheme. Rowton’s plan evidently came to nothing and at some point he was introduced by his cousin, Cecil Ashley, to Farrant.[^13] Deciding that what was needed was a hotel for the working man, of a size that would allow a charge of 6d per night, Rowton, in consultation with Farrant, invested £30,000 in a trial scheme and the first Rowton House opened at Vauxhall in December 1892.[^14] This was provided initially with 470 cubicles and was built by the ALGDC to the designs of Beeston and Burmester. It proved a success and in 1894 Rowton Houses Limited was formed to build further Houses.[^15] Rowton was appointed Chairman, the other founding directors being Cecil Ashley, Richard Farrant and Walter Long, MP and former Chairman of the Local Government Board; after accepting a Cabinet post, Long was replaced by William Morris (junior), a partner in the firm of Ashurst Morris Crisp, which acted as the company’s solicitors.</p>\n\n<p>Rowton House, King’s Cross, opened in 1896 (677 cubicles), Newington Butts in 1897 (805 cubicles initially), Hammersmith in 1899 (800 cubicles), Whitechapel in 1902 (816 cubicles) and Camden Town (Arlington House) in 1905 (1087). The architect for all the Houses apart from Vauxhall was Harry Bell Measures, whose characteristic red-brick blocks lined witslit windows, leavened with gables, turrets and terracotta detailing, created a new and easily recognisable style of building in the capital. Of the five London Rowton Houses designed by Measures, only Tower House and Arlington House survive and only Arlington remains in use as a hostel.</p>\n\n<p><em>The acquisition of the site</em></p>\n\n<p>Rowton House, Whitechapel, was built on a plot of land belonging to the London Hospital on the north side of Fieldgate Street (formerly Charlotte Street), which corresponds with much of two parcels laid out in 1789–92 with two-storey houses by Thomas Barnes on Charlotte Street and Charlotte Court, which lay behind.[^16] It is not clear how this location was decided upon but Rowton Houses and its associated companies would have been on the lookout for available plots of building land. Alternatively, it could have been suggested by the London Hospital’s Surveyor, Rowland Plumbe, whom Farrant would have known through his work for the ALGDC.[^17] </p>\n\n<p>Although Charlotte Court’s living conditions were condemned in the 1880s,[^18] Rowton Houses were not, unlike the LCC municipal lodging houses, built upon areas that had been notorious for their common lodging houses and nor were they intended to provide an alternative to the poorest lodgings. It was reported in 1876 that one fifteenth of the population of the Whitechapel district slept in registered common lodging houses, of which there were 167 that year (eighty-six in 1894 and seventy-six in 1899).[^19] But the majority of these lay in the northern and southern parts of the Parish of Whitechapel or just beyond, and there were none in Fieldgate Street, before or after the north side was cleared. As noted above, Rowton Houses were intended as poor men’s hotels, and the company chose sites that were served with good transport links as well as centres of work, and stressed that the Whitechapel House was near St Mary’s Station, Whitechapel Road.</p>\n\n<p>By early 1897 the company was in discussion with the London Hospital for the Fieldgate Street site and on 1 March Rowton Houses offered £250 for the lease. Later that month, the Hospital agreed that a Rowton House on the estate would be desirable but required a minimum offer of £300. This was agreed, the ‘public way of Charlotte Court to be eradicated to allow site to be let as one’. Two years later it was confirmed that the company was to be given a 999-year lease, that Lord Rowton was to pay £323 rent, and, in October 1899, Rowland Plumbe reported that the lease was £10,767 for 28,171 ft.[^20]</p>\n\n<p>The site was derelict in May 1899, and Harry Measures gave notice to certify plans of the ‘old buildings’ on the site during August.[^21] By the end of the year this property had gone, the Medical Officer for Health reporting to the Whitechapel Board of Works that forty-two houses in Charlotte Court and twenty-six houses in Fieldgate Street belonging to the London Hospital had been demolished for ‘Lord Rowton’s scheme’, thereby displacing 432 people.[^22] According to newspaper reports, some of these were induced ‘with the greatest difficulty to give up possession of their very undesirable residences’, which were padlocked to prevent return prior to demolition.[^23] In addition to the displacements, there were concerns locally that a Rowton House would draw in large numbers of people from other parts of London.[^24] Building began in April 1900 and by early April 1901 work on the roof had begun, and the doors opened to lodgers in the middle of August 1902.[^25] The site reportedly cost more than the others and, as the building had ‘been more costly, and the assessment is very high’, it was stated in 1903 that the charge was to be raised to 8d from 6d per night.[^26] The LCC Housing Committee reported that the charge at all Rowton Houses had been raised during 1903 to 7d for lodgers staying for one night only but remained at 6d for regulars, until around 1906 when all tickets were said to cost 7d.[^27]</p>\n\n<p><em>The building and its architect</em></p>\n\n<p>The company described the building as consisting of two adjoining parallelograms, the larger of which, facing Fieldgate Street, had ‘a frontage of 75 feet and a depth of 67 feet, the total superficial area being 29,500 feet’. These were separated by an inner courtyard 50 feet in width and open at one end, in order to provide good air circulation and light. The roofs to the front elevations were covered in green slates, on a concrete-clad steel construction, the remainder being flat and tarmacked.[^28] The elevations are in pressed Leicester facing bricks, with Fletton bricks on inward faces. Semi-circular windows face outwards from the dayrooms on the first two floors, including in the two bays at this level (one of which has been replaced by the new entrance), and above these are the rows of narrow windows to the hundreds of cubicles, the sashes and frames to which have been replaced throughout the building. Externally, the expanse of brick is relieved with gables, turrets and pink terracotta dressings, and the large projecting porch, flanked with octagonal finials, and which served as the original entrance, is also of terracotta. The diminutive cherub presently seated on the central finial is a recent addition; twentieth-century photographs, and similar designs at other surviving Rowton Houses, indicate that this replaced a larger figure of a child holding a globe on his shoulders, which may have represented a young Atlas.[^29]</p>\n\n<p>Originally the first two floors (known as the ‘entrance floor’ and, above that, the ‘ground floor’) contained the office, staff quarters, and the lodgers’ kitchen, dining and other dayrooms, washing facilities, lockers and services; above these were five floors of cubicles, whose rows of narrow windows contributed to the building’s outwardly institutional appearance. When Measures was asked why he didn’t group his windows, he replied that ‘if I yield to that temptation, then the sleeper has to pay the penalty for the sake of my elevation. Personally, I think the sleeper comes first and that my elevations should truthfully proclaim it’.[^30] Despite the new entrance and alterations to the windows made as part of the 2005–8 conversion, the Fieldgate Street elevation still reads as a Rowton House, the major alterations to the exterior being the penthouse floor and at the rear of the building.</p>\n\n<p><em>Fireproofing and infection control</em></p>\n\n<p>Unsurprisingly for a large institutional building, much was made of the steps taken to render it fireproof. The ground floors were concrete, either laid with solid oak or with cement and granite chippings in the more utilitarian areas.[^31] On the cubicle floors, floorboards were nailed directly onto concrete so as to avoid a cavity. The cubicles were approached by fireproof staircases, located at the ends of the corridors in the towers, so that lodgers could not be trapped by fire, and each floor was divided by walls into ten sections, to check the spread of a fire horizontally.[^32] Infection control was to be achieved by the same means, so that each block of cubicles could be closed and fumigated following a suspected outbreak, while the absence of cavities would safeguard against the spread of vermin. There were also fumigating rooms for clothing and bedding on the lower ground floor.</p>\n\n<p>To illustrate the House’s safety, it was claimed, perhaps apocryphally, that a lodger who was determined to start fires in order to claim his reward for raising the alarm failed five times to do so in 1902.[^33] In addition to using fireproof materials many extinguishers were provided. When Wonderland burned down in the Whitechapel Road in 1911, the staff of Rowton House, which overlooked Wonderland and the East London Picture Palace to its rear, were able to direct eight hoses onto the flames before the fire brigade arrived.[^34]</p>\n\n<p>Whitechapel was the first Rowton House to be fitted with electric light, with local control of the lights on each floor and central control from the office on the ground floor. Also new were the speaking tubes which connected between the office and each floor.</p>\n\n<p><em>The Municipal Journal</em> was impressed with the progress of Rowton Houses, writing at the time of its opening that Whitechapel ‘is the most palatial of all. Externally a little more ornamentation has been introduced, and the latest building can almost be described as a handsome structure. It is situated in a very typical area of Whitechapel, and the lines of elevation stand out conspicuously from the dirty and squalid rows of surrounding houses’.[^35]</p>\n\n<p><em>Harry Bell Measures</em></p>\n\n<p>Harry Bell Measures (1862–1940) was born in Richmond, Surrey, and was articled to Arthur Loader of Brighton in 1877–79, and remained with him as an assistant from 1879 to 1883. At the same time, from 1877 to 1882, he was a student at Brighton School of Science and Art, gaining an honorary medal in Building Construction and the Ashbury Silver Medal in Architectural Design. Measures commenced practice in 1883 with the builder William Willett, designing houses and stabling on the Gunter Estate at Harrington Gardens, Kensington, and laying out roads and houses on the Cadogan Estate in Chelsea.[^36] Many of these were in red brick with terracotta details and the gables, turrets and other flourishes that would be used more sparingly in his later institutional buildings. </p>\n\n<p>From 1891 until 1901, Measures was architect to the Artizans’, Labourers’ & General Dwellings Company, designing block buildings in Clerkenwell and laying out houses and shops on the Leigham Court Estate, Streatham. In 1893 he became the architect for Rowton Houses and also, in 1893–95, for the Middle Class Dwellings Company, for which he designed Gordon Mansions on the Bedford Estate. Prior to this Beeston and Burmester had served as the two companies’ architects, which were linked to the ALGDC and all run from 16 Great George Street, Westminster.[^37] Also registered at this address were the Great George Street Chambers Company, the Wharncliffe Dwellings Company, the London Central Railway, and companies set up to run various electrification projects. Farrant, and fellow Rowton Houses director, William Morris junior, appear to have been the principal links between these enterprises, which shared the same directors, secretaries and solicitors;[^38] Harry Measures and George J. Earle acted as their architect and surveyor, including for Rowton House, Whitechapel.</p>\n\n<p><em>Rowton Houses and the other companies at 16 Great George Street, Westminster</em></p>\n\n<p>Building materials were bought in bulk from the same suppliers for the various schemes. For example, the terracotta and glazed bricks and tiles that are such a feature of Measures’ work, including Rowton Houses and the mansion blocks, were bought in huge quantities from J. C. Edwards of Ruabon in Wales.[^39] Ruabon also supplied the tiles for Measures’ stations for the London Central Railway.[^40]</p>\n\n<p>The Central London Railway (CLR) was first proposed in 1890 by a consortium working through the solicitors Ashurst, Morris, Crisp and Company.[^41] In 1897 Measures was appointed architect for the station superstructures along what was later known as the Central Line. The following year the CLR Company decided to build single-storey structures only in the first place, so the idea of housing the company’s offices over the Oxford Circus Station was postponed. That project finally went ahead in 1903–4, again to Measures’ design (some authorities have mistakenly attributed the superstructure to Delissa Joseph) and acted for a while as the company’s headquarters.[^42] It seems Farrant supervised the purchase of materials and the contracts for the railway and presumably the other companies, and that Morris was involved in the layout of the new stations.[^43]</p>\n\n<p>Rowton Houses did not use contractors for its buildings and managed all the building and joinery in-house, overseen by G. J. Earle, the company surveyor, from 1894. To facilitate this, the company had a works at Pimlico Wharf, which it shared with the wider group of businesses, and which Rowton Houses later bought. Middle Class Dwellings Company bills indicate that Rowton Houses and the other companies including the Central London Railway also engaged the same services and suppliers, for instance French polishers and military uniform specialists, presumably allowing savings across the different schemes.[^44] Savings were also made by centralising some of the services within Rowton Houses and in the early twentieth century, possibly as a result of the smallpox outbreak in 1902, a steam laundry was built at the Newington Butts House to clean all the Rowtons’ linen.[^45]</p>\n\n<p>Lord Rowton was reported as saying at the opening of the Whitechapel House in 1902 that he wished to see the Rowton system applied to barracks, and believed he had support.[^46] Less than two years later, in May 1904, Measures was appointed Director of Barrack Construction for the War Office, a post which allowed him to build upon his ‘great experience of designing buildings for large numbers of men’.[^47] Partly due to their similar functional requirements, Measures’ barrack and other military buildings shared many similarities with Rowton Houses, including their U-shaped plans, as seen at the Redford Barracks, Edinburgh. Other examples of Measures’ barrack construction on the lines of Rowton Houses could be seen in his married soldiers’ accommodation at Woolwich.[^48] But even in these utilitarian buildings Measures was allowed a few of his trademark flourishes. He was given freer rein at the Union Jack Club, Waterloo Road, in Lambeth (1904–7), founded with the assistance of William Morris junior, and on which Measures was honorary architect. Here the day rooms and furniture and fittings resembled those at Rowton Houses.[^49] Outside, the Club’s entrance was very similar to that at Rowton House, Whitechapel, and near identical to that at the Birmingham Rowton House (opened in 1905). In turn, the entrance of the last London Rowton House, at Camden Town, was almost identical to that at Fieldgate Street. Within, glazed tiles and brickwork were decorative, hard-wearing and hygienic and used across Rowton House interiors. With their turnstiles, ticket offices and tiling, the design of Rowton House entrances bears strong resemblance to Measures’ Central London Railway ticket halls.</p>\n\n<p>Rowton Houses were of course particularly influential in the design of model lodging accommodation in Britain and abroad. Despite the difficult relationship in 1899 during the dispute over whether Rowton Houses were hotels or common lodging houses, an article on the second LCC lodging house, at Deptford, claimed that this was ‘carried out very much on the lines of the Rowton Houses’; it also said that the LCC Housing Committee’s report acknowledged ‘the help they had received in the preparation of the scheme by Lord Rowton and Sir Richard Farrant’.[^50] The design and organisation of Iveagh House, Dublin, erected in 1905 by the Guinness Trust, also followed that of Rowton Houses, as did the Ada Lewis Women’s Lodging House, opened in London in 1913.[^51] As Farrant put it in 1904, ‘From almost every capital in Europe inquiries have been made as to the Rowton Houses scheme. Many of the large provincial towns have houses more or less after the design of the London houses’.[^52]</p>\n\n<p>Less often discussed in Rowton Houses’ publicity was the influence of earlier model lodging schemes. There were brief (and apparently undocumented) reports of Rowton’s survey of East End lodging accommodation for the Guinness Trust, and mention of a trip to see a model tenement in Glasgow in the early 1890s, but otherwise little was said about influences.[^53] The Victoria Homes for Working Men in Whitechapel, built in 1887 and 1891, were however cited as influential precursors to Rowton Houses. Rowton would probably have included the Victoria Home, Commercial Road, in his lodging-house survey of c.1890. In 1897, Augustus Wilké, the manager, told a reporter that both Lord Rowton and the LCC had visited the Victoria Homes, ‘and had come to him for information as to his methods’.[^54] In an interview of around the same time, Wilké maintained that Rowton got many of his ideas from the Homes, and had improved on them in structure and equipment because Rowton Houses catered for a different class of men. He acknowledged, however, that they were different because, unlike at the Victoria Homes, ‘no personal or religious influence [was] brought to bear on the occupants’.[^55] He also expressed concern that the presence of the new Whitechapel Rowton House would adversely affect occupancy of the Victoria Homes:</p>\n\n<p>Lord Rowton has in fact attacked one aspect of the housing question, and the Victoria Homes the “dosser” question. Still their spheres of action overlap to some extent and it is a great trouble to Mr Wilké at the present time that Lord Rowton has acquired a large site off the Whitechapel Road nearly opposite Victoria No. 2. It is their Cubicle 6d customers who will be most likely to be drawn away from them, and Mr Wilké is already thinking of the possibility of lowering their charge.[^56]</p>\n\n<p><em>The day rooms and facilities on the entrance and (upper) ground floor</em></p>\n\n<p>On entering Rowton House, Whitechapel, lodgers bought a ticket at the office window and, if they wished, weekly lodgers could pay a 6d deposit for a locker, before passing through a turnstile and into a vestibule. From here, lodgers could go up a flight of stairs to a small ‘glass-roofed lounge with palms and flowers’.[^57] Or they could enter the main corridor, on the lower ground ‘entrance floor’, which ran east-west through the building. The lockers, and the sinks, baths and footbaths (free), baths (1d including soap and towel) and facilities for washing and drying clothes, were all located on the east side of this floor. The tailor, shoemender and barber were in the same area. Once clean and dressed, the men could go to their cubicle for the night or make use of the dining and recreation rooms up to a certain time in the evening. </p>\n\n<p><em>The dining and smoking rooms</em></p>\n\n<p>A huge dining room occupied the centre of the entrance floor, with a floor space of 5,891 ft and seating at teak tables for 456 men.[^58] Lodgers could cook their own suppers over a range, either with food they brought with them or from ingredients bought at the shop. Alternatively, they could buy a cooked meal at prices which, as the company stressed, amounted to little above cost, achieved through the bulk buying of provisions for the five Houses. Lodgers could purchase a pint of tea in a special Rowton House-emblazoned mug for a penny in 1906, while 5d bought a plate of roast mutton or beef with seasonal vegetables followed by a hot pudding.[^59] Top-lit and ventilated with lantern lights, the dining room was finished with the same ‘high dado of glazed brickwork in tints of cream and chocolate’, as found throughout the dayrooms.[^60] Due to the size and function of the building, institutional associations were impossible to escape but the aim was to mitigate this through dayroom arrangements and decoration and, at Fieldgate Street, to ‘give an effect of sprightliness and comfort’.[^61] Framed pictures hung on the walls, the plastering ‘tinted to a shade of terracotta’ above the tiling.[^62] While Measures was responsible for the design of the building, Rowton and Farrant personally oversaw the interior design and decoration, choosing the bedding, furniture, pictures and, even, at King’s Cross, a stag’s head shot by Rowton, for the walls.[^63]</p>\n\n<p>On the south side of the corridor on the entrance floor lay the smaller smoking room, its windows in the central bays looking, through the railings, into Fieldgate Street. This had space for 140 lodgers at teak tables with additional easy chairs around the fire places at each end. Cards and games of chance which might encourage gambling were banned but chess and draughts were provided.</p>\n\n<p><em>The Reading Room and its painted panels of The Seasons</em></p>\n\n<p>The reading room lay immediately above the smoking room on what was known as the (upper) ground floor. This was fitted with cupboards for newspapers and bookcases, from which lodgers could borrow books on application to the Superintendent, open bookcases having been abandoned across the Houses after thefts made it necessary to lock them.</p>\n\n<p>A series of panels ‘emblematic of “the Seasons”’ hung in the reading room. These took up a large part of the back wall facing the windows onto Fieldgate Street, fitted above the tiling. As was widely reported, these were ‘painted by Mr H. F. Strachey of Clutton, near Bristol, and given by him as the practical interest of an artist in the elevating work of a Rowton House’.[^64] ‘Each season is represented by a single figure and also by a larger composition, while over the fireplace in the middle is a small allegorical work. In it a symbolical figure of England sits enthroned, while the fruits of the land are brought to her by the cultivators’.[^65]</p>\n\n<p>A cousin of Lytton, Henry (Harry) Strachey (1863–1940) studied at the Slade School of Art and was art critic of <em>The Spectator</em>. There were no panels in the other Rowton Houses and it is not known what happened to those at Fieldgate Street. Similar in theme and style are Strachey’s five large panels, of painted canvas, representing scenes of country life, that hang in the picture hall (formerly the refreshment house) at Brockwell Hall, placed there shortly after it was opened to the public as Brockwell Park.[^66] These were presented to the LCC in 1896 by Harry’s brother, John St Loe Strachey, editor of <em>The Spectator</em>.[^67] It is likely that Rowton already knew St John Loe Strachey, and both Stracheys attended the lunch at the opening of the Fieldgate Street House in August 1902.[^68] It is possible that the panels were lost during alterations of 1953, which divided the Reading Room into a Billiard Room and a Quiet Room.[^69]</p>\n\n<p><em>The ‘open-air lounge’</em></p>\n\n<p>Near the reading room was a door to the open-air or smoking lounge. As at the previous Rowton Houses, this was formed on the roofs of the rooms below, in this case the kitchen, dining and washroom areas. Invisible from the street, this space, in the void which allowed air and light to circulate within the building, was fifty feet wide and surrounded on three sides by the cubicle floors. Benches were placed around the lantern lights and it was laid out with tubs of flowers as a roof garden.[^70] Like the decoration, pictures and pot plants within the House, the garden was an attempt by the company to ‘de-institutionalise’ the buildings.[^71]</p>\n\n<p><em>Cubicle floors</em></p>\n\n<p>Rowton Houses prided themselves on the superior size and construction of their cubicles and on the quality of the beds and bedding. After experiments with shared dormitories at Vauxhall proved unpopular, all subsequent Houses were provided with individual sleeping cubicles. These measured 5 ft by 7 ft 6 inches and were 9 ft high.[^72] Each lodger had a sash window under his own control, an iron bedstead with a sprung mattress, a clothes hook, and a chair. The partitions (of strong pine, rather than iron as in shelters and some model lodging houses) reached nearly to the ceiling, with a space at the top. Initially this was left open but in the early twentieth century was meshed in after ‘fishing’ by residents into neighbouring cubicles showed that valuables were unsafe.[^73] By this means visual privacy was achieved while ensuring the building remained light and well ventilated.</p>\n\n<p><em>Staff, lodgers and visitors</em></p>\n\n<p>After problems with staff retention and keeping order in the Vauxhall House, Farrant suggested that the company employ sergeant-majors or quarter-master sergeants from the Army as superintendents, since they were familiar with dealing with large groups of men and could hire from their former ranks. This was agreed and subsequently Rowton Houses relied on them to manage the buildings and their inmates.[^74] The first Superintendent at Fieldgate Street was Joseph Henry Brownlow, formerly Squadron Sergeant Major in the 10th Royal Hussars. Prior to this he had been the Superintendent at Vauxhall. He died in 1908 and was replaced by another ex-Squadron Sergeant from the regiment, Thomas Webber Bond and his wife Josephine, who were described respectively on the 1911 census as ‘Army Pensioner, Superintendent’ and ‘Lady Superintendent’.[^75] The other resident staff comprised a restaurant manageress, cook, two waitresses and two maids who looked after the kitchen and dining areas, with a head day porter, four day porters and one night porter to serve the rest of the building.[^76] And in order to keep the 1,044 separate windows and skylights sparkling, a window cleaner also lived in.[^77] The two-storey Superintendent’s quarters (two bedrooms, bathroom, WC and kitchen) were reached from just inside the main entrance, near the clerk’s office, over which was his bedroom. The other staff bedrooms lay behind these, ranged in a line along the west side of the building.</p>\n\n<p>The armies of women required to strip and remake the beds each day did not sleep in but had their own rooms in the basement. These had a separate staircase to the cubicle floors, which were closed to lodgers in the daytime, and which did not connect with any of the day rooms or corridors used by the men, so that the lodgers and women never met.[^78] Clean and soiled linen were also kept separate, thus ensuring that high standards of hygiene as well as morals were upheld.</p>\n\n<p><em>Unexecuted plans for a Rowton House for Women</em></p>\n\n<p>A women’s Rowton House had been discussed as early as 1892 and in 1899 ‘an American gentleman’ was said to have offered Rowton a large sum for the purpose but Farrant did not think it could pay.[^79] ‘The great difficulty’, Farrant was reported as saying at the opening of the Whitechapel House, was ‘the selection of the applicants’, since ‘all comers who can pay and who are not obviously bad characters are admitted to the Rowton houses in the case of men. Such a course would be quite impossible for women’. Nevertheless, he believed that ‘we shall have houses for working girls and women which will compare with the Rowton Houses’.[^80] Until about 1904 it was stated periodically that the company was still looking for suitable sites, mentioning Hackney in this respect, but the project must have been abandoned. The Society for Improving the Conditions of the Labouring Classes had tried and failed to run a women’s model lodging house in Hatton Garden in 1850–55.[^81] In 1905 the Society’s architects Davis & Emanuel drew up plans for the LCC for a small ‘women’s common lodging house’ on Parker Street, off Drury Lane, but this did not proceed.[^82] The Victoria Homes had been considering a home for women on a piece of land near its Whitechapel Road site in the late 1890s but it seems this came to nothing.[^83] At around the same time, the LCC was also considering the desirability of a women’s municipal lodging house, but all the proposals, including one on a site near Blackfriars Road, Southwark, fell through.[^84] In 1913, the Ada Lewis Women’s Lodging House, a ‘Hotel for Working Women and Girls’, opened in 1913 on the Old Kent Road.[^85] This was designed on Rowton House lines by Joseph and Smithem and named for its benefactor, a wealthy Jewish philanthropist.[^86] Although there were only 220 beds at Ada Lewis House, which initially cost 6d a night, the building ‘was the first hostel on anything like the scale or plan of the working-class men’s lodging houses’.[^87]</p>\n\n<p><em>Lodgers at Rowton House, Whitechapel</em></p>\n\n<p>Rowton Houses only made a profit if the cubicles were occupied every night. From at least 1903, it was claimed that the majority of lodgers at Fieldgate Street were ‘regulars’, meaning that they were known to the Superintendent, paid for a weekly ticket and retained the same cubicle. But the House was oversubscribed and ‘a number of permanent lodgers’ were ‘elbowed out from time to time by casuals’. According to this account, casuals were ‘not so cleanly’ as permanent lodgers ‘and it would be impossible to pay the dividend’ if the company had to depend on them. It also claimed the casuals were responsible for the ‘serious’ amount of petty pilfering.[^88] In 1903, as a result of the smallpox epidemic, the doors were closed to newcomers, and consequently a dividend of only three per cent was declared.[^89] According to the company historian, the outbreak ‘nearly closed Rowton Houses’, even though the doors were barred only to casual lodgers and the long-term residents were allowed to stay.[^90] In other words, it seems that casual lodgers were necessary to the profitability of the House and the numbers of ‘respectable’ regulars may have been exaggerated.</p>\n\n<p>The opening of the House in 1902 prompted calls by some local Jews for a specifically Jewish Rowton House to be opened in the area. The <em>Jewish Chronicle</em> was not in favour of this, however, arguing that it would discourage assimilation and that, in any case, Lord Rowton was ‘perfectly willing to receive Jewish lodgers’, and offered them ‘every religious facility they may desire, including the provision of special stoves and utensils’.[^91] This statement appeared in many local and national papers, which also repeated Rowton’s claim that the chief tailor and bootmaker at Fieldgate Street were Jewish. Others, including Henry Herman Gordon, Progressive councillor and Honorary Secretary of the Poor Jews’ Temporary Shelter on Leman Street, countered that the Whitechapel Rowton House was always full, and that it was not ‘merely a question of “pots and pans”’. Rather, ‘a Jewish Rowton House could be made to serve as “The Alien Immigrants’ Training School”’. According to Gordon, there was ‘a small number, under forty, of nominal Jews’ in Rowton House, Whitechapel, whose Judaism needed strengthening.[^92]</p>\n\n<p>At the time of the census in 1911, the house was very nearly full.[^93] Of the 804 lodgers, 390 gave their birthplace as Middlesex or London, fifty-eight as Surrey, forty-eight as either Kent or Essex and seventeen came from Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Sussex combined. 162 lodgers came from across the rest of England. One man was born at sea and another didn’t know his birthplace. Of the larger clusters born outside England, thirty-six gave their birthplace as Ireland, thirty-one as Scotland, eight as Wales, and fourteen and eleven respectively as Germany and Russia (some of whom, presumably, were Jews). Fifteen lodgers were born in other European countries, and five each in British colonies and the USA. Where stated, most of these men were resident in Britain or naturalised, though a few were visiting. Most were in work, though much of this was menial labour, and a few were pensioners or of private means. Many were employed as labourers at the docks and in warehouses, or in labouring and more skilled jobs associated with shipping, shipbuilding or the sea; others were employed in the building and decorating trades or in connection with the railway. Others again worked in the markets and in food and drink preparation and the provisions and hospitality trades locally; there were also many newspaper vendors, other street sellers and travelling salesmen enumerated. Local occupations, including furniture making and dealing, tailoring, drapery and fur and leatherworking, were all well represented, as were those in printing, the metals trades and engineering, including six engineers. There were also around sixty-five men engaged as clerks, accountants and draughtsmen. Only one journalist was enumerated.[^94] But, to judge from accounts of the other Houses, the tables in the reading rooms proved very useful to those who wrote for a living, a group which included wrapper- and advertising-card writers and envelope addressers doing low-paid piece work. At least twenty and most probably more of the clerks enumerated in 1911 were ‘advertising’ or ‘addressing’ clerks doing this kind of work for advertising agencies and newspapers. As at the LCC lodging houses and the Victoria Homes locally, this work appears to have been tolerated and even encouraged within the day rooms. More of a nuisance were the ‘begging letter writers’; all kinds of lodging houses were believed to harbour these men but Rowton Houses refused to provide any information to the authorities.[^95]</p>\n\n<p>The youngest lodger, James Watson, a dock labourer born in Bethnal Green, was seventeen years old, and the eldest, Edward Fluery, a married boot and shoemaker born in Ireland, was eighty-five. Most of the men at the Whitechapel Rowton said they were single or widowed, but eighty-six were married.[^96] Although some clergymen and politicians claimed that the comforts of Rowton Houses would cause men not to marry or to leave their families,[^97] the married men at Whitechapel may have left the family home temporarily to work in London.</p>\n\n<p>The average numbers of lodgers reportedly declined from around 1907 following a slump in the building trade and lack of work at the docks, and because of a ‘levelling up’ in standards of comparable accommodation.[^98] At around this time ‘fishing’ over the cubicles became rife and consequently the open space between the top of the cubicle and the ceiling was enclosed with mesh.[^99] All new building works ceased and the Pimlico Wharf was sold, the joinery, and metal and other workshops eventually moving to Newington Butts. Company policy was to keep improving its Houses, to stay ahead of the other provision being built, but to build no more.[^100]</p>\n\n<p>The decision to build no further Houses must at the very least have also been influenced by the deaths of its founding directors in 1903 and 1906. At Rowton’s death in November 1903, Sir Richard Farrant was elected as the company’s second Chairman. On the death of Farrant three years later, William Morris became Chairman and Company Secretary, and W. T. Dulake took over as managing director.[^101] Meanwhile Measures had resigned by 1905, following his appointment as Director of Barrack Construction, and Earle remained as surveyor, and to ‘superintend the architectural staff’.[^102] But, although there was continuity in the business, and an ongoing commitment keep the company profitable, it seems likely that without Rowton, and perhaps especially Farrant, the enterprising drive had gone.</p>\n\n<p>By the end of 1913 lettings were at their highest ever figure and the company dividend restored to 4½ percent, before war intervened and numbers fell sharply.[^103]</p>\n\n<p><em>Notable lodgers in the early twentieth century</em></p>\n\n<p>Unlike some of the other Rowton Houses, Whitechapel does not appear to have had its own poets and nor, to judge from surviving published accounts, were there many jobbing writers among its ranks who wrote of their time in Fieldgate Street, although one journalist was enumerated in the 1911 census.[^104] The American writer and activist, Jack London, probably stayed in the ‘Monster Doss House’, as he called Tower House in his survey of London poverty made in 1902, published a year later as <em>The People of the Abyss</em>. London was not impressed, writing of the ‘uninhabitableness’ of the poor men’s hotels, and their lack of privacy. His account was illustrated with a photograph of Tower House taken from the East before that section of the street had been rebuilt.[^105]</p>\n\n<p>Edward Henry Vizatelly, journalist and son of the co-founder of the <em>Illustrated London News</em>, was removed from the House to the Whitechapel Infirmary, where he died in 1903 from heart failure following pneumonia.[^106]</p>\n\n<p>In late April and early May 1907 several hundred delegates, including Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Lenin, Maxim Litvinov and Josef Stalin, assembled in London for the fifth Congress of the Russian Democratic Labour Party, to discuss the future of the revolutionary movement in Russia. Those arriving at Harwich on the 9 May were reportedly met by Russian spies and British detectives, who accompanied them to Liverpool Street.[^107] 331 delegates attended the conference,[^108] which was held in the parish hall of the Brotherhood Church in Hackney.[^109] As Simon Sebag Montefiore notes, some delegates were more equal than others: Gorky, Lenin and those with private incomes stayed in small hotels in Bloomsbury and elsewhere.[^110] Some were taken in by Russo-Polish immigrants in Whitechapel, or stayed at socialist clubs or hostels locally.[^111] The press reported that the revolutionaries trooped off to a socialist club in Fulbourne Street and from there took up quarters in various lodging houses.[^112] According to Helen Rappaport, two of the four non-official delegates, Stalin and Litvinov, stayed for a short time at the Rowton House.[^113] William J. Fishman claimed they slept in adjoining cubicles for two weeks during the conference.[^114] Montefiore refers to the ‘legend’ in which Stalin spent his first nights with Litvinov in the Rowton House, where ‘conditions were so dire that Stalin supposedly led a mutiny and got everyone rehoused’.[^115] They are reported to have resettled at 77 Jubilee Street, ten minutes’ walk east of Fieldgate Street.[^116] To judge from the short account contained in a memoir written by Konstantin Gandurin, he and other delegates may well have stayed at Rowton House, Whitechapel, in 1907.[^117]</p>\n\n<p>George Orwell is another elusive resident. While it is quite possible that he stayed at Fieldgate Street in his tour of the capital’s lodging houses in the early 1930s, as some accounts claim, the much-quoted passages of <em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em> (1933) do not identify the Rowton Houses he visited. Travelling, probably, from Edmonton Casual Ward, Orwell said that he and his fellow tramp arrived in central London eight hours before the lodging houses opened and so tried, unsuccessfully, to slip into a Rowton House before the doors opened at seven o’clock.[^118] He noted that they ‘walked up to the magnificent doorway (the Rowton Houses really are magnificent)’, before being turned away.[^119] At least two hours later they went to a Salvation Army shelter, which could well refer to one of the former Victoria Homes or other Salvation Army shelters locally.[^120] However this remains uncertain and Arlington House has also been claimed as the Rowton House in which Orwell stayed.</p>\n\n<p>Nevertheless, Orwell was broadly positive about their facilities. Thus, for a shilling, he wrote, 'you get a cubicle to yourself, and the use of excellent bathrooms. You can also pay half a crown for a “special”, which is practically hotel accommodation. The Rowton Houses are splendid buildings, and the only objection to them is the strict discipline, with rules against cooking, card-playing, etc. Perhaps the best advertisement for the Rowton Houses is the fact that they are always full to overflowing. The [LCC] Bruce Houses, at one and a penny, are also excellent.'[^121]</p>\n\n<p>Individuals known to have stayed at Tower House later in the twentieth century include Patrick Nelson, who came to Britain from Kingston, Jamaica, between the wars; electoral registers place him there in 1948.[^122] In the early 1960s, Nelson, a former model, lover and lifelong friend of Duncan Grant, moved between Tower House and other East End and dockside hostels whilst looking for work, possibly with assistance from the National Labour Board in Stepney.[^123] He would, presumably, have been one of many more recent and longer-term immigrants staying at Tower House at this time. Nelson moved from Tower House to Arlington House in 1962.[^124]</p>\n\n<p><em>Visitors</em></p>\n\n<p>Keen to exclude lodging-house inspectors and those whose intentions smacked of institutional, religious or charitable interference, Rowton Houses Limited welcomed other individuals and organisations into the buildings. A range of local and national dignitaries attended the press view the week before the doors of the Whitechapel House were opened to lodgers. A little later, in February 1904, the Princess of Wales, accompanied by the Bishop of London, was shown over the House by the Superintendent one evening when it was full and returned with the Prince of Wales a few weeks later.[^125] These ‘surprise’ visits were put to good use by Farrant, who was quoted in approving press reports as saying that ‘the whole place was fit for a lady to go through’.[^126] Meanwhile official and semi-official delegations from Britain and around the world visited Rowton Houses prior to setting up their own schemes, including at Birmingham, which Harry Measures also designed. In the autumn of 1903 the Rowton directors held a luncheon in the Reading Room at Fieldgate Street for a group of forty delegates from a German Government Commission sent to study the provision of working-class dwellings in England.[^127]</p>\n\n<p><em>The First World War and after</em></p>\n\n<p>At least some of the Houses took in Belgian refugees, the Relief Committee paying the company enough to cover overheads, and a little later in the war soldiers were billeted at King’s Cross, Camden Town and Newington Butts. The buildings were never commandeered for hospital or other use, apparently after intervention by William Morris on the grounds that they housed munitions workers. They also served as shelters during air raids and, although no records appear to confirm this, it is likely that Fieldgate Street was used for this purpose.[^128]</p>\n\n<p>Bed occupation reached its highest ever figure after the Armistice and at a census taken by the company in 1921 2,000 out of 5,000 lodgers were unemployed.[^129] Baedeker still found the Houses ‘clean and not uncomfortable’ in 1923, when they cost a shilling a night or 6s 6d weekly. Some ‘special bedrooms’, which had first been tried at Camden Town, were now also available at Whitechapel and cost 1s 3d a night or 7s 6d weekly.[^130] These were glazed above the partitions and contained a washstand, a chest of drawers and a mirror.[^131] Further modernisation took place in 1924.[^132] Open fires had already been replaced with central heating and the old lodgers’ kitchens and facilities for self-catering were now also removed across the Houses and the catering sections updated.[^133] Two years later it was claimed in the <em>Daily Mirror</em> that ‘The largest at Camden Town, is called “The Cecil,” “The Ritz” is at Newington Butts; “Claridges” is close to Hammersmith Broadway; and “The Savoy” is in Whitechapel’.[^134] No doubt this was intended to be humorous but is an indication that Rowton House standards remained higher than comparable accommodation at this date. Neon signs put up on the front of Rowton House, Whitechapel, in 1935 added to its styling as a hotel.[^135] Despite difficulties in the interwar years when numbers again plummeted, by 1939 the reserve fund stood at £178,000.[^136]</p>\n\n<p><em>The Second World War and post-war alterations</em></p>\n\n<p>During the war all six Rowton Houses were used by evacuee children en route to stations for the country.[^137] 13,000 plywood shutters were made for the large numbers of windows and rooflights, and the top floors were evacuated as a precaution. A smattering of remaining men too old to enlist were joined by displaced Poles and Belgians and munitions workers, while the Houses were used as official Rest Centres and unofficially as air-raid shelters, with 350,000 people in total recorded across all six Houses during this time.[^138] In 1940 the Whitechapel House lost a gable, and the top floor walls were said to be severely damaged.[^139] Either in the same raid or later in the war the outdoor lounge and skylights were also damaged, and building notices show that repairs to correct this, and to the boundary wall to the north, took place from 1947 through to 1949.[^140]</p>\n\n<p>A Medical Examination Room was created in or shortly after 1948 (by Robert Cromie FRIBA, who was working for the company until around 1953),[^141] where men were seen by doctors or prior to removal to hospital.[^142] Further special bedrooms were rolled out from this time and by the 1950s cost 17/6 per week (‘ordinary cubicles’ at 2/6 per night or 16/6 per week).[^143] ‘Super specials,’ with hot and cold water, now appeared – all in line with Rowton’s original ‘vision of a “hotel” rather than a lodging house, a “club” rather than an institution’.[^144] However these do not seem to have materialised at Whitechapel until later, suggesting perhaps that its customers tended to be poorer than at the other Houses, and in 1983 ‘super specials’ were found to provide only ‘a fraction of the accommodation’.[^145]</p>\n\n<p>Other updates at Whitechapel in the 1950s under new company architects, Ley, Colbeck and Partners, included showers, a television room on the lower ground floor, and the partition of the reading room to create a separate billiard room.[^146] Each House had its own darts and billiards team and ‘inter-House matches’ were ‘keenly contested’. Following the attendance of a special meeting in the late 1940s to discuss the new National Health Service, the Rowton House lecture series was begun.[^147] There were also special lectures on social history and local government organised by the Workers’ Educational Association.[^148] At each House a number of beds was now reserved for night workers to sleep during the day (as had previously been available at Newington Butts) and also for the National Assistance Board, which preferred to give relief in the form of lodging tickets rather than cash. According to the company history, Rowton Houses were also favoured by magistrates and probation officers for the placement of men.[^149] The dining rooms, which were now open to non-residents, continued to make only a small profit to keep prices low and served Christmas dinners at a loss, through a bequest to feed the needy once a year.[^150] At this date it was said that ‘scarcely a week passes without a visit by parties of welfare officers, representatives of Local Authorities, magistrates, housing planners, [and] medical officers’.[^151]</p>\n\n<p>Connections to the founders were maintained through the joint company chairman, Kenneth Dulake, son of the former chairman, and, among the other directors, John Morris, the grandson of William Morris, junior; many of the shareholders also had connections with the earliest investors.[^152]</p>\n\n<p><em>Tower House and changes to the business after 1961</em></p>\n\n<p>In 1961 the company took a more major change in direction. Kenneth Dulake announced that ‘the old cubicle room is out of date like the horse and cart’. King’s Cross was to become a £300,000 hotel, and the five other Houses would remain as hostels but were to be upgraded and have their accommodation improved.[^153] At Whitechapel, the foot baths were removed to enlarge the television room on the lower ground floor and the south wing was converted to bedroom suites, with modifications to the rear windows to accommodate these changes.[^154] The Tower House name almost certainly dates to these improvements made across the company, and it was observed by the Medical Officer of Health Report for Stepney of 1962 that ‘Tower House (formerly known as “Rowton House”)’ now had 694 beds, rather than 816.[^155]</p>\n\n<p>In 1966 the company changed its name to Rowton Hotels Limited and at some point between this date and 1972 the business was split into hotels and hostels – Whitechapel (and Vauxhall and Camden Town) falling into the latter category. Thus while Rowton Hotels offered cheap hotel accommodation to tourists and travelling salesmen with beds at £2.65 a night, Rowton Hostels now cost 52 pence.[^156] Tower House was increasingly catering for an older class of lodger with nowhere else to stay and sometimes with addiction and other problems.</p>\n\n<p>In 1963 a resident’s complaint had given the first of many warnings that Tower House presented a fire hazard. This claimed that the gates were continually locked and chained and that the building was ‘a death trap’, and that inspections were useless because notice was always given to the management.[^157] A report of a meeting between Rowton Houses and the GLC at Tower House in 1976 stated that the house was full, and that any member of the public was admitted as a ‘guest’ provided he had proof of identity and a National Insurance Number.[^158] This report found the standard of housekeeping to be ‘fairly good’ but that fireproofing and means of escape were still inadequate.[^159] A statutory notice was served by the GLC under the London Building Act later that year, stipulating the works required to remedy this, and consequently new external stairs and escapes were completed in 1979 and some of the cubicles on the top floor were sealed up.[^160] Yet in 1982, members of Tower House Residents’ Association repeated the earlier claims regarding locked doors and lack of fire escapes; these, following a site visit, were supported by the GLC, and damning reports began to appear in the national and local press.[^161] Rowton Houses countered that customers had changed, ‘and not for the better’, and that it could no longer ‘carry out the functions of a public authority’, and offered Tower House and the other hostels to their local authorities.[^162]</p>\n\n<p>A pre-arranged inspection by Tower Hamlets Council on behalf of the health and consumer services committee concluded in early 1983 that ‘The occupiers are not in danger of their safety, welfare or health as a result of the conditions’, and did not recommend a control or compulsory purchase order.[^163] This was contradicted by another report, made in January 1983 by independent environmental health consultant Mel Cairns on behalf of Tower Hamlets Law Centre and Shelter, as was reported in Parliament. Cairns, who stayed in the building undercover, found Tower House to be overcrowded and unfit for human habitation as defined by the Housing Act 1957, a statutory nuisance under the Public Health Act 1936 and at immediate risk of potentially serious fire. He recommended that the local authority investigate a Compulsory Purchase or Control Order in order to protect the health and safety of the occupiers.[^164] The report prompted further discussion in the national and local press, which also reported on increasing cases of tuberculosis at Tower House, and that residents wanted a council takeover.[^165]</p>\n\n<p>The Greater London Council took over in November 1983, initially for a period of five years, and proposed a series of improvements including a further reduction of the hostel accommodation to 430, though plans for this work, by Calder, Ashby & Co., surveyors, show a total of 350 beds. After abolition of the GLC in 1986, the building passed to Tower Hamlets Council’s Stepney Neighbourhood, which closed the building in 1989. The housing department then proposed collaborating with housing associations in adapting Tower House for social housing, with small business units in the Vine Court wing (to the north) and the west wing reserved for community use; planning consent was granted in 1990 and a photograph by Isobel Watson of 1992 shows a sign reading ‘Stepney Neighbourhood Annexe’ over the doors of the main entrance.[^166] As recession deepened, the local papers reported in 1993, a £7m proposal by Stepney Liberals to create a mini town hall in Tower House was shelved.[^167] A conversion project by a private company mooted in 1994 came to nothing and the building lay empty, by 1998 squatted by homeless people and drug addicts and attracting increasingly lurid headlines.[^168]</p>\n\n<p>Negotiations for the purchase and present conversion began in 1997, initially with the developers Lincoln Holdings PLC and subsequently with an associated company, Greenacre Properties; after several revisions, approval was eventually granted in 2002 for conversion to flats, the works to be completed by August 2008.[^169] Further permission was granted in May and June 2004 for alterations and additions to the existing building to provide 135 apartments and details were submitted in 2005.[^170] The conversion, by Brooks Murray Architects, also includes car parking on the lower-ground floor, a roof terrace, and a new entrance in the centre bay of the Fieldgate Street wing, facing Parfett Street. This entrance, with ‘Tower House’ in Art Deco-inspired lettering above, opens into a large new reception area. Outside are two early twentieth-century Gothic octagon-section Stepney Borough pavement bollards. Unlike Tower House, which is unlisted, these are listed Grade II.[^171]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: This account draws on the project, <em>At Home in the Institution? Asylum, School and Lodging House Interiors in London and South-East England, 1845</em>–<em>1914</em>, led by Jane Hamlett at Royal Holloway, University of London, in 2010–11, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (RES-061-25-0389).</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Jane Hamlett and Rebecca Preston, ‘A Veritable Palace for the Hard-Working Labourer’? Space, Material Culture and Inmate Experience in London’s Rowton Houses, 1892–1918’, in <em>Residential Institutions in Britain, 1725</em>–<em>1970: Inmates & Environments</em>, ed. Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston, 2013, pp.95–100. See also the entry on Rowton Houses on Peter Higginbotham’s Workhouses website: <a href=\"http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Rowton/\">http://www.workhouses.org.uk/Rowton/</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: E.g. Letter from Richard Farrant to <em>The Times</em>, 5 November 1904, p.9.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: ‘Notes and Comments from Our London Correspondents’, <em>Yorkshire Post</em>, 7 August 1902, p.6.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: See Jane Hamlett, <em>At Home in the Institution: The Material World of Asylums, Lodging Houses and Schools in Victorian and Edwardian England</em>, 2015, pp.141–3.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: ‘Are Rowton Houses Hotels: Lord Rowton and the LCC’, <em>South London Chronicle</em>, 5 August 1899, p.2.</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: ‘Notes and Comments from Our London Correspondents’, <em>The Yorkshire Post</em>, 7 August 1902, p.6.</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: ‘Editorial Mems.’, <em>The Sanitary Record and Journal of Sanitary and Municipal Engineering</em>, 14 August 1902, p.159.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes Minutes, 4 November 1892, p.130; London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), ACC/3445/SIC/01/012.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: J. C. Tarn, <em>Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas between 1840 and 1914</em>, 1973, p.58.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: Richard Farrant, ‘Lord Rowton and Rowton Houses’, <em>The Cornhill</em>, Vol. 16, 1904, pp. 835–44.</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: London County Council Housing of the Working Classes Committee Minutes, 14 February 1890; LMA, LCC/MIN/07236.</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: Farrant, ‘Lord Rowton and Rowton Houses’, p.835.</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: Ibid., p.836.</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: ‘New Model Lodging Houses for London’, <em>The British Architect</em>, 38, 23 December 1892, p.493.</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: Royal London Hospital Archives, RLHLH/F/10/3, Hospital Estate Ledger,</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: During negotiations for the Fieldgate Street site, Plumbe was, with the Bishop of London and the Chief Rabbi, one of the guests invited to inspect the new Rowton House, Newington Butts, in December 1897. See ‘A New Rowton House’, <em>London</em>, 23 December 1897, p.995.</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/BSA/1/5/1/1.</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: <em>Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel</em>, 1876, p.10. See also <em>Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel</em>, 1894, p.10 and <em>Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel</em>, 1899, p.11. There were eighty-four registered common lodging houses (not including free shelters) in the Borough of Stepney in 1902, one sixth of the total in the whole of London. See <em>Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Stepney</em>, 1902, p.19.</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: Estate Sub-Committee Minute Book, 1886–1903, March 1897–October 1899, pp.86–112, Royal London Hospital Archives, RLHLH/A/9/41.</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: LMA, District Surveyors Returns (DSR): serial no: 1899.0316–29; Goad insurance plan, 1899.</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: ‘Report by the Medical Officer of Health for the Whitechapel District Board of Works’, <em>Annual Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Whitechapel</em>, 1899, p.21.</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: ‘New Rowton House’, <em>Lloyds Weekly Newspaper</em>, 16 October 1898, p.2.</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: ‘The School Board Sites: the Hospital’s Explanation’, <em>East London Observer</em>, 25 January 1902, p.6.</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: LMA, DSR serial no: 1900.0205; ‘A New Rowton House for Whitechapel’, <em>East London Observer</em>, 20 April 1901, p.6; ‘A New Rowton House’, <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 7 August 1902, p.7</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: R. Randall Phillips, ‘Rowton House, Whitechapel, London’, <em>The Brickbuilder</em>, vol. 12, no. 7, July 1903, pp.141–4, p.140.</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: Further Report of the Housing of the Working Classes Committee, Housing of the Working Classes Committee Papers, 25 October 1904, LMA, LCC/MIN/07392; ‘The Work of the Rowton Houses Limited’, <em>Actes du VIIme Congres International des Habitation a Bon Marche</em>, 7–10 August 1906, 1906, appendix: ‘Communications Diverses’, pp.4–5.</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: ‘Rowton House’, <em>East London Observer</em>, 9 August 1902, p.8.</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: This figure, just seen in photographs when Rowton House, Whitechapel, was new, was still in place when Isobel Watson photographed the entrance in 1992, but had lost its globe; photographs show that the cherub had also gone by 2001. The cherub at the Birmingham Rowton House, also designed by Measures, has lost its globe but that at Arlington House remains. For a description of the Arlington House entrance porch, and its ‘cherubic yet muscley boy’, see the Historic England List entry by Emily Gee: Arlington House (former Camden Town Rowton House), Number 1396420 <a href=\"https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1396420\">https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1396420</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: H. B. Measures, ‘The Rowton House, Newington Butts’, <em>The British Architect</em>, 22 March 1901, pp.211–14, p.213.</p>\n\n<p>[^31]: Ibid.</p>\n\n<p>[^32]: Randall Phillips, ‘Rowton House, Whitechapel’, p.144.</p>\n\n<p>[^33]: ‘A Rowton House in Whitechapel’, <em>Pall Mall Gazette</em>, 7 August 1902, p.10.</p>\n\n<p>[^34]: ‘“Wonderland” Burned Down’, <em>East London Observer</em>, 19 August 1911, p.7.</p>\n\n<p>[^35]: ‘Another Rowton House’, <em>The Municipal Journal</em>, 8 August 1902, p.648.</p>\n\n<p>[^36]: Harry Bell Measures, FRIBA nomination papers, 30 March 1901, RIBA biographical file. His other work for Willetts in the 1880s included houses in Hampstead, Brighton and further houses in Chelsea.</p>\n\n<p>[^37]: Museum of London (MoL), The Middle Class Dwellings Company Limited, Receipt Books, 1888–1896 (4 vols, incomplete run), ephemera collection. This company was renamed Western Mansions Ltd in 1905.</p>\n\n<p>[^38]: See for example, ‘Richard Farrant’, <em>Who’s Who</em>, vol. 52, 1900, Part II, p. 387; <em>The New Hazell Annual and Almanack</em>, Vol. 21, 1906, p. 216; Judy Slinn, <em>Ashurst Morris Crisp: A Radical Firm</em>, 1997, pp.82, 118–19, 121. By 1908 Rowton Houses Limited and some of the other companies were registered at 7 Little College Street, Westminster.</p>\n\n<p>[^39]: MoL, The Middle Class Dwellings Company Limited, Receipt Books, 1888–1896 (4 vols, incomplete run), ephemera collection.</p>\n\n<p>[^40]: J. C. Edwards, Ruabon, Catalogue, 1903, cited in <a href=\"http://tilesoc.org.uk/tile-gazetteer/london.html#r8\">http://tilesoc.org.uk/tile-gazetteer/london.html#r8</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^41]: <em>Survey of London, </em>vol. 40, ‘Oxford Street: The Rebuilding of Oxford Street’,<em> The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 (The Buildings</em>)<em>, </em>1980, pp.176–84; Slinn, <em>Ashurst Morris Crisp</em>, pp.118–19.</p>\n\n<p>[^42]: LMA, Acc.1297/CLR1/1, 2; <em>Survey of London</em>, vol. 53: <em>Oxford Street</em>, forthcoming.</p>\n\n<p>[^43]: ‘Sudden Death of Sir Richard Farrant’, <em>Pall Mall Gazette</em>, 21 November 1906, p.8; Slinn, Ashurst Morris Crisp, pp.18–19.</p>\n\n<p>[^44]: MoL, The Middle Class Dwellings Company Limited, Receipt Books, 1888–1896 (4 vols, incomplete run), ephemera collection.</p>\n\n<p>[^45]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, p.89.</p>\n\n<p>[^46]: ‘A New Rowton House for London’, <em>Birmingham Daily Gazette</em>, 7 August 1902, p.8.</p>\n\n<p>[^47]: ‘The New Barracks at Redford’, <em>The Scotsman</em>, 8 April 1909, p.7.</p>\n\n<p>[^48]: <em>The Survey of London, </em>Vol. 48: <em>Woolwich</em>, 2012, p.36.</p>\n\n<p>[^49]: ‘The Union Jack Club’, <em>The Graphic</em>, 28 May 1904, p.730.</p>\n\n<p>[^50]: ‘LCC Notes’, <em>The British Architect</em>, 20 December 1901, p.473.</p>\n\n<p>[^51]: On Iveagh House, see F. H. A. Aalen, <em>The Iveagh Trust: The first hundred years, 1890</em>–<em>1990</em>, 1990, p.17; the architects were Joseph and Smithem, assisted by Kaye, Parry & Ross, see ibid., p.42. On Rowton Houses’ influence upon Ada Lewis House, which was also designed by Joseph and Smithem, see Memorandum and articles of association for Rowton House and draft scheme for Lodging Houses for Women, Legal papers relating to Mrs Lewis-Hill’s estate, 1910–1920, LMA/4318/B/02/001–3.</p>\n\n<p>[^52]: Farrant, ‘Lord Rowton and Rowton Houses’, p.844.</p>\n\n<p>[^53]: Michael Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses, 1892</em>–<em>1954</em>, 1956, p.15.</p>\n\n<p>[^54]: ‘Working Men’s Homes in Whitechapel’, <em>The British Weekly</em>, 8 April 1897, clipping in London School of Economics (LSE), Booth/B/227, pp.146–64.</p>\n\n<p>[^55]: Printed report of interview with Mr A. Wilkie [sic], general manager, Victoria Homes, Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street, [c.1898]: LSE, Booth/B/227, pp.146–64.</p>\n\n<p>[^56]: Ibid.</p>\n\n<p>[^57]: ‘Notes and Comments from Our London Correspondents’, <em>Yorkshire Post</em>, 7 August 1902, p.6.</p>\n\n<p>[^58]: ‘Another Rowton House’, <em>Municipal Journal</em>, 8 August 1902, p.648.</p>\n\n<p>[^59]: ‘The Work of the Rowton Houses Limited’, <em>Actes du VIIme Congres International des Habitation a Bon Marche</em>, 7–10 August 1906, 1906, appendix: ‘Communications Diverses’, p.4.</p>\n\n<p>[^60]: ‘Rowton House’, <em>East London Observer</em>, 9 August 1902, p.8.</p>\n\n<p>[^61]: ‘A New Rowton House’, <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 7 August 1902, p.7.</p>\n\n<p>[^62]: ‘Rowton House’, <em>East London Observer</em>, 9 August 1902, p.8.</p>\n\n<p>[^63]: Hamlett and Preston, ‘A Veritable Palace’, pp.96–9.</p>\n\n<p>[^64]: Randall Phillips, ‘Rowton House, Whitechapel’, p.144.</p>\n\n<p>[^65]: ‘Another Rowton House’, <em>The Municipal Journal</em>, 8 August 1902, p. 648; ‘Rowton House, Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel E’, <em>The Building News</em>, 8 August 1902, p.177.</p>\n\n<p>[^66]: ‘Mural Painting’, <em>The Spectator</em>, 30 March 1912, p.11.</p>\n\n<p>[^67]: ‘Gift of Paintings for a London Park’, <em>The Times</em>, 28 December 1896, p.7.</p>\n\n<p>[^68]: ‘A Rowton House in Whitechapel’, <em>Pall Mall Gazette</em>, 7 August 1902, p.10.</p>\n\n<p>[^69]: Building notice, 28 April 1953, THLHA, Tower Hamlets Building Control file 40664.</p>\n\n<p>[^70]: ‘A New Rowton House’, <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 7 August 1902, p.7; ‘Rowton Houses, Limited’, <em>The Lancet</em>, 23 August 1902, p.520.</p>\n\n<p>[^71]: Hamlett and Preston, ‘A Veritable Palace’, pp.100, 101.</p>\n\n<p>[^72]: ‘Progress of Rowton Houses’, <em>The Municipal Journal</em>, 22 August 1902, p.691.</p>\n\n<p>[^73]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, p.43.</p>\n\n<p>[^74]: Ibid., pp.26–7; Jeffery Williams, <em>Byng of Vimy: General and Governor General</em>, 1983, p.19.</p>\n\n<p>[^75]: ‘Obituary’, <em>Milngavie and Bearsden Herald</em>, 3 April 1908, p.3; The National Archives (TNA), RG 14/1497 ED 24, 1.</p>\n\n<p>[^76]: TNA, RG 14/1497 ED 24, 1.</p>\n\n<p>[^77]: ‘A New Rowton House’, <em>The Times</em>, 7 August 1902, p.3, and ibid.</p>\n\n<p>[^78]: ‘Rowton House’, <em>East London Observer</em>, 9 August 1902, p.8.</p>\n\n<p>[^79]: ‘Workingmen’s Hotels’, <em>The New York Times</em>, 2 September 1898, p.4.</p>\n\n<p>[^80]: <em>Wigan Observer and District Advertiser</em>, 20 August 1902, p.6.</p>\n\n<p>[^81]: See Hamlett, <em>At Home in the Institution</em>, p.136.</p>\n\n<p>[^82]: Women’s Common Lodging House, 1905, LMA, GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/027856.</p>\n\n<p>[^83]: ‘Working Men’s Homes in Whitechapel’, <em>The British Weekly</em>, 8 April 1897, clipping, and printed report of interview with Mr A. Wilkie, general manager, Victoria Homes, Whitechapel Road and Commercial Street, [c.1898] in Booth/B/227, pp.146–64.</p>\n\n<p>[^84]: See Emily Gee, ‘“Where shall she live?”: Housing the New Working Woman in Late Victorian and Edwardian London’, in <em>Living, Leisure and Law: Eight Building Types in England 1800</em>–<em>1941</em>, ed. Geoff Brandwood, 2010, pp.93–5; and <a href=\"https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1386034\">https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1386034</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^85]: Gee, ‘“Where Shall She Live?”’, pp.104–5.</p>\n\n<p>[^86]: Lewis was the widow of the philanthropist, Samuel Lewis, founder of the Samuel Lewis housing Trust, whose architects were Joseph and Smithem; Samuel Lewis left £20,000 to fund an Ada Lewis wing of the London Hospital: Probate copy and printed copy of the will of Samuel Lewis Esq., 1901, LMA/4318/A/01/001/02.</p>\n\n<p>[^87]: Emily Gee, ‘“Where Shall She Live?”: The History and Designation of Housing for Working Women in London 1880–1925’, <em>Journal of Architectural Conservation</em>, No. 2 Vol. 15, July 2009, pp.27–46, p.42.</p>\n\n<p>[^88]: Randall Phillips, ‘Rowton House, Whitechapel’, p.141.</p>\n\n<p>[^89]: Ibid.</p>\n\n<p>[^90]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, p.89.</p>\n\n<p>[^91]: ‘A Jewish Rowton House’, <em>The Jewish Chronicle</em>, 20 March 1903, p.20.</p>\n\n<p>[^92]: ‘Correspondence: A Jewish Rowton House’, <em>The Jewish Chronicle</em>, 27 March 1903, p.3.</p>\n\n<p>[^93]: TNA, RG 14/1497, ED 24, 2–28.</p>\n\n<p>[^94]: Louis Jeski. A Louis or Lew Jeski also appears at the Whitechapel Rowton House in most electoral registers from 1935 up to 1963: Ancestry.com, <em>London, England, Electoral Registers, 1832</em>–<em>1965</em>.</p>\n\n<p>[^95]: <em>Report of the Departmental Committee on Vagrancy</em>, Vol. II, Digest of evidence, 1906, p.388.</p>\n\n<p>[^96]: TNA, RG 14/1497, ED 24, 2–28.</p>\n\n<p>[^97]: Percy Alden and Edward E. Hayward, <em>Housing</em>, 1907, p.113; Hamlett and Preston, ‘A Veritable Palace’, p.98.</p>\n\n<p>[^98]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, p.43.</p>\n\n<p>[^99]: Ibid.</p>\n\n<p>[^100]: Ibid., p.44.</p>\n\n<p>[^101]: Ibid., pp.42–3.</p>\n\n<p>[^102]: ‘Rowton House, Camden Town’, <em>The Builder</em>, 8 December 1905, pp.790–1.</p>\n\n<p>[^103]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, pp.51–2.</p>\n\n<p>[^104]: For the many accounts written by Rowton lodgers at the turn of the century, including the Rowton House poets, William Andrew Mackenzie and ‘Supertramp’ W. H. Davies, the majority of which told of life at King’s Cross, Newington Butts and Hammersmith, see Hamlett and Preston, ‘A Veritable Palace’.</p>\n\n<p>[^105]: Jack London, <em>The People of the </em>Abyss, 1903, pp.240–1.</p>\n\n<p>[^106]: ‘Sad End of a Famous War Correspondent’, <em>Inverness Courier</em>, 17 April 1903, p.3</p>\n\n<p>[^107]: ‘Mock Duma in London’, <em>Daily Mirror</em>, 10 May 1907, p.5.</p>\n\n<p>[^108]: Elia Levin, ‘The Social Democratic Party of Russia and Its Recent Congress’, <em>Social Democrat</em>, Vol. XI No. 9 September, 1907, pp.538–46, p.541.</p>\n\n<p>[^109]: Stanley Buder, <em>Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community</em>, 1990, pp.54-5; ‘Duma Reassembles’, <em>London Daily News</em>, 14 May 1907, p.7.</p>\n\n<p>[^110]: Simon Sebag Montefiore, <em>Young Stalin</em>, 2007, p.146; Helen Rappaport, <em>Conspirator: Lenin in Exile</em>, 2010, p.143.</p>\n\n<p>[^111]: Rappaport, <em>Conspirator</em>, p.143</p>\n\n<p>[^112]: ‘Revolutionists in London’, <em>London Daily News</em>, 9 May 1907, p.8; ‘Mock Duma in London’, <em>Daily Mirror</em>, 10 May 1907, p.5.</p>\n\n<p>[^113]: Rappaport, <em>Conspirator</em>, pp.143–4.</p>\n\n<p>[^114]: William J. Fishman, <em>The Streets of East London</em>, 1979, p.124. According to Edward Ellis Smith, in <em>The Young Stalin</em>, 1968, pp.188–9, Stalin’s accounts of the conference were brief and apparently unconcerned with delegates’ accommodation.</p>\n\n<p>[^115]: Montefiore, <em>Young Stalin</em>, p.146.</p>\n\n<p>[^116]: Ibid.; Rappaport, <em>Conspirator</em>, p.144.</p>\n\n<p>[^117]: Konstantin Gandurin, <em>Epizody podpol’ya</em>, 1934, pp.26–8.</p>\n\n<p>[^118]: George Orwell, <em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em>, 1933, 1963 edn., p.137. For the identification of the anonymised casual wards where Orwell stayed, see <a href=\"http://www.1900s.org.uk/1900s-casual-ward-experiemces.htm\">http://www.1900s.org.uk/1900s-casual-ward-experiemces.htm</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^119]: Orwell, <em>Down and Out in Paris and London</em>, pp.137–8.</p>\n\n<p>[^120]: Ibid., p.138.</p>\n\n<p>[^121]: Ibid., p.186. See also Eric Blair, ‘Common Lodging Houses’, <em>The New Statesman</em>, 1932, reprinted in Edward Hyams, Ed, <em>New Statesmanship: An anthology</em>, 1963, pp.86–8.</p>\n\n<p>[^122]: Ancestry.com, <em>London, England, Electoral Registers, 1832</em>–<em>1965.</em></p>\n\n<p>[^123]: Gemma Romain, <em>Race, Sexuality and Identity in Britain and America: The Biography of Patrick Nelson, 1916</em>–<em>1963</em>, 2017, pp.188–93.</p>\n\n<p>[^124]: Ibid., p.189.</p>\n\n<p>[^125]: ‘The Princess of Wales visits a Rowton House’, <em>St James’s Gazette</em>, 26 February 1904, p.8.</p>\n\n<p>[^126]: ‘Royalty at Rowton House’, <em>London Daily News</em>, 4 March 1904, p.5.</p>\n\n<p>[^127]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, p.37; <em>East London Observer</em>, 10 October 1903, p.5.</p>\n\n<p>[^128]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, pp.52–4.</p>\n\n<p>[^129]: Ibid., p.58.</p>\n\n<p>[^130]: Karl Baedeker, <em>London and its Environs: handbook for travellers</em>, 1923, p.57.</p>\n\n<p>[^131]: Undated Rowton Houses ‘Up to London’ booklet, c.1930, n.p., Hammersmith & Fulham Archives.</p>\n\n<p>[^132]: LMA, DSR serial no: 1924.0843.</p>\n\n<p>[^133]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, p.59.</p>\n\n<p>[^134]: <em>Daily Mirror</em>, 17 June 1926, p.2.</p>\n\n<p>[^135]: Letters from Rowton Houses Ltd to the District Surveyor for Stepney West, 5 March and 1 August 1935, THLHA, Tower Hamlets Building Control file 40664.</p>\n\n<p>[^136]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, p.65.</p>\n\n<p>[^137]: Ibid., p.68.</p>\n\n<p>[^138]: Ibid., pp.69, 71.</p>\n\n<p>[^139]: Ibid., p.73.</p>\n\n<p>[^140]: Metropolitan Borough of Stepney report to the LCC, 2 September 1947, Rowton Houses in London, 1947–1951, TNA, HLG/101/513; Building Notices, 24 March 1947, 4 September 1948, 12 August 1948, 24 January 1949, THLHA, Tower Hamlets Building Control file 40664.</p>\n\n<p>[^141]: Letter from Robert Cromie to the District Surveyor, 23 June 1949, THLHA, Tower Hamlets Building Control file, 40664.</p>\n\n<p>[^142]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, p.79.</p>\n\n<p>[^143]: Ibid., pp. 86–7.</p>\n\n<p>[^144]: Ibid., pp.93, 95.</p>\n\n<p>[^145]: M. Cairns, <em>Environmental Health Report, Tower House Hostel, for Tower Hamlets Law Centre</em>, January 1983, p.4, THLHA.</p>\n\n<p>[^146]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, p.88, 93; Building Notice, 30 April 1953, THLHA Building Control file, 40664.</p>\n\n<p>[^147]: Sheridan, <em>Rowton Houses</em>, pp. 91–2.</p>\n\n<p>[^148]: Ibid., p.92.</p>\n\n<p>[^149]: Ibid., p.87.</p>\n\n<p>[^150]: Ibid., pp.88–9.</p>\n\n<p>[^151]: Ibid., p.87.</p>\n\n<p>[^152]: Ibid., pp.42–3.</p>\n\n<p>[^153]: ‘Rowton House becomes £300,000 Hotel’, <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, 16 October 1961, p.15; ‘Empty Beds Led to Hotel Decision’, <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, 11 October 1961, p.22.</p>\n\n<p>[^154]: Letters to LCC Superintending Architect from Ley, Colbeck and Partners, architects, 15 and 26 November and 18 December 1962, THLHA Tower Hamlets Building Control file, 40664.</p>\n\n<p>[^155]: <em>Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Stepney</em>, London, 1962, p.27.</p>\n\n<p>[^156]: Robert Head, ‘Your Money: Tourism is a Victim of War’, <em>Daily Mirror</em>, 15 August 1972, p.20.</p>\n\n<p>[^157]: Letter addressed from Tower House, 57 Fieldgate Street to officer in charge, Albert Embankment (probably the London Fire Brigade), received 22 May 1963, THLHA, Tower Hamlets Building Control file, 40664.</p>\n\n<p>[^158]: Report of a meeting between the GLC and Rowton Houses Ltd., 3 March 1976, THLHA Tower Hamlets Building Control file, 40664.</p>\n\n<p>[^159]: Ibid.</p>\n\n<p>[^160]: Evidence of R. W. Banks, 12 August 1976; correspondence between Ley Holbeck & Partners and the GLC, 1977–79; Memorandum re site visit from GLC Building Regulation Division to Rowton Hotels re Tower House, 27 March 1979, THLHA Tower Hamlets Building Control file, 40664.</p>\n\n<p>[^161]: See correspondence and case notes, October–November 1982, THLHA Tower Hamlets Building control file, 40664; Jeremy Laurance, ‘A Kind of Home’, <em>New Society</em>, 10 March 1983, pp.365–6.</p>\n\n<p>[^162]: Roger Nuttall, ‘Time Slams the Door on the Rowton Houses’, <em>Daily Mail</em>, 18 September 1982, p.33.</p>\n\n<p>[^163]: Commons Sitting of Friday 25 February 1983, <em>Hansard</em>, Sixth Series, Vol. 37, 1141–562.</p>\n\n<p>[^164]: Cairns, <em>Environmental Health Report</em>, p. 4, THLHA; Cairns initially stayed for two nights in a ‘special cubicle’, and was assisted by a photographer on his second stay.</p>\n\n<p>[^165]: E.g. ‘Nearly Every Rule in the Book is Broken’, <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 3 June 1983, <em>East End News</em>, May 1983, and other reports held in THLHA press clippings file, 365.1.</p>\n\n<p>[^166]: See <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/839/detail/#images\">https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/839/detail/#images</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^167]: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 1 February 1991; <em>Tower Hamlets News</em>, 18 February–4 March 1993, THLHA press clippings file, 365.1.</p>\n\n<p>[^168]: E.g., ‘The House of Horror’, <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 10 December 1998, pp.1–2.</p>\n\n<p>[^169]: See ibid.; Mark Gould, ‘Flat Rejection’, <em>Guardian Society</em>, 18 July 2002, THLHA, press clipping file 265.1; correspondence and plans in THLHA Tower Hamlets Building Control file, 40664; and Tower Hamlets Building Control online application reference nos: FP/02/15929/TW (unconditional approval for derelict building to be converted to flats, commencement and completion dates 14 March 2005 and 31 August 2008) and BN/04/22268/TW (additional works to residential block completed in 2008).</p>\n\n<p>[^170]: Permitted planning applications for 81 Fieldgate Street in 2004–5, Tower Hamlets Environment and Planning, PA/98/00411, PA/03/00219, PA/04/01770.</p>\n\n<p>[^171]: Historic England list entry Number: 1357547.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-09-18",
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{
"id": 456,
"title": "Former Jagonari Women's Centre, 183-185 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>This four-storey stock-brick faced building of 1984–7 was designed by and for women as part of the wider Davenant Centre project that the GLC initiated and funded.</p>\n\n<p>A scheme for refurbishment of the two surviving school buildings to the west of this site to be a community centre emerged from the GLC in 1984. In a project spearheaded by George Nicholson, Chair of the Planning Committee in the GLC’s last and defiantly radical days, more than £1m was made available for the formation of the Davenant Centre. This ‘community resources and training centre’ was to extend to include a new building on the empty site at 181–185 Whitechapel Road, all to house eight local groups: the Asian Unemployed Outreach Project, Dishari Shilpi Ghosti (musicians who had left the scene by 1988), the Federation of Bangladeshi Youth Organisations, the Progressive Youth Organisation, Tower Hamlets Advanced Technology Training, the Tower Hamlets Trades Council, the Tower Hamlets Training Forum, and the Jagonari Asian Women’s Education and Resource Centre.</p>\n\n<p>Against a background of the frustrations of recent immigrants and the violence of 1978–9, local Asian women, mostly Bangladeshi, led by Shila Thakor, Mithu Ghosh, Alma Chowdhury and Pola (later Baroness) Uddin, with Varna Sudhi, Mina Thakur and Mita Den, founded the Jagonari organisation in 1982–3 (<em>jago nari</em> is Bengali for 'rise women' or 'women awake', from a poem by Kazi Nazrul Islam). It secured Tower Hamlets Inner Area Project funding and the GLC's Whitechapel Road plot in 1984, and linked up with the Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative, a newly formed architectural practice led by Anne Thorne and Kathleen Morrison. GLC funding was secured and the firm explained in 1985 that the centre would ‘act as a link between Asian and European cultures’, [^1] providing language, health, literacy and computer classes, with a hall for dance, music and drama, as well as a crèche. Plans were devised in close consultation with the users, though not without cultural tensions. On a brick-clad reinforced-concrete frame, motifs from South Asian architecture were incorporated, deliberately avoiding religious symbolism. Security against racist attacks had to be a major consideration, thus the window screens (security grilles) or 'jali'. The building was designed with full disabled access. Ann de Graft-Johnson was the job architect during construction, working with Alan Baxter & Associates, consulting engineers (Michael Coombs and M. S. Seyan), on structural and detailed design. The mosaic surround to the entrance was designed by Mina Thakur. John Laing Construction Ltd were the contractors and Jhumur Mukherji was the Centre’s first Development Worker. Above ground-floor reception, kitchen and dining spaces, the main block was given a first-floor hall or meeting space, second-floor classrooms, and a third-floor library and offices. A two-storey rear range, to house the crèche, was linked by a covered open passage to enclose a courtyard, a conscious echo of a typical Bangladeshi house-courtyard-service range layout.</p>\n\n<p>The Jagonari Centre adapted to funding difficulties and shifting demography, developing partnerships and greater cultural inclusivity, working with offenders and offering English-language training to non-EU migrants. But faced with increased rents from 2010 it had to be wound up in 2015. At the time of writing No. 183 houses the Reset Recovery Support Centre, for the treatment of drug and alcohol problems, and No. 185 is home to the Rainbow House Nursery, run by the Centre in partnership with the London Muslim Centre.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), Building Control file 15500; 'The Bengali East End: Histories of life and work in Tower Hamlets', 2012, pp. 7–8: Swadhinata Trust, interview with Mithu Ghosh and Shila Thakor, 2006</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: THLHLA, BC file 15500; LMA, ACC/3499/EH/03/037/002: <em>Davenant News</em>, Oct. 1985–8: eds Jane Garnett and Sondra L. Hausner, <em>Religion in Diaspora</em>, 2015, pp. 55–79 (chapter 3: Nazneen Ahmed et al, ‘Historicising diaspora spaces: performing faith, race and place in London’s East End’): www.thegazette.co.uk/notice/2414958: interviews with Sufia Alam, May 2017, Anne Thorne, October 2017, and Ruhun Chowdhury, January 2018</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-25",
"last_edited": "2020-10-12"
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{
"id": 460,
"title": "191 Whitechapel Road (demolished)",
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"body": "<p>In 1840 the shophouse on this site was taken by Henry William Wainwright, a brushmaker. By 1861 his son of the same name, age 22, had inherited the shop and business, which he extended later in the 1860s to a warehouse and packing depot across the road at what is now No. 130, taking his family to live in Tredegar Square. In 1874 the younger Wainwright killed and disposed of the body of his mistress, Harriet Lane, at his depot, a notorious crime for which he was executed in 1875. In the same year a fire in the brush factory caused a dangerous panic in the Pavilion Theatre. After 1900 No. 191 became the Pavilion Restaurant; it was cleared with the theatre in 1962.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, E/BN/160,162,166–8,171–2: CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/572/1344518; GLC/AR/BR/07/0439: Ancestry: the-east-end.co.uk/henry-wainwright: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-25",
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},
{
"id": 603,
"title": "Describing the George Yard Ragged School",
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"b_name": "Nagpal House, site of George Yard Ragged School",
"street": "Gunthorpe Street",
"address": "Nagpal House, 1 Gunthorpe Street, E1 7RG",
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"body": "<p>East End historian and guide David Charnick recounts some of the history of the former George Yard Ragged School</p>\n\n<p>\"This [site] used to be George Yard and the ragged school was set up as part of the George Yard Mission. Just around the corner on Whitechapel High Street itself at number 87 (which nowadays is Cashino, one of these amusements arcades) is where George Holland set up the base for his mission. It was aimed particularly at this street which was described in the <em>East London Advertiser</em> in 1888 as one of the most dangerous streets in the area because of the crime around here and the prostitution, et cetera.</p>\n\n<p>\"This was the site of the actual ragged school itself. You would have the building here which stretched back to the area covered now by the Whitechapel Art Gallery extension. It would be quite a modest building which would be accommodating children who were from very destitute families who couldn’t get places in the general charity schools and hence the name 'ragged schools'. These children would have raggedy clothes and often no shoes or anything like that. They would have been from the local area because this was an area of great poverty in the 19th century.</p>\n\n<p>\"The ragged school was established in 1853 as part of the mission. George Holland was a provisions merchant but he had a change of heart and became an evangelist and decided to come east to Whitechapel to administrate a modest outreach.</p>\n\n<p>\"It is said that in 1888 with the Ripper murders, the spotlight was turned on the East End and then everyone was realising what was going on here and the poverty, et cetera. In fact, people like George Holland were coming down in the 1850s, so long before the Ripper murders there was an awareness of the problems that were being caused here by the expansion of London.</p>\n\n<p>\"The ragged school was established in the Black Horse, a notorious gin shop. These schools would take over existing buildings because they were very basic establishments. The most famous one in the East End is the Dr Barnardo's Ragged School which is now the Ragged School Museum on Copperfield Road just by the canal farther to the east from here. That was old warehouses that were now disused and were taken over by Dr Barnardo himself to establish a ragged school.</p>\n\n<p>\"Lord Shaftesbury, who was a peer and a politician, but also a great social reformer, was very interested in child welfare. He was behind a lot of legislation to get children out of working in the mines for instance and factories. He came to visit George Holland's work here, and particularly the ragged schoos to see what the children were like and how they were being cared for and so on. In fact, he was a great admirer of George Holland's work.</p>\n\n<p>\"He has left descriptions of the children when he would go and talk to them and ask them how they were and what’s being done for them, et cetera, and they were all full of praise for what George Holland was doing for them, the way he was giving them I suppose some form of structure and security to an otherwise very haphazard existence.</p>\n\n<p>\"How long a child was in a ragged school was difficult to answer because of the nature of employment here and because of poverty as well. Families were keen to have their children at work at the earliest possible opportunity. We know [about] Charles Dickens, for instance, (I know this was not his area), but when his father was imprisoned in the Marshalsea Prison, Dickens was taken out of school at the age of 12 and sent to work. This was 1824 when 12 years old was plenty old enough to be put to work.</p>\n\n<p>\"The children would be put to work at much earlier ages than that and often in family businesses. They would be sent to a ragged school presumably to get them out of their parents' hair for a while but very soon, they would be put to work.</p>\n\n<p>\"It would relieve the parents of the burden of looking after them, that’s the thing I suppose. There was a ragged school union but not all ragged schools belonged to that. Some of them were created by individual philanthropists like George Holland here and, as I mentioned, Thomas Barnardo. His ragged school was not part of the union. It was his own creation.</p>\n\n<p>\"We don’t have any records for [how many children attended the school]. Unfortunately, we don’t really have a great deal of information about George Holland himself or his work, which is in many ways a great injustice because we know that he inspired quite a lot of people with his work here. He was here from 1850 until he died in 1900 and a number of people were very much inspired by what he did.</p>\n\n<p>\"I mentioned Lord Shaftesbury but there was a professional cricketer called C.T. Studd. He and his wife decided to go to China as missionaries and they sold everything before they left and split the proceeds amongst a number of charities and they gave George Holland here a substantial amount of money. There were people who were interested in what he was doing and wanted to support him back here.</p>\n\n<p>\"Whether there was any link to church and Christianity, I'm not sure. I imagine that it would be one of these places that would have texts on the wall, biblical texts or exaltations to worship but as far as I know, there were no services held [at 87 Whitechapel Road]. Again as I say, the information is very sketchy so it’s very hard to say.\"</p>\n\n<p>David Charnick (www.charnowalks.co.uk) was speaking to Shahed Saleem on 23.02.18. The text has been edited for print.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-17",
"last_edited": "2019-09-12"
},
{
"id": 447,
"title": "151 Whitechapel Road",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
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"properties": {
"b_number": "151",
"b_name": "",
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"search_str": "151 Whitechapel Road"
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"body": "<p>An imposing row of thirteen shophouses (later Nos 151–175) was built on the site of Whitechapel workhouse in 1860–2. This four-storey speculation by John Hudson, an architect based on Leman Street, was with its Italianate stucco dressings an exceptionally unified development for Whitechapel Road.[^1] Only the western end survives, as 151 Whitechapel Road. This began as the premises of Robert Gladding, a bookseller who moved from what is now 203–205 Whitechapel Road (see Bob Gladding's contribution). Edward George, previously a competitor across the road at what is now 104 Whitechapel Road, acquired and sustained the bookshop into the twentieth century. There was a conversion for the Midland Bank, and by the 1930s upper-storey use for millinery showrooms and workrooms. After bomb damage and rebuilding in 1949, the plain-brick formerly top-lit rear wing was raised two storeys in 1984.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Salvation Army Archives, VH/1/1: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives Building Control file 15950</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-24",
"last_edited": "2017-08-24"
},
{
"id": 339,
"title": "Former Victorian Bookshop",
"author": {
"id": 115,
"username": "bob"
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"b_number": "151",
"b_name": "",
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"body": "<p>Originally No 76, before the re-numbering of Whitechapel Road, the property was built on the site of the house of the Master of the (Old) Whitechapel Workhouse in 1860-61. The freehold was bought by the first occupant, Robert Gladding (1808-1896), a bookseller whose previous premises were at 97-98 (old numbering) Whitechapel Road. He had the building fitted up with two galleries one above the other, and as such it was described 'as one of the most admirably arranged bookstores in the country – not unlike a miniature British Museum Reading Room' [^1]</p>\n\n<p>Robert Gladding was a publisher as well as bookseller. His obituary in the <em>East London Observer</em> described him as ‘the Grand Old Man of the East End’ and ‘the Father of Whitechapel’ because of his public service over many years as Chairman of the Whitechapel District Board of Works and a Guardian of Whitechapel Workhouse. [^2].</p>\n\n<p>On retiring around 1893 he sold the book business to his competitor Mr E. George on the opposite side of the Road at No. 231 (old numbering), but the freehold was retained in the family until 1940. In recent years the building has housed an Asian textile business.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: W. Roberts, <em>The Book-Hunter in London</em>, 1895 – section on Central and East London</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>East London Observer</em>, 7 March 1896, p. 6</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-31",
"last_edited": "2017-08-24"
},
{
"id": 465,
"title": "Living in the Old King's Hall",
"author": {
"id": 185,
"username": "Elaine_Evans"
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"body": "<p>I lived in a building on this site as a child. The address was 83/85 Commercial Road. It was called the Old King's Hall at one time. I think it might have once been a theatre. </p>\n\n<p>I used to go through the black doors on the ground floor. There was a hall with mirrors on both sides and black and white tiles on the floor. We lived on the top floor. The two windows on the left of the Phoenix plaque was our living room and the two windows on the right hand side of the plaque was my parent's bedroom. We had an outside toilet on the floor below, no bathroom. There was a ladder in the hall outside my parents bedroom that led onto a flat roof above. We also had a kitchen and one other bedroom for myself and my two sisters. It is funny but I never felt as if I was poorly off. In fact we were fine. </p>\n\n<p>The reason we lived here was because my mother wanted to be near her mother at No. 81 Commercial Road. My grandmother died when I was two years old and we stayed in the flat until I was a teenager I think.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-30",
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},
{
"id": 929,
"title": "38 to 48 Middlesex Street",
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"body": "<p>These six tall, muscular former warehouse buildings are the survivors of a range of seventeen that ran like a cliff down Middlesex Street when it was newly widened in the 1880s. The land had been bought from the Metropolitan Board of Works in February 1886 by Arnold Gabriel (1833-96), a dentist who had turned to commercial-property investment on an increasingly ambitious scale.[^1] The warehouse sites were leased and built up in 1886-8 by five builders, chief among them W. & F. Croaker of Great Dover Street and W. Mitchell of Reading who built six each.[^2] The architect was Marcus Evelyn Collins (1861-1944), son of the prolific warehouse architect Hyman Henry Collins, which may account for the young man’s swagger in the design, with giant white-brick pilasters rising through ground and first floor to Corinthian capitals, cement cornices between and full-height warehouse loops on the north sides of each warehouse.[^3] By 1911, several were in the ownership of the Clients’ Investment Company (Limited), founded in 1888.[^4] Use was generally by the rag trade, to which the full-height and width windows on ground and first floor were suited. Applications to demolish Nos 38-44 were refused or withdrawn in 1989-92 and the upper floors were converted to twelve flats, the loophole footboards retained and fronted with railings, in 1994. Since the Second World war, the ground floors have been in shop use. Nos 46-48, adjoining The Bell, were substantially rebuilt, with new rear windows in 1964. Its shops were refurbished and the upper floors converted in 2010 by Noble House Properties (Middlesex) Ltd to six large flats (No. 48A) as the Lofthouse to the designs of Tasou Associates, architects, expanding into the roofs, which were cut back at the front to create roof terraces. The shop units at Nos 46 and 48 retain a rag-trade association as Hilton Textiles, ‘the home of African fabrics’, specialising in West African waxed cotton.[^5] The other shops are currently (February 2019) a barber’s, an Argentinian restaurant and a news agent.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Metropolitan Board of Works, <em>Minutes </em>(MBW <em>Mins</em>), 19 Feb 1886, p. 340; 19 March 1886, p. 537: <em>The Housing Question in London : Being an Account of the Housing Work Done by the Metropolitan Board of Works and the London County Council, Between the Years 1855 and 1900</em>, London 1900, p. 151: <em>London Evening Standard</em> (<em>LES</em>), 17 July 1865, p. 6: <em>East London Observer</em> (<em>ELO</em>), 17 Sept 1881, p. 7: <em>Globe</em>, 30 July 1885, p. 2: <em>The Builder</em> (<em>B</em>), 10 Sept 1892, p. 213</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns (DSR)</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>B</em>, 1887, p. 830</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: DSR: <em>Manchester Courier</em>, 5 May 1888, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Tower Hamlets Planning applications online: <a href=\"https://www.hiltontextiles.com/\">https://www.hiltontextiles.com/</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2019-06-05",
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"id": 809,
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"body": "<p>The two-storey glazed curtain-wall triangular building was built in 2013-14 as part of the regeneration of the New Holland Estate. It was used as its offices and meeting rooms by <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/379/detail/\">Toynbee Hall</a> in 2016-18, while its redevelopment was underway.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Close to Blooms was the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where we would go, as they had programmes for kids. I think this is where my brother picked up his love of art, as later on he went to art school and a career in advertising.</p>\n",
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"id": 532,
"title": "A Short History of Sixty-Nine & Seventy Whitechapel High Street (Including Nine Whitechurch Passage)",
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"body": "<p><strong><em>Medieval:</em></strong></p>\n\n<p>Whitechapel High Street is probably the shortest High Street in London, some 350 yards. It leads right up to the Aldgate entrance to the walls of the original Roman City of London established about 45AD. In the biggest rebellion in nearly four hundred years of rule by the Romans, Bodicea (Boudicca), Queen of the Norfolk-based Iceni Britons, must have used this route to enter and destroy Roman London in 61AD after first destroying Roman Colchester in Essex. At the end of the High Street, 20 yards from no’s 69 & 70, is the original location of the White Chapel, becoming in 1323 St Mary’s Church, the centre of the parish of Matfellon. (Now named Altab Ali Park after a young man murdered there by Racist thugs in 1978.) No’s 69 & 70 therefore occupy a site that is likely to have been under perpetual re-building since soon after that: some seven hundred years.</p>\n\n<p><strong><em>1700’s:</em></strong></p>\n\n<p>A new Huguenot protestant refugee community had established itself. They were from the Low Countries, fleeing Spanish Catholic colonisation. The surrounding area contained orchards, and mulberry trees used to feed the silkworms for their silk-weaving industry. The parish church, St Mary’s had a famed outdoor pulpit on the corner for preachers. Behind it was a massive rubbish dump forming a stinking hill. Across the High Street was the southern end of Brick Lane (now Osborn St), a narrow alley leading to Spitalfields and the brick works that served the surrounding area. Behind no’s 69 & 70 was Hatchet Alley (now Whitechurch Passage), which provided access to Adam and Eve Court, opposite, and to our own back yard, which then extended into the properties either side. This part of the High Street was extremely congested since it was the location for a Hay Market as well as the main route into the City for livestock and traffic from Essex. Also being near the docks, it was packed with inns and brothels. The block (of which no’s 69 & 70 are a part) may have originated as market stalls in the thoroughfare, which had previously been widened. The stone oven/sink in the basement of the no 70 shop may date from this period and may be the oldest existing feature in the property.</p>\n\n<p><strong><em>1800’s:</em></strong></p>\n\n<p>By this time the area was packed with Irish (earlier) and Jewish (later) immigrants. Hatchet Alley had been renamed Spectacle Alley. Somewhere in the Alley was a small synagogue, seemingly at no. 9, our ‘tower’, (which appears to have been called no. 3 then). The 1881 census shows over 30 Alley residents, mainly “Russians” i.e. Jews. Next door, on the corner of White Church Lane was the Bligh Pub with mainly Irish residents. While the present row of properties no’s 65-69 (including 9 Whitechurch Passage) may have been rebuilt in the early 1800’s, no. 70 was probably mid-1800’s.</p>\n\n<p>No.’s 69 & 70 were already occupied by a succession of woollen merchants and tarpaulin manufacturers. In about 1882 the whole block was acquired by London Metropolitan Railway Company at the time they were building the underground line beneath the High Street. It may have been at this time that the original brick-arched windows to 9 Whitechurch Passage were massively enlarged with exposed rolled steel lintels, and the floor levels changed. In 1885 they auctioned-off most of the block, including no. 70, but they kept no. 69, the front of which seems to have been demolished to form an earth excavating route via the basement from the tube line to 9 Whitechurch Passage which is described in the 1901 census as an “Engine-House”. It may be that they also rebuilt no. 70 before selling it in 1885; see the picture on the inside front page.</p>\n\n<p>The basement of 69 is still now characterised by massive riveted steel beams, a barrel vaulted cellar running forward towards the tube line under the High Street, and a large bricked-in arch running back to below 9 Whitechurch Passage. This has exceptionally thick walls at ground and basement level.</p>\n\n<p><strong><em>1900’s:</em></strong></p>\n\n<p>About 1907, Wolf Mackover (a ‘Scotticised’ version of Makov in Poland?), Jewish woollen merchant from Warsaw, took over at no 70 and then in about 1910 he purchased the lease to no 69 (incl, presumably, 9WP) from the Metropolitan Railway, immediately after it had been rebuilt. At basement, ground and first floors there were large linking entrances to 9 Whitechurch Passage (renamed from Spectacle Alley about this time), which was by now a Salvation Army warehouse.</p>\n\n<p>By 1940, Wolf’s four sons; Samuel, Nathaniel, Abraham & Gabriel, were running the business, selling worsted wool for suit-making off twelve-foot rolls. Then blitz bombing demolished St Mary’s church, all of neighbouring number 71, the second and third floor of no 70, and the rear first and third floor of no 69. A 1942 repair plan shows the rear first floor ceiling being raised to make what is now the cavernous flat 1 living room.</p>\n\n<p>It wasn’t until the mid 1960’s that the second floor of no 70 was rebuilt and the Mackover brothers gave up the woollen merchants business. They let no’s 69 & 70 to “Fancy Goods” wholesalers, and no 9 for rag trade warehousing. Their first tenants were the Jewish Nathans, then Laniardo, then Mazri. In the late 1990’s the business passed, typically for the whole area, to their former employees and immigrant successors, Shafiq Sultan and Iqbal Shahid from Islamabad. By the end of the century the whole block had fallen into severe decay but it had been declared a conservation area.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/20/screen-shot-2017-12-20-at-154336.png\"></p>\n\n<p><em>About 1951, outside the Whitechapel bombsite: Wolf Mackover’s sons, the (somewhat dodgy-looking!) Mackover brothers (l to r): Abraham, Samuel, Gabriel and Nathaniel.</em></p>\n\n<p><strong><em>2000’s:</em></strong></p>\n\n<p>In 2002 the Fancy Goods Wholesale business (and the rag trade warehouse at 9 Whitechurch Passage) vacated the somewhat rundown property, moving just across the road (Audiotime). </p>\n\n<p>Over time, some ownership shares in the properties (by this time split into twelfth shares owned by the third generation) had been bought by Wolf’s great-grandson, Tom. In 2004 he bought out the remaining other Mackover shareholders. With his wife Jacquie, and daughters Jodie and Belinda, they became the fourth and fifth generation of Mackover owners. (Jodie had moved into the former warehouse at number 9 in 2003.)</p>\n\n<p>In the face of developer’s plans to demolish the whole block (which fell through in the credit crunch of 2009), a comprehensive restoration and conversion then commenced under the architect Jan Kattein. In 2005 the ground floor and their basements became separate commercial units; now Bangladesh- and Bahrain-based banks. In 2006 the first and second floors became split-level flats. And the third floor, destroyed in the same blitz bombing which had demolished Whitechapel Church exactly 70 years before, was finally re-instated as a residential flat in 2010 under a sweeping new copper mansard roof.</p>\n\n<p>2011 saw a new roof and other important structural restoration work to 9 Whitechurch Passage, the unusual four-storey tower. More improvements remain to be done!</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/20/screen-shot-2017-12-20-at-154547.png\"></p>\n\n<p><em>2010: Part of the new copper roof.</em></p>\n\n<p><strong>Census Extracts </strong><strong>and Mackover involvement summary</strong><strong>.</strong></p>\n\n<p><strong>Summary</strong>: From the records and documents below it seems the lease on no 70 was acquired by the Mackovers about 1908, but the freehold was still owned by a Philip & Ella Goldstein as late as 1939. Likewise, the lease on no 69 (which included 9 Whitechurch Passage) was acquired sometime between 1910 and 1920, but the freehold was only acquired from The British Transport Commission (successor to the Metropolitan Railway Company) in 1949.</p>\n\n<p><strong><em>Census </em></strong><strong><em>Extracts copied from Tower Hamlets Archives, 6.5.04:</em></strong></p>\n\n<p>Note: Photocopies of relevant entries held in TR’s files.</p>\n\n<p>Date Source No Comment</p>\n\n<p>1881 Census 69 8 residents: Raymond Klapper, confectioner, born Germany,</p>\n\n<p>plus family of 7 and 1 servant.</p>\n\n<p>1881 Census 70 7 residents: William Boldwood, woollen draper, plus family of 6.</p>\n\n<p>1891 Census 69 No reference to no. 69.</p>\n\n<p>1891 Census 70 4 residents: Mary Fryer, Dressmaker, plus family of 3.</p>\n\n<p>1901 Census 69 Recorded as “ Engine-House”. No residents.</p>\n\n<p>1901 Census 70 Recorded as “Harness & Stable Requisites Shop”. No residents.</p>\n\n<p>1901 Electoral 69 No reference to no.69.</p>\n\n<p> Register </p>\n\n<p>1901 Electoral 70 Records a “John Smith” as owner of the “tenement”.</p>\n\n<p> Register</p>\n\n<p>1905 Kelly’s 69 No entry</p>\n\n<p> 70 “Tomlinson Bros, tarpaulin makers”</p>\n\n<p>1906 Kelly’s 69 No entry</p>\n\n<p> 70 No entry</p>\n\n<p>1907 Kelly’s 69 No entry</p>\n\n<p> 70 No entry</p>\n\n<p>1908 Kelly’s 69 No entry</p>\n\n<p> 70 First reference to “Samuel Mackover & Co, Woollen Merchant”, </p>\n\n<p>1920 Electoral 69 Jessie, Nathaniel, Samuel, and Wolf Mackover recorded as </p>\n\n<p> Register 70 owners of both properties.</p>\n\n<p>1939 Electoral 69 Abraham, Francis, Samuel & Sylvia Mackover recorded as owners.</p>\n\n<p> Register 70 Phillip & Ella Goldstein recorded as owners.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Via a series of mergers, the vestiges of the Sir John Cass School of Art were subsumed into London Metropolitan University (LMU) in 2002. Central House had been retained throughout the School’s various iterations, used for the teaching of art, craft and design for over three decades. Additional workshops were located in a separate building on Commercial Road. In 2011 the University decided to move its architecture department from its Holloway Road premises, on which the lease was due to expire, to Central House, to create a unified ‘creative hub’ in Whitechapel. All floors of Central House were then in possession of the soon-to-be expanded Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture. The first upgrade of the building was undertaken by architects Cartwright Pickard, whose extensive re-organisation of the ground-floor and basement created new entrance, gallery, café, gym and studio spaces.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>As Director of Architecture and Dean of the Cass Faculty, Robert Mull commissioned ‘ultimate insiders’ at LMU, Florian Beigel, Philip Christou and the Architecture Research Unit (ARU), to re-conceive the upper floors of building to facilitate the teaching of architecture.[^2] Their scheme re-asserted the original structure of the building, but deliberately sought to disrupt its uncompromising pragmatism in order to allow for informal connections between disciplines to emerge serendipitously. After relocating to Central House in the summer of 2013, students and staff of the architecture department acknowledged the efficacy of Beigel, Christou and the ARU’s sensitive interior interventions. Moreover, the ‘Aldgate Bauhaus’ continued to benefit from its proximity to the East End art scene and the Whitechapel Gallery. Faculty-wide confidence in the future culminated in July 2015 in a proposal for a large-scale installation of external signage, designed by art Professor Bob and Roberta Smith. It was to proclaim that ‘Art Makes People Powerful’. Events that unfolded subsequently suggested otherwise.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>In October 2015, under increasing financial pressure, LMU’s senior management presented a ‘one campus, one community’ plan, anticipating the closure of nineteen courses and a much-reduced student body. Central House was designated for sale and the Cass was to be relocated to Holloway Road, its custom-designed teaching spaces discarded. The proposed closure was met with fierce opposition, perceived to be a short-sighted commercial decision, and indicative of the identity crisis afflicting many former polytechnics in the twentieth-first century. The ‘Save the Cass’ campaign drew widespread support and publicity with David Chipperfield, Richard Rogers and Nicholas Serota lending their backing. In December 2015, the sale of Central House was debated in the House of Lords, but the government declined to take action and LMU’s senior management did not lose their resolve.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Building Design (BD)</em>, 10 Jan 2013; <a href=\"http://www.cartwrightpickard.com/projects/education/further-higher/lmu-central-house/\">http://www.cartwrightpickard.com/projects/education/further-higher/lmu-central-house/</a> Accessed 21 Oct 2017; <a href=\"http://www.savethecass.org/category/campaign/news/\">http://www.savethecass.org/category/campaign/news/</a> Accessed 20 Nov 2017</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Will Hunter, <em>Architectural Review (AR)</em>, Jun 2013, p.75</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <a href=\"http://aru.londonmet.ac.uk/works/cass.1.html\">http://aru.londonmet.ac.uk/works/cass.1.html</a> Accessed 20 Nov 2017; <em>BD</em>, 10 Jan 2013; Interview with Robert Harbison, 31 May 2017; Interview with Christou and Beigel, 7 July 2017; <em>The Guardian</em>, 11 June 2012; Tower Hamlets Planning, PA/15/03249</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>BD</em>, 9 Dec 2015; <em>The Guardian, </em>22 Nov 2015</p>\n",
"created": "2018-01-02",
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"id": 604,
"title": "Describing the Residence for Respectable Girls",
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"body": "<p>East End historian and guide David Charnick recounts some of the history of the former Sir George's Residence for Respectable Girls</p>\n\n<p>\"This was the Residence for Respectable Girls and respectable, this is one of those very loaded Victorian terms. It doesn't mean that they were sort of prim and proper, what it means is, basically, they weren't prostitutes. These were young women who maybe came to London for work or whatever and fell on hard times and had no repose, and so could be accommodated here. It's a kind of hostel. They offered accommodation but they also had people coming in who would actually give talks and so on to the women here. They will have a sort of programme of events I suppose we'd call it.</p>\n\n<p>I suppose we're looking at young women, possibly 20’s, because you have to remember that in the 19th century, London was growing hugely. It was attracting a lot of immigrants from other parts of the country. People were leaving their country life or their provincial towns and coming to London because of the growth of industry on the back of the growth of the docks. A lot of people were coming to London and then finding it wasn't quite so easy to find the work, and that’s the way that people have come to London ever since, really.</p>\n\n<p>They would find themselves, if they couldn't find work or indeed if they lost work because there was no sort of trade union setup as we understand it today, and so employment conditions could be difficult and you might end up losing your job and not being able to afford your rent. Again, rents were notoriously higher in private sector as it were.</p>\n\n<p>[At this time in the East End we] have a large number of refugees and hostels for varieties of people from different social strata all the way from the people with absolutely nothing to people up to who are just in financial straits but are not as if were vagrants.</p>\n\n<p>Again, like with rest of George Holland's work, there's very little information [about the building] available at the moment. I'm sure [it is] in archives somewhere that could be ferreted out and put back together.</p>\n\n<p>They stopped operating here with the death of George Holland himself [in 1900]. It was very much a one-man mission.</p>\n\n<p>It carried on for a while [as a hostel] but by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, it was deteriorating into a slum. You got a lot of poor people living here. As with a lot of buildings in the area, with the poverty among the Jewish population particularly here, a lot of Jewish people were living here.</p>\n\n<p>I imagine it probably was bought by someone or rather who then ran it as slum accommodation. It was cramming people in, really.</p>\n\n<p>The mission died with George Holland himself.\"</p>\n\n<p>David Charnick (www.charnowalks.co.uk) was speaking to Shahed Saleem on 23.02.18. The text has been edited for print.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Shila B, interviewed by her neighbour Jil Cove, August 2017:</p>\n\n<p>I went to Blue Gate Fields Primary School and then to Mulberry. I really enjoyed school and left with General National Vocational Qualifications (GNVQ) in health and social care. I volunteered at the London Hospital until I got a part time job there which later became full time job. I worked in admin in the gynae department for 8 years. I loved the work and sometimes, I was asked to use my bilingual skills if an advocate was not available.</p>\n\n<p>When I was at The London there was a great fish and chip shop opposite – the chips were fantastic and the fish was really good too. I often went there at lunch time, it was very traditional and when the owners changed I could taste the difference in the quality of the cooking. I really missed it when it I stopped working and still miss it, even today; I can still taste the chips! Sometimes after work a group of us would go to the Pizza Hut opposite, but I didn’t miss that so much when it closed.</p>\n\n<p>My marriage was arranged when I was 20 and took place in Bangladesh. I carried on working until my first son was born; I now have 3 sons aged 16, 11 and 9. The 16 year old has recently received his GCSE results and my husband and I are very proud to say that he passed all eight subjects one with an A* and the others were A’s and B’s. He is going to start college soon to study for his A levels.</p>\n\n<p>My husband is a butcher by trade but has now got heart problems that prevent him from working. His English is rather limited though it has got better over the years with the children speaking to him in English. At first, he was unable to go to English classes as locally we couldn’t find one that fitted in with his work hours and now he is reluctant to go as the ESOL classes are predominantly for women, so he would be the only man in the class.</p>\n\n<p>My dad came to the UK from Bangladesh before I was born, and I was about 6 or 7 when my mum brought me and my three brothers to join him. My eldest brother who was 16 or 17 at the time had to stay behind because of immigration rules but he eventually joined us about 18 months later; my youngest brother was born here. Dad originally worked in textile factories in the north of England and I don’t know why he moved to London. His English was always very limited and my mum has virtually no English as she was isolated when we lived in Shadwell and busy with looking after 6 children. She didn’t know anyone to give her any support or guidance so never had time to learn. My dad died in 1987 and now my mum lives with my youngest brother. I’m really pleased that she is involved in lots of activities every day enjoying various groups including Arabic classes, and though she still has no English she is quite independent of the family and is out and about every day.</p>\n\n<p>I come from a very big extended family and we all live in the Whitechapel area so see each other often. Just recently one of my nieces got engaged which meant a large celebration party; about 40 members of my extended family came along with a similar number from the soon to be groom’s family. We all had a good time with lovely food and a very late night. I was telling my neighbour about this and she was amazed at having such a large family and that we are all in such close contact with each other.</p>\n\n<p>I’ve lived in this same street with my family for about 15 years now and moved with all my neighbours into a new block of flats in 2013. Though my new flat is much bigger, I do miss the very big balcony I had before where the children could play safely outside. I think that Whitechapel market has changed as there are now too many clothes stalls so there is not the variety of things any more. I tend to go to Wapping for my fish and herbs, and do the big shopping at Iceland as they delivery to my door.</p>\n\n<p>One of the downsides to living where I do, is that as a car driver, we are less that 100 yards inside the congestion zone which means, that even with my residents discount, I have to pay just to take my car out of the garage during the charging hours. But I still think that Whitechapel is a lovely place to live and it really feels like home to me. There is such a mix of cultures here and I can meet people from other countries. It feels very comfortable and safe to me, everything is here and I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>While a nursing student at the University of California Medical Center in San Francisco, California, I was accepted to a summer work-program at The London Hospital in Whitechapel. Four women from our nursing class participated, two at The London Hospital and two at another hospital in the suburbs.</p>\n\n<p>My father worked for United Airlines, so I flew on a stand-by ticket direct from San Francisco to London. I think it was June since I remember seeing daffodils. I had no idea how to get from Heathrow Airport to the hospital, so I took a large black cab that cost a small fortune. The cab delivered me at the main entrance along Whitechapel Road. I checked in at Matron’s office where I was assigned a room at Edith Cavell Nurses House, behind the hospital.</p>\n\n<p>Cavell Home, a stately brick building, housed student nurses then and was named for the World War I heroine, Edith Cavell. Upon entering the building, there was an office to the left of the foyer. The office contained the one telephone at Cavell for the nurses’ use. Separating the foyer from the front office was a counter where a pitcher of milk would sometimes sit (covered with a folded cloth). Students who wanted milk could help themselves. To the left of the foyer along a corridor was a reception room to meet visitors. Opposite the front door was the stairway to the rooms above. I had a private room on maybe the first or second floor in the rear. It was quite comfortable with a bed, desk or dressing table, the usual. There were separate bathrooms (aside from toilet rooms) somewhere in the building; each had a large old-fashioned tub, great for soaking.</p>\n\n<p>The London Hospital student nurses wore the hospital’s puffy-sleeve (gingham) uniforms with long skirts, white aprons, and small starched caps. In cooler weather, the uniform also included a beautiful long cape. At the time, the students there loved their “old-fashioned” uniform. In fact some were worried that the National Health or maybe the hospital would modernize it to look more like my uniform, a plain light blue shirtwaist that resembled something a cafe waitress might wear. Apparently The London Hospital’s uniforms were updated sometime after I left. I wonder what the student uniform looks like today. I wonder if the hospital has its own nursing program any more.</p>\n\n<p>I remember working three days a week in exchange for room and board. I helped out where needed and ran errands. In 1968 hospital care was simpler with fewer “gadgets” and far less technology. My first assignment was in Pediatrics; the “Kids” ward as they called it. Metal cribs with infants and toddlers filled the large room. I held and rocked many of them during my time there. It was located I think on an upper floor toward the rear of the main hospital building and looked out onto the courtyard.</p>\n\n<p>My next assignment was in Men’s Surgical Ward (wish I could remember the exact name) maybe on the first or ground floor. It was a large ward with 20 or more beds arranged I think in long rows. I was instructed to make and serve morning tea on my first day of duty there. I had never done that before, so had to be taught. A large kettle provided the hot water and I had to remember that the milk went in first, then the hot tea. I served it to the patients using a rolling cart. The men were so kind and friendly. I learned that it was the ward sister who was in charge of not only the patients, but to a large extent, the doctors too. Sister (named for the ward) was the one who decided when the dressings and bandages came off. During morning rounds, she participated completely in the discussions.</p>\n\n<p>Meals for the nurses were in the dining room of the hospital. I think it was somewhere on the ground floor off the rear courtyard. There was an extensive buffet to select from. What was new to me was the yellow custard sauce that was poured on all types of cake and sweets. I came to like it and missed it when I returned to the states. My friend Kay (the other student nurse from California) worked in the Accident Department. In pleasant weather we would meet in the courtyard for lunch. While eating outside, we would often comment on the residual bomb damage from World War II still visible on the courtyard walls of the hospital. </p>\n\n<p>The English student nurses would sometimes invite us along for socials on the weekends. It seemed they used to hang with policemen. At one party we were driven home by a young policeman who had an old Volkswagen beetle; we fit at least six nurses in it for the ride home. When a student nurse celebrated a birthday, we would eat at an Indian restaurant. I may be mistaken, but I seem to remember we could get a shrimp curry dinner for 11 shillings. (Until that summer, I had never eaten Indian food). Of course, the money then was the ancient system of pounds, shillings, and pence; I still miss the old coins when I visit England.</p>\n\n<p>As part of the program I accompanied a visiting nurse on her rounds in East London. The nurse wore a uniform suit, maybe navy blue. I remember visiting mothers and young pre-school children. The families we visited lived in new high rise buildings that had replaced their older one- and maybe two-story homes. The mothers complained about the unpleasant elevators, the lack of private garden space, and the overall drabness of the new buildings. The visiting nurse was interested in how the neighborhood was changing, so she shared with me a lot about the history of the East End. What I found fascinating was the physical evidence of that history still there in 1968. There were still so many brick residences along narrow streets, the waterfront pubs, and simple shops, 19th century buildings that were slowly being replaced. In general Whitechapel did not draw tourists then, (there were no ‘Jack the Ripper’ tours), but there were many historic areas “off the beaten path” to explore. </p>\n\n<p>The last time I visited The London Hospital, (well, now the Royal London) about eight or ten years ago, I could not find Cavell Home. They were constructing a very tall bright blue high rise (incompatible architecturally) behind the old hospital. Things looked very different and I became disoriented. It was disturbing and sad to see the loss of the hospital complex that I had experienced long ago. I assume the old London buildings along Whitechapel Road are now abandoned on the interior; online photos show the wards, surgeries, and offices empty. I wonder what they are planning now. </p>\n\n<p>Yes, I wish I had taken more photographs during that time, especially in light of the drastic recent changes. With its human-scale Georgian brick buildings, The London Hospital in 1968 felt like a unique combination of stepping back in time while participating in modern medical care. I treasure my memories and very grateful for that experience nearly 50 years ago. </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>We used to go to Petticoat Lane on Sundays to shop. When we became teenagers we went more often and met friends and hung out there. We went to The Lane mostly to shop for food but also we looked at the stalls at the clothes, etc. My mother worked at a dress-manufacturing factory owned by my uncle, which was situated in the Lane. Two of my aunts also worked there and my much older cousin. The factory moved a couple of times, but it was always 'down the Lane'. I would visit there often as a kid and tried to help out. During the week the Lane was quieter without the Sunday crowds and I would prefer going then.There was a huge Jewish population around Whitechapel when I was growing up, so many of the food shops in the Lane and in Whitechapel catered to us. Around the early or mid 1960s the Indian population increased around Brick Lane, where they opened shops and restaurants.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-07-05",
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"title": "Booth House, Salvation Army Lifehouse, 153-175 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>From 1614 this was the site of a parish burial ground and almshouses (described elsewhere). The workhouse was replaced in 1860–2 by an imposing row of thirteen shophouses (later Nos 151–175). This four-storey speculation by John Hudson, an architect based on Leman Street, was with its Italianate stucco dressings an exceptionally unified development for Whitechapel Road.[^1] Only the western end survives, as 151 Whitechapel Road. </p>\n\n<p>The terrace was largely vacant and ruinous in 1947, having suffered war damage. Proposals for a Salvation Army hostel on the site were put forward in 1961, the adjacent site (Victoria Home, 177 Whitechapel Road) having long since been a Salvation Army hostel. H. & H. M. Lidbetter, the Army’s usual architects, prepared plans and the building was erected in 1965–7 by Walter Lawrence & Son Ltd, and opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1968 as Booth House Hostel, the Salvation Army’s first purpose-built hostel, named after its founder, William Booth, and said to be the largest hostel for men in London. The six-storey and basement building, with a four-storey rear wing, has a reinforced-concrete frame, originally articulated with brick-panel cladding. There were 252 cubicles, mostly single rooms, a few double, off spine corridors with communal washrooms/WCs. On the ground floor a canteen and lounge flanked the entrance foyer, with offices and the kitchen to the rear. The fourth-floor had dining, sitting, reading, TV and smoking rooms, with a sun lounge and roof garden on the rear wing.[^2] From early on there was a rehabilitation unit for drug addicts and alcoholics in the basement. In 1971, with most of the residents more or less permanent, accommodation for men remanded on bail was introduced into Booth House, principally to protect those not previously held in custody from others who had been. This initiative was sponsored by the Xenia Field Foundation as a social-welfare experiment to meet a ‘particular need for a bail hostel for young men who drifted into London, got into trouble of a not very serious kind, and had to be remanded in custody because there was nowhere else for them to go.’[^3] It helped lead to the sanction of public funding for bail hostels through the Criminal Justice Act of 1972. Alterations to the fourth floor of Booth House in 1973 formed Rawson Home, accommodation for about forty elderly residents.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>Booth House was thoroughly refurbished in 2000–2 for the Salvation Army Housing Association, Mansell PLC being the client and involving Fraser Brown MacKenna Architects. Interiors were converted to provide en-suite accommodation for 150 men, with shared kitchen/diners and tearooms on all the upper floors, the canteen continuing on the ground floor. The building was refaced with a steel-framed screen, supporting brick panels in a wholly new fenestration pattern, and the rear wing was extended and raised. The Salvation Army stopped using the term ‘hostel’, seeing it as carrying negative connotations, preferring Lifehouse. The hostel closed in 2018.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Salvation Army Archives, VH/1/1: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (hereafter THLHLA), Building Control files 15520–1: Goad map 1953</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Home Office Research Unit Report, Frances Simon and Sheena Wilson, ‘Field Wing Bail Hostel: The First Nine Months’, 1975, p.1, seen at Salvation Army Archives COS/1/8</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THLHLA, Building Control file 15520</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: THLHA, Building Control file 17959: <em>The War Cry</em>, 4 July 2015, p.13: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 12 June 2018</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"title": "3 and 5 Dock Street",
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"body": "<p>The pair of shophouses at 3 and 5 Dock Street went up in the 1860s for George Edward Rose of the Black Horse public house, then adjoining to the south. The architect was probably Frederick Robert Beeston, who had taken a lease of the plot in 1859, undertaking to build two houses before conveying the property to Rose. No. 3 was a baker’s with a basement bakehouse, No. 5 an outfitters. Frank William Lersch, baker, had No. 3 by 1910 and the pair in the 1930s and 40s. The Battle of Cable Street of 4 October 1936 is commemorated by a red Tower Hamlets Environment Trust façade plaque. A well-known photograph from that day shows police clearing the way for a car carrying Fascists while anti-Fascists blocked the top end of Dock Street. The Sailors’ Home acquired the building around 1943 for a redevelopment that never transpired, instead No. 5’s blocked shopfront was adorned by a bas-relief panel depicting a sailor, while bakery use continued into the 1970s. Estate agency is a twenty-first century arrival.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives, WORK6/143/5; WORK6/145/8; IR58/84823/4097–8: London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/EO/HFE/05/146: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P02641: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
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"properties": {
"b_number": "201",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "201 Whitechapel Road",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 3,
"search_str": "201 Whitechapel Road"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>William Stanborough (or Stanbrow, d.1694/5), a local citizen mason, took a 500-year manorial lease of a piece of waste ground here in 1681 and proceeded to develop this and other nearby sites. William Hufton, an aqua fortis or colour maker, was here in the late eighteenth century. He was succeeded in the early nineteenth century by George Ramsden, whose family continued the colour-making factory to the rear into the 1850s. That then became a rag warehouse until displacement by the railway in the 1880s. The front building was replaced in 1876 with the present four-bay front range and a back warehouse, built by Harris & Wardrop of Limehouse and first occupied by the Universal Bedstead and Bedding Company. From around 1900 the building housed Cohen & Sons, which firm, after a change of family name, became David Drage & Sons, household furnishers who expanded to Holborn and then to Oxford Street in 1930.[^1] The shop later sold menswear. Since about 2000 it has been Ranees, an Asian clothing retailer. The polychrome brick façade was enhanced by the removal of render in the 'High Street 2012' works, revealing ‘Rose House’ in a central panel between the upper storeys, and restoring the older ‘BEDDING’, ‘BEDSTEADS’, ‘FEATHERS’ and ‘FLOCKS’ in the tympana above the first-floor windows.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Transport for London Group Archives, LT002051/475 and 584: John Strype, <em>A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster</em>, vol. 4, 1720, p.45: London Metropolitan Archives, Land Tax returns; Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; District Surveyors Returns; SC/PZ/ST/02/066: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive, Building Control file 15505: Post Office Directories. </p>\n",
"created": "2017-11-17",
"last_edited": "2017-11-17"
}
]
}