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"id": 548,
"title": "The former Buck's Row School, 6 Durward Street",
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"body": "<p>George Torr, proprietor of a manure works to the north, gave the west end of the Buck’s Row–Winthrop Street wedge that he acquired in 1861 to the parish of Whitechapel as a gift for the building of a ragged school. This project was inspired by the example of the Rev. William Weldon Champneys who had launched several such schools in Whitechapel in preceding decades. Further, there had already been ad hoc use of a coach factory on the south side of Little North Street for educating the local poor. The ragged school was built in 1862, to designs by Snooke and Stock, Torr’s architects. Characterised by stepped gables, it comprised a boys’ schoolroom to the north and a cross-range for girls and infants to the south, to accommodate 500 children altogether.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Like other ragged schools, this was transferred from the parish to the School Board for London. In 1874–5 the East London Line sliced through to the east and in this densely built-up district the idea of expansion through a second school came to nothing. The Board decided instead to redevelop on the ragged-school site to a larger scale, to provide a school for 828. This went up in 1876–7 to designs by the Board’s architect E. R. Robson, with Atherton & Latta of Poplar as builders. It survives and is among the earliest of the Board’s schools still standing.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>This was a tightly confined site by the Board’s standards. The school had therefore to be unusually tall and compact, four storeys rather than the standard three. On a square plan, it was laid out with an open ground floor for a covered playground, one of the first examples of this arrangement among the Board’s schools. This was powerfully expressed as a basement of red-brick arches, rusticated with vermiculated stone bands. There was also a flat concrete and decoratively railed roof for additional outdoor space, this being more typical by this time. Double stone staircases in a service core to centre-east kept boys and girls apart. Infants were schooled on the first floor, boys on the second, girls on the third. Ample use of Portland stone dressings includes Walter Crane’s relief panels of vases of sunflowers. These do little to mitigate a markedly neo-Elizabethan parti that is also fortress-like, ‘austere to the point of severity’.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Buck’s Row School was found to be unsatisfactory and dangerous in 1910, and it closed in 1911. Its ground-floor arcades bricked in, it was adapted for use by Solomon Hanstater’s ships’ chandlery and there was short-lived linkage by a steel bridge to Schneiders & Son’s clothing factory to the north from 1919–22. Then in the mid-1930s there was a conversion for the Elfin Cabinet Works, for the making and storage of wireless cabinets. By 1946 there was coffee-mill use, then in the 1960s and 70s the building was a warehouse for Leonard Hamilton Ltd, basket importers. There followed a period of dereliction associated with shopping-centre blight. Tower Hamlets Council gained ownership and was on the brink of demolishing the building as unsafe in 1989–90.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The Spitalfields Trust stepped in to acquire the building in 1990 and saw to essential repairs. It was sold on to Ballymore Properties Ltd in 1995, the developer being concerned about blight on the Kempton Court speculation across the railway line. The former school, now called Trinity Hall, was converted in 1996–7. The Regeneration Practice, a division of First Architecture, oversaw the work with David Tyrer as job architect. Workshop use had been considered, but plans switched to flats, at first intending fourteen, increased to eighteen by the insertion of mezzanines. There are rooftop gardens, one communal, the other for a ‘penthouse’.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>East London Observer</em>, 22 March and 15 Nov 1862</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: School Board for London Minutes, 28 Oct 1874, 17 Feb 1875, 28 Feb 1876: <em>The Builder</em>, 25 March 1876, p.297: District Surveyors Returns</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Andrew Saint, 1988, in Historic England, London historians file, TH106</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: London County Council Minutes, 21 Feb 1911, p. 355: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: Goad map, 1953</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, pamphlets 022; Building Control file 17068: The Spitalfields Trust newsletter, 1990, pp. 1–2: http://www.thespitalfieldstrust.com/project/durward-street-school-london/</p>\n",
"created": "2018-01-03",
"last_edited": "2018-01-03"
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"id": 1154,
"title": "Goulston Square, Goulston Street and New Goulston Street in the century to 1880",
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"body": "<p>In 1796 E. P. Medows obtained a Private Act of Parliament to permit him to offer leases of up to ninety-nine years, not limited to twenty-one years as specified in his uncle’s will, to enable development of land and the replacement of ‘divers houses in a very ruinous state’ north of Goulston Square.[^1] This led to a radical change of the local topography around 1800. Former randomly built over garden ground had been opened up to be the mysterious ‘Blackguards Gambling Ground’. This was expunged by a new street running north from Goulston Square to Wentworth Street. Another, called Horse Shoe Street ran parallel to the west behind courts off Petticoat Lane. What had been Black Bell (Bull) Alley became Short Street (New Goulston Street since the 1840s). Medows intentions notwithstanding, development here continued to be of a poor standard. Goulston Square’s east side was encroached on in the 1840s to make it little more than a widening of a continuous if irregular and renumbered Goulston Street.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>Later occupants of Goulston Square, so called until 1860, included, briefly, the Jewish National Friendly Association for the Manufacture and Sale of Passover Bread, a subscription society for cheap bread established around 1838 and at 27 Goulston Square with offices and a bakery from 1841 to 1845 when the square’s east side was required for the building of public baths. In the 1870s a small <em>hevrah</em>, known variously as the Hebrath Menahem Abelim Nishmas Adam, or Menahem Abelim Nishmas Adam Chevra, met in Goulston Street; it had closed by 1881. A synagogue for a Polish congregation was announced as opening on Goulston Street in 1876, possibly on a site south of the baths. It was said to have a <em>mikveh</em> (ritual bath) and accommodation for more than 700, the ‘hall’ being used for meetings and weddings. Music and dancing were objected to by local residents and Nathan Adler, the Chief Rabbi, and were discontinued.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The former snuff house on the south-east corner of Goulston Square was in 1775 a warehouse held by John Fry, a Finsbury merchant. Around 1804 Fry built a substantial sugarhouse complex on the north side of newly formed Short (New Goulston) Street in partnership with William Osborne, who had previously refined sugar on the site with a Petticoat Lane baker, James Diack. The premises included a ‘very compleat’ sugarhouse, a manager’s house, counting house, yard, a five-stall stable, five houses, including three in Three Tun Court to the north, a ‘men’s room’ – a lodging house for single male workers, and a ‘very large plot … for building on’.[^4] The business failed and Fry was declared bankrupt in 1806. Peter Martineau purchased the establishment.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, LCF00361, <em>An Act for paving, etc</em></p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/PB/1/1796/36G3n151: The National Archives, PROB11/1715/338: London Metropolitan Archives, SC/PM/ST/01/002: Land Tax returns: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 17 Aug 1860, pp.620–1</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 25 Nov 1841, p.40; 6 Oct 1845, p.256; 27 Oct 1876, p.474; 24 Nov 1876, p.533; 1 Dec 1876, p.551; 22 Dec 1876, p.597; 17 March 1893, p.19; 31 March 1893, p.2: Vivian David Lipman, <em>Social History of the Jews in England, London, 1850–1950</em>, 1954, p.74: www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/EE_goulston/index.htm</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 16 July 1806, p.3: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 30 March 1807, p.4</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Land Tax returns: Bryan Mawer, sugar website: <em>The Times</em>, 18 Nov 1806, p.1: Old Bailey Online, t1806070262: Bryan Mawer, <em>Sugarbakers: From Sweat to Sweetness</em>, 2011, p. 63: George Dodd<em>, Days at the Factories</em>, 1843, pp.89–110</p>\n",
"created": "2020-11-12",
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"title": "United Standard House ",
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"body": "<p>Designed by J. Ockwell, an associate with R. Seifert & Partners. c.1960. </p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-19",
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"title": "Staff Accommodation",
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"body": "<p>In the eighteenth century, nurses were confined for their rest to tiny rooms in lobbies adjacent to the wards. This arrangement was customary in general hospitals and persisted at the London Hospital until the 1860s, with minor improvements. The ward lobbies in the east and west wing extensions of 1830–42 incorporated larger bedrooms, kitchens, washing rooms and bathrooms. At this time, attic bedrooms in the central block were assigned to assistant nurses, laundry maids and ‘watchers’, or night nurses. Bedrooms were also provided for the cook, the clerk and the surgeon’s assistant. Senior employees enjoyed a greater level of comfort, with separate apartments assigned to the house governor, the apothecary, the matron and the head nurse.[^103] </p>\n\n<p>By the mid nineteenth century, the provision of nurses’ accommodation was deficient owing to the swift expansion of the hospital and its rising population of resident staff. The 1841 census recorded a nursing staff of only 37, whereas the 1851 census calculated 57 nurses. By the 1860s, the provision of sleeping quarters was considered essential to preserving discipline and respectability among nurses, who were drawn predominantly from the working classes. For instance, the absence of dormitories was deemed to ‘lower the standard of the women who can be obtained for night duty’ and diminish their efficiency.[^104] The attics of the Alexandra Wing (1864–6) secured four communal dormitories for night nurses and household staff. Despite this addition, nurses were accustomed to ‘boxing and coxing’, or occupying beds at different hours between shifts. In contrast, the house governor lived in a three-storey maisonette with servants’ quarters and a private walled garden. By 1871, there were 52 nurses and 23 night nurses residing in the hospital, and other nurses living in the vicinity. Only a short time elapsed before plans for the Grocers’ Company’s Wing necessitated more than thirty additional nurses, prompting significant improvements to accommodate an expanded nursing staff of as many as 154. An extension to the east wing provided the first purpose-built residential home for the nursing staff, containing dormitories, dining rooms, and a suite of rooms allocated to the matron.[^105]</p>\n\n<p>This advance established the pattern for subsequent additions to the accommodation for nurses. Four purpose-built homes were erected on and adjacent to the hospital’s grounds between 1884 and 1918: Old Home (1884) and Alexandra Home (1895–6) were connected to the east wing, while the monumental Eva Lückes Home (1903–5) and Edith Cavell Home (1915–8) were located in Stepney Way and East Mount Street respectively, and accessed by covered bridges. This energetic building programme was propelled by reforms to the nursing system carried out under the guidance of Eva Lückes, the hospital’s matron from 1880 to her death in 1919. During her long incumbency, she introduced new measures to improve the training and education of nurses, along with their living and working conditions. Lückes started a course of lectures for probationers in 1881, and established a training school for aspiring probationers in 1895. The construction of purpose-built nurses’ homes was integral to Lückes’s efforts to raise the standard of nursing. The provision of individual bedrooms reflected her instinct that ‘separate apartments, however small, are absolutely essential, both on grounds of comfort and discipline’.[^106]</p>\n\n<p>The preservation of health, respectability and discipline among the nursing staff provided the main impetus to build residences on and adjoining the hospital’s grounds, and shaped their configuration. The number of nurses increased significantly under Lückes’s supervision. The 1881 census recorded a resident nursing staff of 87, while the 1911 census counted 446 nurses. Covered bridges extended between the tall blocks of the nurses’ quarter to ensure safety, convenience and protection from bad weather. Bedrooms allocated to sisters, or senior nurses, were interspersed between nurses’ dormitories to secure a degree of surveillance. Despite these authoritative measures, the nurses gained several amenities for their enjoyment and relaxation. Their homes contained a range of leisure spaces, including dining halls, sitting rooms and libraries. A public garden in Stepney Way was also provided for the diversion of nurses, who referred to it affectionately as ‘the Garden of Eden’. The addition of an indoor swimming bath at the east end of the garden in 1936–7 was another boon.[^107] </p>\n\n<p>The swift construction of the nurses’ homes produced a sprawling residential quarter drifting south from the main hospital building, marked by tall, austere blocks connected by covered bridges. Despite this advance, a large number of staff, including nurses, continued to reside in the main hospital building. After the completion of the building programme in 1906, staff accommodation was dispersed throughout the hospital. The degree of comfort continued to be dictated by seniority. Laundry maids slept in basement dormitories, while maternity students and night dispensers were allocated first-floor rooms. The attics of the front block, the east wing, and the Grocers’ Company’s Wing contained bedrooms for nurses, while trainee midwives and maternity staff had attic bedrooms in the Alexandra Wing. Cooks slept in the attics of the east wing, adjacent to the kitchens. Resident physicians and surgeons enjoyed the privilege of private apartments containing a bedroom and a sitting room. Receiving room officers acquired similar amenities by the rebuilding of 72–74 New Road in 1903–4, but were subsequently transferred to a resident doctors’ hostel on the south side of Mount Terrace. Despite the generous provision of hospital accommodation, many employees continued to reside in private lodgings. Gwynne House in Turner Street, a block of compact flats with a resident caretaker, was immediately popular among staff and students at its completion in 1938, and later acquired by the hospital as rented accommodation.[^108]</p>\n\n<p>After the Second World War, large swathes of the hospital’s estate were cleared as part of the redevelopment scheme produced by Bennett & Son. An extension to the Edith Cavell Home had been envisaged in the late 1930s, and the scheme was revived as Knutsford House (1957–9), a block of apartments rented to senior nurses. The ruins of the bombed-out Great Synagogue (previously the Wycliffe Chapel) on the east side of Philpot Street were cleared for John Harrison House (1962–4), a ten-storey tower blockwith 227 bedsitting rooms for nursing and administrative staff. Bennett & Son also produced plans to clear a large site for a cluster of nurses’ homes set in landscaped gardens. This scheme was partially executed with the construction of a block of flats and dormitories around Varden Street, opened formally in 1976. Plans for the new hospital precipitated the large-scale demolition of the first wave of nurses’ homes. Old Home, Alexandra Home, Eva Lückes Home, and Cavell Home were cleared, eradicating the concentration of nurses’ homes constructed between 1884 and 1918. Knutsford House was also demolished at this time, while John Harrison House has largely been converted to administrative offices. The group of 1970s nurses’ homes around Walden Street has survived, but the population of hospital employees has declined after the majority of the blocks was sold to a private developer.</p>\n\n<p>[^103]: Richardson, <em>English Hospitals</em>, p. 34.</p>\n\n<p>[^104]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/32, p. 30. </p>\n\n<p>[^105]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/35, p. 35; RLHLH/A/5/37, p. 11: 1841, 1851 and 1871 censuses. </p>\n\n<p>[^106]: Eva Lückes, cited by A. E. Clark-Kennedy, Vol. 2, p. 99: Amy Smith, ‘The Expansion and Remodelling of the London Hospital by Rowland Plumbe, 1884–1919’,<em>The London Journal </em>(online: <a href=\"https://doi.org/10/1080/03058034.2019.1583455\">https://doi.org/10/1080/03058034.2019.1583455</a>).</p>\n\n<p>[^107]: 1911 census. </p>\n\n<p>[^108]: RLHLH/A/5/49, p. 531: DSR.</p>\n",
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"title": "The first Davenant School",
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"body": "<p>An undemonstrative road-side building of 1818 and a showy but concealed rear addition of 1895 are all that is left standing in Whitechapel to represent a significant educational history. Tenuously sustained by a youth centre that perpetuated the name Davenant, this spans more than three centuries and a site that extended to Davenant Street and Old Montague Street.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/01/22/d-block-plan.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Block plan showing Davenant and related school buildings and principal nearby sites as in 1953 (buildings of 2016 in grey)</em></p>\n\n<p>Under Ralph Davenant, the Rector who oversaw the rebuilding of Whitechapel’s parish church in the 1670s, planning for a school for the poor children of Whitechapel began in earnest in 1680, possibly following up an idea conceived by Davenant’s predecessor and father-in-law John Johnson. Johnson’s daughters, Mary (Davenant’s wife) and Sarah Gullifer, endowed two of three shares of an estate in Essex (Sandon, near Great Baddow) to be overseen by a newly formed body of trustees to maintain the school. Davenant died in 1681 and his will directed that £200 he was owed go directly to the building of the school, and that his goods be sold after Mary’s death to raise money to see the plan through.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Mary Davenant lived on, marrying Thomas Buck who died two months later in 1684, and the trustees struggled at first to find a site. However, the easterly stretches of Whitechapel Road were comparatively open in the 1680s and the parish held a large plot on the north side for almshouses and a burial ground (see above). The easternmost part of this land, a frontage of 50ft, was given up for the school in 1686 and building work ensued. Endowments proved insufficient and in 1701 an anonymous benefactor gave £1000 to clothe as well as educate the children at the ‘School House of Whitechappel Town’s End’. In 1705 the Rev. Richard Welton invested this money in Thames-side land at East Tilbury.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The schools building of the 1680s was a brick range with a seven-bay front, a single full storey with pairs of hipped dormers in a hipped roof flanking a pedimental centrepiece, all set behind a forecourt garden and enclosing brick wall. The main room on the west side was for the teaching of forty boys, that on the east for thirty girls, above were living spaces for the master and mistress. A single central doorway gave on to an open passage through to a garden at the back, the schoolrooms evidently entered from the sides of this passage. An aedicular niche above the main entrance rising up to the open pediment is said to have stood empty until the late eighteenth century, awaiting a figure of Davenant for which funds never stretched. Samuel Hawkins, the school’s Treasurer, then acquired and saw to the painting of a scrapped wooden statue of a figure in clerical dress to make up the deficit. There were further benefactions and by the 1790s the premises, already enlarged westwards after 1767, had been extended at the back.[^3]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/11/davenant-school-wilkinson.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>The first Davenant School of the 1680s (from Robert Wilkinson's Londina Illustrata, 1819)</em></p>\n\n<p>In early 1806 the Trustees decided to double the number of children and a shed and ‘dust-bin’ behind the school were converted to form an additional schoolroom. Anticipating the increased attendance, one of the Trustees, William Davis (1767–1854), the co-proprietor of a sugarhouse on Rupert Street who was to go on to found the Gower’s Walk ‘school of industry’ in 1807–8, saw to it that the Rev. Andrew Bell was invited to Whitechapel to introduce his monitorial (Madras) system of education which had as yet made limited impact. Bell attended the school daily in September 1806 and with Davis’s fervent support and the employment of a trained assistant, Louis Warren, age 13, and then a schoolmaster (a Mr Gover), both from Bell’s base in Swanage, they successfully established a showpiece in Whitechapel for wider evangelisation of the benefits of Bell’s monitorial system. This gained influential Anglican support and led in late 1811 to the foundation of the National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church in England and Wales. This episode has caused the Davenant School to be hailed as the ‘cradle of the “National” schools of England’.[^4]<br>\n </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives (hereafter TNA), PROB11/365/312: London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), A/DAV/01/013, No. 37: Roland Reynolds,<em> The History of the Davenant Foundation Grammar School</em>, 1966, pp.6–7</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, A/DAV/01/002–6; DL/A/A/021/MS09532/001, f. 8v; P93/MRY1/091, pp.206,312: <em>Victoria County History Middlesex</em>, vol. 1, 1969, pp. 293–4: Reynolds, pp.12–14</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Robert Wilkinson, <em>Londina Illustrata</em>, vol. 1, 1819, pp. 139–40: LMA, Collage 22182: Reynolds, pp.18,29: Richard Horwood's map, 1813</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: LMA, P93/MRY1/090; Wilkinson, <em>loc. cit.</em>, p. 140: <em>Annual Report of the National Society etc</em>, 1813, pp. 39–40: VCH, <em>loc. cit.</em>: Charles Cuthbert Southey, <em>The Life of the Rev. Andrew Bell</em>, vol. 2, 1844, pp. 163–175: Bryan Mawer's sugar industry website for William Davis: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em> for Andrew Bell: Reynolds, pp. 27–35</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-24",
"last_edited": "2021-09-14"
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{
"id": 432,
"title": "105-113 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>105–113 Whitechapel Road are three-storey and garret two-bay shophouses that have origins of about 1816–18, probably as a development by James Schooling, an ironmonger who had a stove and range factory to the rear. Among early tenants plying quotidian shop use, Isaac Anderton, a grocer, was a stalwart. He occupied No. 105 up to around 1840, then moved to No. 117 where he continued into the 1850s, identified as a tea-dealer. There was extensive rebuilding in 1921–3, by James Jennings & Son, local builders. Nos 109–111, the premises of Mrs Fanny Woolfe, photographer, in the early twentieth century, gained a stylish shopfront for Dolcis Shoes in 1935. The white rendering of the façades was an alteration of the 1970s when the properties were adapted for wholesale clothing. Nos 107–115 were until Aytan’s clothing factory, reduced at the time of writing (2017) to No. 115, Nos 107–109 housing Criminal Damage, ‘East London streetwear since 1991’. Into the 1970s there was an open carriageway through to No. 113 which was a yard and workshop to the rear. Edward Stubbs, a coach and harness maker, was here in the early nineteenth century. Charles James Bone, a cheesemonger who had been at No. 107 since the 1850s, had these stables and warehouses rebuilt in 1900 as a two-storey range. They passed to H. Lotery & Co. who in 1922 raised the building. In the 1950s it was taken for an extension of Mornessa Ltd’s mantle factory and warehouse further north.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; M/93/159/1; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/473/933469: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 13774; photographs</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-02",
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{
"id": 520,
"title": "Juber Hussain remembers living in Davenant House in the 1990s",
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"body": "<p>Juber Hussain spent some of his childhood living in Davenant House in the 1990s, he remembers some of his family's daily struggles,</p>\n\n<p>\"[In] Davenant House, [Old] Montague Street, there'd be prostitutes sleeping on our door. We would wake up to go to school and we had like this black railing that we had to first open, and you couldn't open it because someone was sleeping there. There got to be a drunkard or a prostitute sleeping there, and it was very awkward. Sometimes, my mum would push the gate so hard to open it while they're still sleeping and then they’d pee and the pee would just trickle, and my mum would [pour] hot water in the mess, and every morning she'd be washing. She hated it. </p>\n\n<p>There was a house above us that was a crack house. Prostitutes, drug, gambling. [They were] Bengali, Asian. And that was number 11. We were No. 1, No. 11 was on the top, and they had the balcony access to the roof and they'd do everything on the roof, and that's our roof, basically. Even with all the complaints, nothing happened.\"</p>\n\n<p>Juber Hussain was interviewed by Shahed Saleem at the East London Mosque on 01.04.16</p>\n",
"created": "2017-11-29",
"last_edited": "2017-11-29"
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{
"id": 511,
"title": "261–267 Whitechapel Road and Woods Buildings",
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"body": "<p>The two pairs of shophouses of 1767–72 here are the oldest surviving buildings on the north side of Whitechapel Road east of Vallance Road. While not identical and separated by a straight joint, the group is homogenous and has common origins with a development to the rear, Woods Buildings, which was a court of eighteen smaller houses, entered from an arch that survives to east of centre under No. 265.In 1767 Samuel Ireland (c.1706–1786), a Spitalfields bricklayer and developer who had family connections to the Grave Maurice pub to the east, took a 99-year manorial lease of the whole site back to Ducking Pond Row (Winthrop Street). This was forward dated to 1772, implying a generous period for carrying out development. Ireland was building nearby in Mile End New Town around this time in partnership with Robert Clavering, a Spitalfields carpenter. The three-storey buildings are standard speculative development of their date, with flat stock-brick fronts, now much restored. Gambrel attics in M roofs are original and there were two-room rear-staircase plans with corner fireplaces in the back rooms. The Woods Buildings houses were much humbler, one room each on plan, with frontages of about 13ft and depths of about 10ft. The identity of Wood remains unknown. Four houses on Ducking Pond Row were also replaced.[^1]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/03/20/261-267-plan.jpg\" style=\"\"><em>261-267 Whitechapel Road and Woods Buildings, plan at ground-floor level, reconstructed as built in 1767–72</em></p>\n\n<p>A John Dexter was at No. 263 by the 1780s and Richard Nelme, an oil and colourman, at No. 261 by 1800. By 1827 all four houses were seemingly in the hands of John Creed Dexter, a silversmith and pawnbroker. Around 1840 Thomas Dexter replaced the two houses behind Nos 261–263 at the south end of Woods Buildings with a large three-storey, basement and attic warehouse. Surprisingly given its site, this had a pilastered arcade to its front. After John Creed Dexter’s death in 1842, Robert Upsall, another pawnbroker, took No. 263 and then No. 261. In 1866 John Swingler Upsall re-unified ownership of the holding with Nos 265 and 267. That pair had been adapted to be a tobacco and snuff factory, perhaps by William Heudebourck around 1810. This was later run by Thomas and George Sapsworth, then John Roberts & Co. There was an engine room and a warehouse behind the shops and the two southernmost houses on the east side of Woods Buildings had been converted to be a warehouse, demolished by 1890. The remaining fourteen Woods Buildings houses were cleared for the railway line in the early 1880s. The shops remained paired and other pawnbrokers followed at Nos 261–263; Arthur Hone had begun a long family tenure by 1890. At Nos 265–267 upholsterers were followed by tea merchants.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>After 1900 Nos 265–267 became refreshment rooms, first Lockharts Ltd and then The Creamery under Lando’s Hotel, run by Stewart & Wight Ltd. In 1926 this firm redeveloped the site behind No. 265 for an extension to accommodate around 110 diners overall, employing William Allison as architect and Garner Brothers as builders. Their two-storey rear addition was reduced in height in 1973.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The front and back walls of Nos 265–267 were rebuilt in 1949 and 1951, and stucco architraves of the nineteenth century across the whole group were removed in the 1950s. The two upper storeys of the warehouse behind No. 263 were taken down in 1978 for A. J. Hone & Co., watchmakers and jewellers; the lower two storeys survive, used by market stallholders for storage. By 1995 Dallas Jeans, owned by Jaswant Singh Dhanoa of 11 Vallance Road, held Nos 261–263. Extensive repair and rebuilding works that included the removal of staircases were carried out in 1999. Nos 265–267 were refurbished and converted for M. Ali via Simon Hands & Associates, surveyors, in 2007–8, to make six flats. The original staircases were apparently retained, above the ground floor which was converted to ‘small market type units’ for what was then the Bombay Saree House and Bombay Jeweller. Render and paint were removed from the fronts and the plat band at Nos 261–263 was lost in the High Street 2012 works. A large iron lamp bracket has been retained.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MDR/1767/4/80; 1768/3/156–9: Transport for London Group Archives (TfLGA), LT002009/448: <em>Survey of London</em>, vol. 27: <em>Spitalfields</em>, 1957, passim.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: TfLGA, LT002009/448: LMA, Land Tax returns: Tower Hamlets Commissioners for Sewers ratebooks: <em>London Chronicle</em>, 15–18 April 1786: Post Office Directories (POD): Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/BDH/3/2; P/GRN/1/9/4</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: THLHLA, Building Control file 15530: LMA, District Surveyors Returns: TfLGA, LT001611/009: POD: Ordnance Survey maps: Goad insurance maps</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THLHLA, Building Control files 15529–30, 18189, 18709, 18712, 85566, 86954: TfLGA, LT000586/355</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2017-11-20",
"last_edited": "2018-03-20"
},
{
"id": 523,
"title": "293-297 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>This trio of four-storey properties was, despite its heterogeneity, possibly all built around 1840, perhaps in part at least by John Naylor Topping, a tea-dealer, who leased No. 295 to John Rose, another tea-dealer, in 1844. William Grellier, as District Surveyor, had directed rebuilding in 1839 on account of thin party walls. No. 295 appears comparatively little altered from that time. No. 293 was restored, possibly refronted, in 1881 after fire damage, Merritt & Ashby being the Spencer Phillips estate’s builders. Thereafter Raymond Klapper, confectioner, moved in and set up a Post Office. The rendered front of No. 297 disguises the lowering of the heads of the upper-storey windows, undertaken since 1975. George Milward ran the Railway Coffee Tavern here from 1886 up to the First World War. Appleby & Matty, dressmakers and milliners, were at No. 297 in the 1920s. The backs were truncated and refaced in 1899–1900 for railway works.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, E/PHI/416,418; MR/B/C/1839/013–14: Transport for London Group Archives, LT000655/014; LT001611/041,048: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2017-11-30",
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{
"id": 637,
"title": "New Road's formation and early land use",
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"body": "<p>New Road was formed in 1754–6 in close connection with the London Hospital’s move to the south side of Whitechapel Road in 1752–7. Slightly earlier than the better-known New Road of 1756–7 (now Marylebone Road and Euston Road), it shared with its bigger north-westerly sister the attribute of being a bypass to built-up districts. More particularly, it made eastern Whitechapel (heretofore ‘town’s end’) more accessible from riverside districts, linking what are now Cable Street and The Highway in the south to Whitechapel Road across entirely open fields. It more or less followed the line of Civil War defences, though this might be little more than coincidence. The road was enabled by an Act of Parliament and overseen by a body of trustees led by prominent commercial men from riverside districts (Jonathan Eade, a Wapping ship-chandler, John Shakespear, a Shadwell ropemaker, Joseph Curtis, a Wapping sea-biscuit maker, Hugh Roberts, a St George-in-the-East brewer, and William Camden, a Wapping ship-owner and slave-trader), some among them hospital governors. For these people good access to the hospital presumably mattered not just for themselves and their families, but also for their workforces.</p>\n\n<p>New Road’s frontages remained largely undeveloped for more than thirty years. Only the road’s northernmost end lies in Whitechapel parish. The connections formed there were first exploited for industrial use in the shape of carriage-making, present by the 1770s. Houses followed in the 1790s, but industry persisted and transformed, turning predominantly to clothing trades in the early twentieth century.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In planning the road in January 1754 the hospital’s governors and the road’s trustees concurred that it should lie as far west as possible on ground pertaining to the hospital. Its north end therefore abutted west to the built-up estate that since 1737 had been owned by John Turner, a carpenter–builder (see Nos 109 to 133). A ditch or sewer running east–west divided this landholding from the hospital’s. By 1774 John Kincey had a wheelwright’s yard and associated buildings on the hospital’s (south) side of this ditch on the west side of New Road. To this holding Kincey added an existing house (previously Richard Bishop’s) and in 1775 built a double-fronted house on the site of 107 New Road with a new 65-year lease. In 1778 he extended his one-and-a-half acre holding north on Turner’s land to Whitechapel Road and the corner for carriage or coach-making. Kincey further enlarged his premises southwards in 1789 to the then intended Charlotte (Fieldgate) Street corner with the New Road frontage and the sites of what later became 101–109 Fieldgate Street, promising new buildings for 99-year leases from the hospital. Kincey carried on to about 1830 on much of this extensive site on and behind New Road between Whitechapel Road and Fieldgate Street.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>A shophouse at the Whitechapel Road corner was tenanted by Thomas Amey by 1774. He was perhaps responsible in the 1790s for putting up a one-room deep house at 129–131 New Road, occupied by his widow, Sarah Amey, up to about 1818. This survives in much altered and partial form. Further south, Kincey gave up the sites of Nos 109–119 in the 1790s for the building of two houses, further much-altered survivals at Nos 109 and 111, with a large warehouse to the north. In the first years of the nineteenth century Andrew Richards, a stonemason, occupied this with the larger house at No. 111 (originally 2 New Road). Thomas Ramplee had the smaller house at No. 109 with a cooperage to the rear. Thomas Turner, another stonemason, was based on the opposite side of New Road at its north end in the 1820s and 30s.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Derek Morris and Ken Cozens, <em>London's Sailortown 1600–1800</em>, 2014, p. 19: Derek Morris, <em>Whitechapel, 1600–1800</em>, 2011, p. 53:<em>An Account of the Rise, Progress and State of the London Hospital</em>, 1775: Royal London Hospital Library and Archive, RLHLH/S/10/1: William Owen, ‘The Ichnography of the Cities of London and Westminster and the Borough of Southwark’, 1757</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Royal London Hospital Library and Archive, RLHLH/S/10/1: House Committee Minutes, 24 Jan, 22 May and 12 June 1754, pp. 284,326,335; 1 Dec 1756, p. 232; 9 March 1757, p. 257; 4 and 11 Jan. 1774, pp. 130–1; 28 Feb. and 14 March 1775, pp. 214,217; 24 Nov 1789, p. 87: RLHLH/F/10/3: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks (THCS)</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, Land Tax returns; THCS: The National Archives, C13/2777/49: Richard Horwood's maps, 1799 and 1813: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-09",
"last_edited": "2018-05-10"
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"body": "<p>This was the site of John Kincey’s double-fronted house of 1775, on a setback building line that was followed at Nos 109 and 111. His carriage-building and wheelwright’s workshops and yards were to the rear and north. William and John Seaborne, wheelwrights, followed Kincey from 1831 into the 1890s. They were succeeded by Bonallack & Co., carriage or van builders, who finished up here in the 1920s as motorcar body builders.[^1] The site was redeveloped in 1929–30 for M. Myers Levy as a four-storey, lightly Art Deco (Moderne) steel-framed clothing factory of lettable workshops with a three-storey block to the rear for a garage below additional lettable units, to provide eleven workshops in total. The first scheme did not include the garage, but the site’s long-standing vehicular links were perpetuated by the addition of No. 101 in 1930 for an entrance in a full-height rendered bay that looks like the motor-age afterthought that it was. The architect was Hume Victor Kerr, of Arbour Square, Stepney, and Lincoln’s Inn, the builders the Pitcher Construction Co. Ltd. This was Kerr’s first work on the London Hospital estate; a number of others followed. Levy intended to call the development New Buildings then Newley House, before settling on Service House, comprehending New Service Garage. Simmonds & Landsman had silks and woollens counters in one of four shop units. Alongside was Lewis Mendelbaum’s dining rooms. The garage was extended to 99 New Road and 109 Fieldgate Street in 1955 for E. Levy following war damage, to plans by Arthur G. Porri & Parners, with S. Wiener of Bow as builder. became a base for taxis and closed around 1970. Clothing factory use continued and in the 1980s Shiv Fashions had the premises, renamed Shiv House.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Owned by Levy International Ltd, registered in the British Virgin Islands, the building fell empty and into dereliction. Refurbishment in 2015–18 by CMT Design and Construction, with Synthesis Architecture, formed New Road Hotel. This involved the addition of an attic storey as well as the raising of the rear block for premises with seventy-three bedrooms.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks: Post Office Directories (POD): The National Archives, IR58/84797/1497</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control files 41179–81: Ordnance Survey maps: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Private Eye, overseas owners’ database: Tower Hamlets planning applications online,</p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-09",
"last_edited": "2018-05-10"
},
{
"id": 457,
"title": "187 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>William Rowland was a market gardener in Whitechapel by 1637 when, age 35, he married Frances Roberts of the parish. In 1639 Rowland took a thirty-year lease (dated from 1642) of a part of a ‘great garden’ immediately east of the parish burial ground. This manorial waste ran along Whitechapel Road, with frontages corresponding to Nos 181–195 and 1–13 Vallance Road. Rowland enlarged his holding to the west, north of the burial ground, on a firmer basis and in 1643 endowed a cottage, barn and three acres adjoining the burial ground to the benefit of Whitechapel’s poor, leasing it back from the parish for 99 years. In 1654, when Rowland proclaimed himself a citizen clothworker, he further enlarged his walled garden north to the present line of Old Montague Street on land outside Whitechapel parish on the Halifax estate in a transaction with George and Sidney Mountague. By now there were four houses on the frontage corresponding to 181–187 Whitechapel Road, that to the west had been Rowland’s own and was up by 1644, the others had been occupied by George Ellyott, widow Bromefield and, at No. 187, William Daniel (a William Daniel was buried in Whitechapel in August 1640, a William Daniell in Stepney in August 1647). In 1666 the garden property was demised to Rowland’s son-in-law Robert Wareing, a citizen saddler, but Rowland remained resident, alongside William Gunn, also a gardener, in 1670. Rowland acquired freehold possession of the property that had not gone to the parish in 1672, but in 1674–5 paid tax for just a two-hearth dwelling.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Rowland’s house on the site that became No. 181 was occupied by Nicholas Gale in 1707, by when there were nine small houses eastwards of the earlier group on the sites of Nos 189–195. Rowland’s descendants auctioned off his estate in 1734. The large market-garden holding, everything behind Whitechapel Road and the burial ground on the block now bounded by Davenant Street, Old Montague Street and Vallance Road, was depicted in the 1740s as walled round and planted as an orchard. Edward Wildman acquired land to the rear of No. 187 in 1765 and undertook to rebuild three of the roadside houses further east alongside two that Richard Tillyer Blunt, a citizen distiller and Alderman, had rebuilt earlier in the decade. In 1766 the estate was sold to Charles Digby the Elder, a Wapping ship-chandler, for £2,400. The parish leased the Mile End New Town section in 1805. Much of the rest was acquired by the sculptor John Bacon the younger by the 1830s, passing to his sons John and Thomas, both clergymen, after his death in 1859.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The former garden ground behind the houses was divided up in the mid 1820s as, from west to east: a workhouse garden that became a stone yard by the 1840s and then through the Whitechapel District Board of Works ‘a receptacle for the sweepings of the roads’,[^3] with a builder’s (later stable) yard immediately to its south; a long thin livery yard; and the Pavilion Theatre. The livery yard, laid out by William Hyland and James Parish for Samuel Bartram, coach-master, was known by the 1840s as Pavilion Stables, later as Pavilion Yard, which was also applied to the former stone yard. The livery yard was long held by George Young and continued into the 1890s. Motor garage use had come in by the 1920s, with lock-up garages where the stone yard had been from 1933. Much of the area was again a builders’ yard from 1939. Northern parts were taken for the Davenant Street housing development in the 1970s. The remaining southern part of the yard is used as a car park.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The three-bay and three-storey house standing at 187 Whitechapel Road could still in significant measure be that of about 1642 built by William Rowland and first occupied by William Daniel. It is probably also identifiable as the property occupied by Henry Carey in 1674–5 when it was assessed as having five hearths. There have been many alterations, but there is no evidence of any thoroughgoing rebuilding. It is possible that the end of Rowland’s thirty-year lease and his acquisition of freehold tenure in 1672 prompted a rebuilding, but no documentation for that has been found. The broad front, window-to-wall proportions, steeply pitched hipped-roof and gabled back wall are consistent with a seventeenth-century date, even one as surprisingly early as the 1640s.</p>\n\n<p>Thomas Whitehead was in occupation in 1707. By 1761 Edward Wildman, a pump maker, had the house. John Wildman succeeded, making water closets as well as pumps here up to about 1815, and continuing with the yard to the rear in the 1820s. There was access to this yard under the east side of the house by 1812, perhaps earlier. John Cox, a hatter took a short lease of what had become a shophouse in 1830 and then in 1840 the premises (ground floor at least) became coffee rooms, possibly reflecting the arrival of the Pavilion Theatre. A plan from 1840 shows the house laid out with a newel staircase between the two party-wall chimneystacks on its west side, perhaps top-lit by a narrow western aperture. Thereafter there was intermittent use as the Pavilion Wine Stores. Stucco treatment of the façade with loud window architraves and a bracketed cornice, and of the panelled east face of the yard passage, looks Victorian, as does the gabled rear elevation, rebuilt in stock brick. A new shopfront was installed in 1912 and in 1916 the property was acquired by the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel, extending its premises from No. 189 for a bookshop under classroom and dwelling spaces. An older single-storey back wing (there by 1840) was in use as a surgery by the 1940s. These uses continued up to about 1980. In 2003 there was thoroughgoing internal reconstruction and further rear extension above the back wing in a flat conversion of the upper storeys. The shop is now a branch of the Money Shop.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (hereafter THLHLA), P/RIV/1/15/1/1–2; P/RIV/1/15/2/1–2; P/RIV/1/15/3/2–3; P/RIV/1/15/4/1: TNA, E179/143/370, rot.33v: Ancestry: Roland Reynolds, <em>The History of the Davenant Foundation Grammar School</em>, 1966, p. 59: Morden & Lea map, 1700</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: THLHLA, P/RIV/1/15/4/2,5,8,12; P/RIV/1/15/7–9: London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), E/BN/085,131–72; MDR 1807/2/109: John Rocque's map, 1746: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em></p>\n\n<p>[^3]: The National Archives, ED27/3238</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: LMA, Land Tax returns; Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; E/BN/130,132,137,146–9; A/DAV/01/018; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/505/1051583; 469/911926; GLC/AR/BR/07/0439; Collage 121908; 22182: District Surveyors Returns: THLHLA, P25891; P/RIV/1/15/11–17; P/MIS/127; Building Control file 15500: Richard Horwood's map, 1813: Post Office Directories: Goad insurance map, 1953</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: THLHLA, P/RIV/1/15/4/2,8: LMA, E/BN/085; E/BN/150–1; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/503/1023120; Land Tax returns; Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: The National Archives, E179/143/370, rot.33v; IR58/84806/2309: David Baron, <em>David Baron and the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel</em>, 1943, pp. 25,28: Goad insurance map, 1953: Tower Hamlets planning applications</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-25",
"last_edited": "2018-11-16"
},
{
"id": 433,
"title": "115-121 Whitechapel Road",
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"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>Francis Newham, a grocer, took occupation of the building on the site of No. 121 in the 1750s. He replaced Cross Key Alley to the rear with Newham Rents, four cottages at the back that were accessible via a passage between Nos 117 and 119. They had been cleared by 1873. The main-road properties appear to have been rebuilt in 1819–20, Newham having died in 1807 and divided the ownership among relatives. The first occupant at No. 121 in the 1820s was Francis Heaverman, a corn chandler, who was followed by butchers. There was stucco embellishment of the façade at Nos 119–121 but that pair was refronted in plain brick in the 1940s. No. 115 was partially rebuilt in 1931–2, and No. 117 wholly rebuilt in 1952 after a fire, W. S. Sharpin & Co. Ltd being the builders for a Mr Genis. Its brickwork was rendered, windows replaced and dormers added in 1974–5 for A. Dakri & Co. Ltd (Iqbal Ahmed and Osman Ahmed Dakri). From 2005 'Weekly Bangladesh', a Bengali-language newspaper was published at No. 117, which premises continue as East London Book Shop and Islamic Clothes.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1] London Metropolitan Archives, Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/487/970769: The National Archives, PROB11/1459/77: District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 15942; P07316; LCP00017 </p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-02",
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},
{
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"title": "Aldgate Police Section House, 21A Commercial Street",
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"body": "<p>Aldgate Police section house was erected on the site of the Commercial Street Baptist Chapel in 1910-11 to the designs of the Metropolitan Police Architect, J. Dixon Butler. [^1] It was of unusually spartan design, two shallow parallel six-storey blocks joined at the south end by a curve-ended staircase block. It survived war damage, and a timber clubroom and gym were added on the adjoining bomb site to the south.[^2] The section house closed in the autumn of 1964 and was demolished c.1966 for the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1454/detail/#denning-point-and-the-new-holland-estate\">New Holland estate</a>. </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Building News</em> (<em>BN</em>), 28 Oct 1910, p. xl: The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84840/5721</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Goad insurance plans: information Reg Denny, ex Metropolitan Police: ‘<a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=2pu4G4lRjBs\">Scenes around Toynbee hall’</a>, Associated Press Archive film, 1964</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-20",
"last_edited": "2018-12-21"
},
{
"id": 436,
"title": "123 and 125 Whitechapel Road",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>This is the earliest building in this stretch of Whitechapel Road with early eighteenth-century origins. No. 123, three bays wide, fronted a tallow factory. Allen Parsons, a tallow chandler, was here by 1740, followed by another Allen Parsons and William Parsons, brothers and hay salesmen as well as tallow chandlers, then from 1808 into the 1870s by Henry Mitchell & Son, tallow chandlers or melters. The same business, including candle making, continued in other hands into the 1890s. In 1906 the whole front (123–125) was rebuilt to the design of J. R. Moore-Smith, architect, with A. Webb as builder. J. Freed & Son raised the back workshop in 1925. The façade was flattened and rendered in 1974, and the interior comprehensively altered in 2002–3 in a conversion for Ram Gopal of Alpine Fashions Ltd by Reflex Design Consultants Ltd (John A. Smith) of Upminster, to form six flats above shops. Twin-newel staircases were removed.[^1[]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Land Tax returns: Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks: District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive, Building Control files 15937; 19158: London County Council Minutes, 13 Nov 1894, p.1154: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-07",
"last_edited": "2017-08-07"
},
{
"id": 639,
"title": "93 New Road",
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"body": "<p>Of 1923–4, red brick and four storeys, so taller than most of the 1790s houses to its south, this shophouse was put up by George Barker for William A. Barker, builders based almost opposite at 48–50 New Road. The shop was first occupied by Leonard N. Sherer, wholesale furrier, and Joseph Harris Beckman, woollen merchant.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-09",
"last_edited": "2018-05-09"
},
{
"id": 628,
"title": "Vine Court",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>Vine Court was formed around 1700 on land then or soon after held by Thomas Turner, a house carpenter, and was originally known as Walnut Tree Street. Houses included a group called Dupaz’s Buildings, named for Solomon de Paz, a Sephardic Jewish merchant. The court as a whole comprehended about twenty small houses by 1770.[^1] Its south side was largely lined with brick-built houses by 1817. On the north side timber outbuildings were gradually redeveloped and enlarged to serve Whitechapel Road premises. A scheme in 1867 for redevelopment of the west end of the court with ‘new streets’ came to nothing. The old two- and three-storey houses were generally in poor repair by 1910 and thirty years later there was extensive bomb damage. Little survives.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Nos 11–14<strong> </strong>to the south-west are two three-storey grey-brick clad houses built in 2016–17 to plans by Parker Clark, architects, for Ismail Parekh and Ahmed Bhayat.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives (TNA), C13/2777/49; C107/175; PROB11/799/423: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax returns; Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: TNA, C13/2777/49; IR58/84803/2001–20: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 27 Sept. 1867, p. 1133</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: TNA, C13/2777/49: LMA, District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: Goad maps: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 41742: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-24",
"last_edited": "2018-04-24"
},
{
"id": 524,
"title": "303-317 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>Earlier buildings on this site were varied and repeatedly rebuilt. In 1670 John East, a citizen blacksmith, took a 500-year manorial lease of a 100ft frontage of waste corresponding to Nos 307–317. There was a house on the site of No. 305 from about 1675 when a comparable lease was granted. The Queen’s Head on the Ducking Pond Lane (Brady Street) corner (No. 317) was so named by 1730, when William Goudge was the landlord and the vicinity of the Ducking Pond was thickly built up. It was rebuilt after a fire in 1781 and sometimes known as the Queen Elizabeth’s Head. Another pub on the site of No. 307 was known as the Angel and Crown, then the City of Norwich, then the Little Driver, all before adaptation by 1840 to be a private house and shop.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The present buildings at 303–317 Whitechapel Road are a single development of 1904 carried out for the Whitechapel & Bow Railway Company which had acquired the earlier properties along this front to extend the District Line eastwards from Whitechapel, taking a route that cut under and left very shallow development sites at Nos 305–315. Henry L. Florence was the railway’s architect through the design stages. After his retirement his successor, Howard Chatfeild Clarke, saw the project through with Ford & Walton Ltd as builders. There are red-brick elevations to dwellings over the two shop units to the west, with an arcade continuing across five shallow lock-up shops on what is in effect a bridge, with scrolled upstands above the parapet. At No. 317 on the corner the front part of the nineteenth-century Queen’s Head public house was replaced, in brown brick with stone dressings and at a larger scale than its predecessor. The three-bay section to the rear facing Brady Street survived from a two-shop redevelopment of 1886, Hearle and Son the builders. The pub had closed by 1950. Solomon Bressloff & Son, boot dealers, were at No. 303 from the 1940s to the 1980s – ‘Bressloff & Son Ltd’ survives on the arch spandrels.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Transport for London Group Archives, LT002051/1077, 2407: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MR/LV/05/026: <em>Chronicle and London Advertiser</em>, 3 Oct 1781</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, District Surveyors Returns; GLC/AR/BR/22/024605: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2017-11-30",
"last_edited": "2017-11-30"
},
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"id": 458,
"title": "189 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>An earlier house on this site was probably rebuilt as a roomy shop around 1827–8 for Hugh McDevitt and George Moffett, linen drapers. The drapers’ premises became a carpet and furniture warehouse in the second half of the nineteenth century, winding up as the Bürgerliches Casino Club in 1899.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The present tall four-storey brown-brick-faced building was erected as a mission hall in 1900 for the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel, which had been founded by the Rev. David Baron and Charles Andrew Schönberger in 1893. Baron, Polish born, converted from Judaism to Christianity as a young immigrant in Hull and worked there with the Mildmay Mission to the Jews. As a missionary he was a prolific writer. The older Schönberger was Hungarian and already a convert when he came to London in 1891. Their joint project in the promulgation of unsectarian Protestantism operated from makeshift premises at first. In 1897 Lord Blantyre gave them financial backing for the establishment of a permanent home. Richard Cope Morgan, editor of 'The Christian', was also involved. Their architect was William Alfred Pite, older brother of Arthur Beresford Pite and principally a hospital architect. The builders were E. Lawrance & Sons. The pilastered ‘shopfront’ was topped by a stylishly proportioned inscription, in English and Hebrew. The institute had a ground-floor mission room for bible readings and a first-floor assembly room, with a classroom and dwelling rooms above. There was also a library/reading room and the premises were used for printing mission literature. The mission departed around 1980, its larger site having been compulsorily purchased by the Greater London Council for the Davenant Street Development. After a period being boarded up, the Academy Drama School, founded by Tim Reynolds and incorporating the Andrew Sketchley Theatre, was here from about 1988 to 2007. The upper storeys were converted (without planning permission) to five flats in 2008, by Charterhouse Design and Build Ltd for S. S. Gill and P. S. Gill. The ground floor is in use for clothing wholesaling.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, E/BN/152–9; Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London County Council Minutes, 6 March and 26 June 1900, pp. 321,858: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/RIV/1/15/19; BC files 15464,15500: District Surveyors Returns: The National Archives, IR58/84806/2310: David Baron, <em>David Baron and the Hebrew Christian Testimony to Israel</em>, 1943: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-25",
"last_edited": "2018-01-22"
},
{
"id": 630,
"title": "The Whitechapel Mission, 212 Whitechapel Road",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
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"b_number": "208-212",
"b_name": "Whitechapel Mission",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "Whitechapel Mission",
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"body": "<p>The island site at the easternmost end of Whitechapel parish on the south side of Whitechapel Road, otherwise bounded by Cavell Street (formerly Raven Row and South Street), Raven Row (formerly Mile End Green) and Maples Place (formerly Cannon Place), has since 1906 housed the Whitechapel Mission, a Methodist institution dedicated to aiding East London’s homeless, hungry and vulnerable. Its buildings of 1969–71 replaced a chapel of 1866.</p>\n\n<p>Already an island and modestly built on by the 1740s, this site was then part of the hamlet known as Mile End Green. Francis Nettlefold, a coal meter (measurer), who occupied the west part of this site from the 1780s to the 1820s, gained the freehold. The Raven Row (Cavell Street) frontage was built up with small houses in the first years of the nineteenth century by when three shophouses faced Whitechapel Road. That to the centre was rebuilt in 1825, from when there was a carpenter’s workshop behind the Raven Row corner. Charles Bushell, a house painter and ornamental decorator, held the largest property here in the 1830s. To the west on the other side of Raven Row, John Hayward, a floorcloth and carpet manufacturer of Newington Causeway, had established a floorcloth factory In the 1780s. This was adapted for use by lead and glass merchants from the 1840s to the 1880s when the Post Office arrived.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>By 1856 William King, a ‘shop fixture manufacturer’,[^2] had a substantial part of the island property, including the former carpenter’s workshop, a large room for which he unsuccessfully sought a music licence in 1860. His Whitechapel Road neighbours on the island site were Anselom Jewell, a furniture broker, and Charles Benoni Taylor, a gingerbread-maker. In 1861 King let his room to a Calvinistic Methodist congregation, displaced from the Sion Chapel on the site now occupied by the Roman Catholic Church of St Boniface (see p. xx), where it could not afford a new lease. A fire in 1865 spread across what had become South Street from the former floorcloth factory and ruined the improvised chapel. Rev. John Kennedy solicited a £1,000 donation from Samuel Morley and the London Chapel Building Society and a 90-year building lease was obtained on the condition that two shops with dwellings were built along with the chapel. Thomas Chatfeild Clarke was appointed architect and the cheapest of his three designs, in ‘Simple Gothic’, was selected. The New Sion Chapel was built in 1866–7. Of polychrome brick with mixed stone dressings, the chapel had multi-gabled five-bay returns. A capacity of 1,000 had been intended, but in the event there were seats for only 550, largely because side galleries had to be omitted on cost grounds. This left the aisled interior looking rather gaunt, with a high ceiling above slender iron columns. A half-basement for a school-cum-lecture room had to be finished later for want of funds. The eastern shop became hatters’ premises, the western was by 1890 occupied by a bootmaker.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Despite income from the shops and a mortgage the congregation found it difficult to keep going. In the 1890s the chapel was taken by Independents and renamed the Brunswick Congregational Sion Church. This too could not be sustained and the whole property was advertised for sale in 1906 with dance-hall or cinema use proposed. Rev. Thomas Jackson, who had established a Primitive Methodist Mission at the Working Lads’ Institute (279 Whitechapel Road) a decade earlier, jumped at this opportunity and threat, and secured the building for his Mission. He could do so because he had funds arising from the forced sale of part of the Working Lads’ Institute site for the Whitechapel and Bow Railway for £20,000. Alterations in 1907–8 for what was now the Brunswick Hall Primitive Methodist Church were overseen by George Baines & Son, architects. They included a lowered floor and a relocated organ.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>What was hereafter known as the Whitechapel Mission used the Brunswick Hall for worship, this being the sole Primitive Methodist establishment in Stepney. In 1923 Jackson inaugurated a ‘Free Night Shelter’ for homeless men (‘Down and Outs’) in the basement school-room. It was used by 250 men in its first week. By 1932, when Jackson died, the shelter had accommodated 8,732 men and supplied 20,780 free meals.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>War damage forced temporary closure of Brunswick Hall until 1949, by when the Mission had out-stations in Tulse Hill and Essex. From 1957 the costs of maintenance inclined the Mission to contemplate closure of the Working Lads’ Institute, for consolidation of its Whitechapel functions in a new building on the Brunswick Hall site. Rev. Arthur E. D. Clipson, Superintendent, pushed this forward and gained support from the Methodist hierarchy, determining that the new building should comprise a church, a youth club, offices, his manse, and a row of shops on Whitechapel Road. First plans were prepared by Trevor Donaldson of Donaldson & Sons, surveyors, and additional land to the rear was acquired from the London County Council in 1963. An eleven-storey tower was proposed, and alongside a long-running funding appeal, some of the costs were offset against the intended sales of 279 Whitechapel Road and the Tulse Hill property. Clipson died in 1964 and Rev. William Parkes saw the project through. Ronald Ward & Partners prepared new plans in 1966, but by 1968, when a low-rise scheme was approved, the project had passed to Lee Reading & Associates (James Harbinson, job architect). The contractors were Marshall-Andrew & Co. Ltd, and the rebuilding was carried out in 1969–71.</p>\n\n<p>The low-slung and angular red-brick clad mission has architectural qualities that are reminiscent of Darbourne & Darke’s Lillington Gardens Estate. It is entered from Maples Place to the south of its chapel, which sits with a raking profile above the lettable shops and comprises one of three distinct pavilions. From early on into the twenty-first century one of the shop units was a sandwich bar. To the centre there are offices and flats, an assembly hall forming a link to the rear block, the four-storey short-stay hostel, built to house thirty ‘needy boys’; it stands above a fenced-in car park. Also towards the rear, a ‘crypt shelter’ was provided to be large enough to sleep six ‘down and out men’.[^6] Of social work, Parkes said ‘I’d like to see some of these trendy Johnnies identify with an old man who’s got three months to live, who’s blind from hard spirits, and peeing all over the floor’, and of the Mission, ‘If you talk of success here – well, I think you must just find another word.’[^7] The Whitechapel Mission has continued since 1995 under the leadership of Tony Miller, a lay Director. It maintains its support for the homeless as a day centre. The hostel dormitories were converted to be eleven flats in 1997–8.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Rocque's map, 1746: Horwood's maps, 1799 and 1813: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax returns; Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; MS11936/326/501845; MS11936/532/113666: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, MR/L/MD/0865; ACC/1926/B/009/007–8; ACC/1926/D/002,030: <em>Congregational Year Book</em>, 1867, pp. 363–4: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: LMA, N/C/24/001–2; ACC/1926/D/001–9: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, ACC/1926/B/015; ACC/1926/D/30/2: Harold Finch, <em>Tower Hamlets Connection: a biographical guide</em>, 1996, p. 93</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LMA, ACC/1926/B/007; ACC/1926/B/015: <em>Architectural Design</em>, Jan 1969, p. 29: Royal Institute of British Architects Library, photonegatives S71/311–3; S71/401–3; S71/441–2: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>The Guardian</em>, 5 July 1969</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-26",
"last_edited": "2018-04-26"
}
]
}