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"id": 710,
"title": "87 Whitechapel High Street",
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"body": "<p>Another utilitarian war-damage replacement, built in the late 1950s, very similar to No. 84, three storeys with red brick facing and triplet metal windows within thin concrete frames. It replaced a substantial building of 1835, three windows wide with pediments to those on the first floor. The site was by the 1670s, and until 1769, two houses of at least three storeys, and their back premises, either side of a court which led to an undeveloped plot of land adjoining Angel Alley.[^1] By 1733 they were in the occupation of Roger Osmond, distiller, who left one each in 1738 to his sons, Francis, another distiller, and Robert, a cheesemonger, who was also to have use of a brewhouse at the distillery.[^2] They passed through several hands until 1769 when John Rex (1726-92), a wealthy local distiller, Master of the Distillers Company in 1782, acquired them and rebuilt them as a single property, for the distillery he ran with his partner and stepson, Richard Perigoe (d. 1796).[^3]</p>\n\n<p>By 1818 it consisted of ‘a spacious rectifying distillery, many years established, with principal and clerks counting houses, a respectable spacious dwelling house… stabling for four horses, loft over, a covered yard, waggon lodge, harness room, dry warehouse, all enclosed by ‘lofty folding gates’.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The lease of the ‘capital dwelling house, distillery and vaults’ was offered for sale in August 1835 and acquired by the London and Westminster Bank, the first joint stock bank, founded under the Bank Charter Act of 1833.[^5] Presumably after some alteration, it opened as the Eastern Branch on 1 January 1836, one of three branches opened that day, the first outside the initial branches in Westminster and the City.[^6] Its manager from the 1840s to the 1860s, William Dent Asperne (1803-76), was the son of James Asperne, proprietor of the <em>European Magazine</em> from 1803 to his death in 1820. As a 12-year-old in 1816 the future bank manager published a sermon, ‘On the Benefits of Choosing a Heavenly Kingdom in preference to an Earthly One’.[^7] After the bank moved to new-built premises at <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/409/detail/\">130 High Street</a> in 1866 the building became a furniture and upholsters and a refreshment room until it opened as the People’s Café in 1875.</p>\n\n<p>The People’s Café Company was modelled after similar establishments in Liverpool, and its President, who conducted the opening ceremony at 87 High Street on 12 May 1875, was the George Yard Mission’s most prominent supporter, the Earl of Shaftesbury. It was one of the earliest temperance-inspired coffee houses in London, of which there were 121 by 1884. The idea was to create places ‘sufficiently attractive to compete with the beer shop and the gin palace’ in large and cheerful rooms on the capital’s busiest thoroughfares.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>The building was substantially altered to the designs of George Williams architect of Buckingham Street, Strand, to include, on the ground floor, a coffee room, ‘well-supplied with little marble-topped tables’, and on the first floor a reading room, ‘a small library, a room where chess, draughts, dominoes and the like may be played; {and} a room for billiards and also for bagatelle’. There were plans to fit out the basement ‘as an American bowling alley’. Though it was touted as a place where ‘men’ could get a ‘very reasonable and sufficient dinner’ for 6d, the People’s Cafés also recognised a need for working women to find a place to eat during the day. A commentator in 1878 noted that ‘wherever suitable coffeeroom accommodation has been provided for them, working women have gladly availed themselves of it’, and noted ‘many customers of this class’ in the Whitechapel café.[^9]</p>\n\n<p>The company, however, got into difficulties, the building’s freehold was sold for £3,550 in December 1884 and the café closed shortly after. [^10]. The buyer was apparently the George Yard Mission as it was the Mission which in 1889 moved into No. 87, having remodelled the rear parts of the site and rebuilt part of the back premises of No. 86, to the designs of John Hudson, architect, to connect with the original <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/386/detail/\">Ragged School</a> building in George Yard (Gunthorpe Street) and opened No. 87 as a girls’ refuge; by 1891 there were eight ‘inmates’ aged 8 to 12.[^11] The Mission continued there till the First World War, and thereafter the building, partially rebuilt in 1923, with more showy stone-effect frontage and pediments to all the first-floor windows, reverted to conventional Whitechapel rag-trade use, as Edward Bontnor & Co Ltd, wholesale clothiers, followed by J. Goide Ltd, caterers, from 1926. Joseph Goide (1886-1946), who emigrated from Russia in the 1880s and set up a baker’s in Commercial Road, had by 1926 seven catering premises in East London and one in the West End, with headquarters at 54 Whitechapel High Street. The ground-floor café ‘with a restful Wedgwood motif’ could sit 250, as could the first-floor restaurant, ‘in buff and old gold’, which also featured ‘a magnificent dancing floor’, in the top-lit former mission room to the rear, and a live orchestra.[^12] Goide’s moved to Willesden in the 1950s when the war-damaged building was finally demolished and, following rebuilding c. 1959, the building housed wholesale textile merchants, with solicitor’s offices upstairs, and, since the 2000s, an amusement arcade, currently Cashino.[^13] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Hearth Tax returns (HT) 1666 and 1673-4: Four Shillings in the Pound Aid assessment, 1693-4 (4s£): Ogilby and Morgan, map of London, 1676 (Ogilby and Morgan)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), DL/C/B/012/MS09172/143C</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, Land Tax returns (LT): The National Archives (TNA), PROB 11/1229/68; PROB 11/1281/66</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 30 Jan 1818, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Globe</em>, 21 Aug 1833, p. 1: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 12 Aug 1835, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Essex Standard</em>, 27 November 1835, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>Monthly Review</em>, July 1816, p. 336: <em>Bankers’ Magazine</em>, 1/8, Feb 1847, p. 489: Census</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: John Burnett, <em>England Eats Out: A Social History of Eating Out in England 1830 to the Present</em>, Harlow 2004, pp. 48-9, : E. Hepple Hall, <em>Coffee Taverns, Cocoa Houses and Coffee Palaces</em>, London 1878, pp. 15-18: <em>Builder</em> (<em>B</em>), 22 May 1875, p. 472: Robert Thorne, ‘Places of Refreshment in the Nineteenth-century City’, in <em>Buildings and Society: Essays on the Social Development of the Built Environment</em>, ed Anthony D. King, London 1980, p. 134: <em>Edinburgh Evening News</em>, 5 March 1874, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: <em>The Coffee Publichouse: How to Establish and Manage It</em>, London 1878, p. 10</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>B</em>, 20 Dec 1884, p. 844: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: Census: POD: <em>B</em>, 12 Jan 1889, p. 40: <em>East London Observer (ELO)</em>, 30 March 1889, p. 4: <em>Morning Post</em>, 2 April 1889, p. 5</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: TNA, HO 144/449/B30507; HO 334/30/11414: <em>ELO</em>, 18 Sept 1926, p. 3</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: POD</p>\n",
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"id": 200,
"title": "Woolworths",
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"body": "<p>I lived near to this building (in nearby Gower's Walk, in fact) when I was aged 10 onwards, in 1946 or thereabouts. At that time it was a Woolworths, and I was aware of it having two floors. For a lad, both floors were good to explore and spend pennies in. I was also aware that there was another floor, to which the staircase was closed off: I think that the stairs led down to a basement. At a later time the basement floor was opened up, so there was yet more pleasure for a young lad. <em> </em></p>\n",
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"title": "English Martyrs: the heart of the community (by Cathy J)",
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"body": "<p>Five generations of our family have worshipped and attended school at English Martyrs, Tower Hill, and we are of German-Irish origin. Our grandparents were married there in December 1911. Our grandfather was baptised in the German Lutheran Church in Alie St, and he converted later to the Catholic faith. Our Mum and Dad - Jerry & Eva Bills - were also married in January 1941 in English Martyrs Church. Here is their story.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/09/26/jones.JPG\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Jerry Bills and Eva Hageman in 1940</em></p>\n\n<p>Eva Hageman married Jerry Bills (baptised Frances Bills but always known as Jerry) who also played in goal for the Tower Hill football team. They knew each other all of their lives and both went to Tower Hill School. They started courting in about 1940, and during June of that year Jerry was on the troop ship 'Lancastria' which was evacuating soldiers from France. Our Mum always told us that on the day of this event she had the most awful feeling and went to sit in our church. She spoke to one of the priests (at that time there was always at least 4 priests resident at Tower Hill) and because they knew Jerry was at sea somewhere the priest lit a candle in the Chancery Light in Our Lady’s Chapel. The candle was set in a boat hanging over the chapel. (The boat you now see on the there is a new one, the original being stolen back in the 1980s). My mother sat there with the priest for a while in quiet prayer. The ship evacuating the soldiers was hit and suffered the largest loss of life in one action every recorded. Our father Jerry could not swim but he made it back to England. Because of the loss of lives involved there was a news blackout put on this, but it was a story always well known in our family, and in the families of all those involved.</p>\n\n<p>When our parents heard that Jerry he was being shipped overseas again, they decided to marry. The service was arranged for January 1941 and Jerry got a few days leave to return home. Eva, who was a dressmaker and made wedding dresses for a lot of girls, made herself a blue suit. On the day of the wedding English Martyrs Church took a direct hit from a 500lb bomb, which came through the roof and hit the pulpit, situated at the front of the church, quite near to where we now have the baptismal font. The bomb caused a lot of damage, but did not explode. Because of the timescale, it was agreed the wedding would go ahead but it was impossible to enter the church by the main doors. Instead our parents and family had to get in by going through the Presbytery (sited to the side where the Premier Inn is now), and enter the church through the Sacristy door, which opened out on to Our Lady’s Chapel. They were married there at Our Lady's Chapel by Father Gaffney as the bomb damage meant that they were unable to access the rest of the church. </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/09/26/whatsapp-image-2018-09-25-at-115014.jpeg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Wedding day at English Martyrs, January 1941</em></p>\n\n<p>The war ended and Jerry came home to meet his son Michael, by then three years old, for the first time. Our parents had three more children - Maureen (born 1947), Catherine (1954) and Jerry (1956). We all went to English Martyrs school, then located in Chamber Street; our children, and now our grandchildren went to the new school in St. Mark Street (opened in 1970), meaning that five generations of our family have been educated there. Our parents worshipped at Tower Hill all of their lives. Jerry always collected the Offertory at Mass (usually the Saturday vigil) along with Bill Rushmer. Eva cleaned the church until she became too ill. Both were buried from there, Eva in January 1984 and Jerry in July 1997.</p>\n\n<p>To them Tower Hill (English Martyrs) was not just a place of worship, it was the heart of their community. This is no doubt true of all of that generation of Tower Hill parishioners as many, including our family, were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Constructed 1969-71 to designs by Lee Reading & Associates, 212 Whitechapel Road has long been associated with the <a href=\"https://whitechapel.org.uk/about/history\">The Whitechapel Mission</a>. Its history can be traced back to the late eighteenth century when the Countess of Huntingdon funded the purchase of a former theatre building in order to precipitate its conversion into the Sion Chapel for her Connexion (a non-conformist group of Calvinistic Methodists). Situated on the site of present-day <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/308/detail/#developments-from-1784\">St Boniface</a>, this congregation's occupation of its first building continued into the 1860s. Following relocation to this site the 'New' Sion Chapel was built facing on Whitechapel Road in 1866–7. Following a transfer to a group of Independents in the 1890s the building assumed the name Brunswick Congregational Chapel. In 1906 it was sold to the Primitive Methodists for use by the Whitechapel Mission which from the 1920s provided night-time shelter for homeless men here. The present building originally comprised a chapel above shops, an assembly hall, offices, a hostel and a basement shelter for down and outs. The hostel has been converted to flats, but the mission continues to serve the area's homeless.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>No. 95 New Road was built in 1883–4 following condemnation of the northernmost of Thomas Barnes's Gloucester Terrace houses of the 1790s on this site. The two-bay rear section to Fieldgate Street was built first by G. Ellis of Walden Street, followed by the front part, built by W. Taylor, of Shepherd’s Bush. The single-storey lock-up shop on Fieldgate Street was inserted in 1924. By the early 1930s the main ground-floor space to New Road was F. Garetta’s dining rooms. Michael Baldacci succeeded around 1950 and the establishment came to be known as Mick’s Café into the 1980s. It is now the Shalamar Kebab House, a comparably workaday South Asian canteen.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 41143: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>A view of the market from a digitised colour slide in the Tower Hamlets Archives collection:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/760489279046967297\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/760489279046967297</a></p>\n",
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"body": "<p>This was the location of THAP! - Tower Hamlets Arts Project - in the late 1970s and the 1980s. There was a bookshop on the ground floor and offices above. THAP! published books on East End history. There was also a video production project based here called Despite TV which made documentaries on the Wapping newspaper dispute (<em>Despite the Sun</em>) and the re-development of the Isle of Dogs (<em>Despite the City</em>). Both are still in circulation.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>I don't know where my mother got it from, but she had a live chicken, and of course according to Jewish traditions it has to be killed in a particular way and there was a building in which this was done which was in Hope Street market. She gave me this chicken in a bag to take it round there to have it killed in the proper way. I remember going in there with squawking and screeching, feathers flying everywhere. It was noisy and a man came out and I gave him sixpence I think it was for doing it.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-06-12",
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},
{
"id": 819,
"title": "The creation of Commercial Street, 1836 to 1860",
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"body": "<p>The section of Commercial Street that lies within Whitechapel, between Whitechapel High Street and Wentworth Street, was the first section of a new street stretching from the High Street to Christchurch Spitalfields. It was built in 1843-5 by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, under Acts of Parliament of August 1839 and August 1840.[^1] The development of the northern section, from the church to Shoreditch High Street, laid out between 1849 and 1857 by the Commissioners of Woods and, after 1851, by the Commissioners of Works, is described in Survey of London volume 27.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>These Acts also provided for the construction of New Oxford Street, Cranbourn Street and Endell Street. These streets, together with Commercial Street, represented modified parts of a scheme by James Pennethorne for ‘Metropolitan Improvements’, while Commercial Street in particular formed a link in his scheme for a line of communication from the docks to the northern and western parts of London (see also Dock Street).</p>\n\n<p>The first governmental consideration of a new street in Spitalfields and Whitechapel was made by a Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements in August 1836. This Committee recommended the construction of a street ‘from Finsbury Square to Whitechapel Church and the Commercial Road’, running in a straight line from the Bishopsgate Street end of Middlesex Street to near the southern end of Osborn Street, cutting diagonally across from the north end of Old Castle Street to the south end of Osborn Street.[^3] This was approximately the line that the City favoured, to relieve the congestion in Aldgate and Leadenhall Street. The cost was estimated at £300,000. An alternative scheme put to the Committee by the chairman of the Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers was, however, closer to the line finally chosen.[^4] This was for a street from the London Docks through Leman Street to Christchurch and thence to the western end of Church Street, Bethnal Green. This more northerly projection of the street was urged because of the proposed construction of the Eastern Counties railway terminus on the site of Webb's Square, Shoreditch, a factor which ultimately determined the line of the northern end of the street. The concern of the Whitechapel deputation was prompted more by a wish for the line south to run through Leman Street to the docks than with improving Essex Street and its slums, though the rector of Spitalfields stressed the benefit of clearing slum housing in his parish.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>In August 1838 another Select Committee again suggested a line from Whitechapel to Bishopsgate Street, but carried to the western end of Union (Brushfield) Street, where Sun Street would continue the line to Finsbury Square: ‘The property in that line is worse than in St Giles’.[^6] They had, however, heard representatives of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green parishes, whose views resembled those of the Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers, and favoured a line from the southern end of Rose Lane to the northern end of Wheler Street. Thence it might run into Shoreditch High Street or behind Shoreditch church.[^7] The more northerly direction of the line had the advantages of communicating with Spitalfields Market and the new railway terminus, and of making some use of the lines of existing streets. It also performed more extensively than the line first suggested a function which was agreed to be of the greatest importance, that of opening up the congested warren of seventeenth-century streets and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century courts on the line of the street. Quite apart from its merits as a communication route a new street was advocated to facilitate the draining and policing of the area. It would achieve ‘the destruction of a neighbourhood inhabited by persons addicted to vices and immorality of the worst description’, and permit the better surveillance of ‘a low population’, which was hitherto ‘without any respectable persons to keep them at all in check and under control’.[^8] The Committee thought it an area ‘presenting serious obstacles to the efficient action even of the best constituted police’, while the rector of Spitalfields agreed that the route through his parish was ‘inhabited by an exceedingly immoral population’ and desired that a new street should ‘open it to public observation’.[^9] The rector was equally convinced that a new street would assist the drainage of a fever-ridden district that was mainly dependent on an open ditch across Mile End New Town.[^10] The improvement of sanitation was later acknowledged to be ‘one of the principal objects for the formation of the new street’.[^11] </p>\n\n<p>Another Select Committee recommended in March 1839 that New Oxford Street, Cranbourn Street, Endell Street and a ‘spacious thoroughfare’ from the London Docks to Spitalfields should be built by the Commissioners of Woods and Forests. The Committee thought that £200,000 ‘employed in aid of the capital which individual or associated enterprise may reasonably be expected to bring to the execution of such works’ would be sufficient.[^12] </p>\n\n<p>Following the recommendations of the Select Committee James Pennethorne prepared plans for the new streets on behalf of the Commissioners of Woods, in consultation with Thomas Chawner, the Commissioners’ architect and surveyor.[^13] These plans were submitted to the Treasury in May 1839 for the preparation of the necessary Bill, which received the royal assent in August.[^14] This Act empowered the Commissioners to raise £200,000 out of certain funds derived from the duties on coal and wine, including the ‘Orphans Fund’ and the ‘London Bridge Approaches Fund’, in order to construct the four streets. The Commissioners were also empowered to make surveys but not as yet to undertake actual construction.</p>\n\n<p>A further Committee was appointed which heard evidence in the spring of 1840 where Pennethorne and Chawner stressed the greater value for London's communications of a northerly direction of the line, ‘to form a great communication from the port of London to all the railways that come to the north of London, and also to the north and north-western parts of London, without going into the city’.[^15] Pennethorne's ultimate object at this time was to take the street as far north as Shoreditch and then to link it with the City Road, but he succeeded in reducing the estimated net outlay on the Whitechapel-Spitalfields street from some £141,000 to about £91,000, partly by terminating it at Christchurch instead of at the market. The plan accompanying the Committee's report in June 1840 was essentially that carried out.[^16] There was a particular, localised attraction in running the new street through Essex Street, whose cut-off character, with a narrow dog-leg alley leading north out of it, Pennethorne described: ‘There is no communication from Whitechapel {High Street}, except under a gateway that just admits carts into Essex Street; and there is no outlet {to Wentworth Street}, except a foot-passage through a dark alley.’[^17] </p>\n\n<p>The Act of August 1840 authorized the Commissioners of Woods to proceed with the work, and to raise a further £100,000 from the funds and purchase the necessary property.[^18]</p>\n\n<p>The curtailment of the ‘improvements’ was criticized in <em>The Westminster Review</em> which ridiculed the termination of the street at Christchurch ‘as if the only object of the line was to enable the sailors of our merchantmen to attend divine service on Sunday’.[^19] But as the clearance of the route took place there was general approval: ‘The locality destroyed was well known as the resort of the most depraved character of the metropolis. Several of the houses were built 200 or 300 years ago.’[^20] </p>\n\n<p>The financing of the Commissioners’ work was dependent on the gradual accumulation of funds, and want of ready money postponed the clearing of the line until early in 1843, most of the property being purchased by that year.[^21] </p>\n\n<p>The work of clearing so closely built an area was not always easy: men worked at night to empty and fill in the dangerous ‘privy-pits’ in the congested courts on the line of the street: in October 1843 a workman was suffocated clearing out an old drain behind Venables’ premises at the corner of the High Street and the new street.[^22] The old properties were sold for demolition not by public auction but privately, the Commissioners’ architects finding that ‘by selling by Private Tender … in low neighbourhoods many difficulties are avoided and a better price realized’.[^23] Regular sales were held of building materials and fittings on the ‘waste land’ which characterised the area of the new street in its early years.[^24] </p>\n\n<p>In August 1844 the tender of J. and C. I'Anson of Fitzroy Square to construct the vaults along the street for £3,098 was accepted.[^25] In November the gas-pipes were laid.[^26] By December the line was completely marked out and in January of the following year tenders were invited for paving the street. The name Commercial Street was decided on by September 1845 after the name Spital Street had been abandoned because it duplicated an existing local street-name.[^27] In October 1845 the Commissioners issued notices for the erection of houses along the line of the street, which was divided into thirty-two lots to be leased for eighty years from Christmas 1845.[^28] Few of the plots were disposed of at this sale, and only <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/376/detail/#st-judes-church\">St Jude’s Church</a>, the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/361/detail/#from-princess-alice-to-the-culpeper\">Princess Alice</a> pub at the eastern corner with Wentworth Street and the site at the western corner of the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/404/detail/#earlier-history-of-the-site-of-the-relay-building\">High Street</a> were built by the end of the 1840s. In June 1849 the Whitechapel authorities were complaining that some sites were still unbuilt and that too high prices were being asked by the Commissioners, who replied that these would be obtainable when the extension to Shoreditch was completed.[^29] A flurry of building occurred in the Whitechapel section of Commercial Street in the first half of the 1850s but the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/421/detail/#no-1-victoria-home-and-23-41-commercial-street\">final plots</a>, either side near the junction with Wentworth Street were not sold until 1860-61, now with the added inducement of the freehold.[^30] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: 2 and 3 Vict., c. 80, public; 3 and 4 Vict., c. 87, public</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: 'Commercial Street', in <em><a href=\"https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol27\">Survey of London: Volume 27, Spitalfields and Mile End New Town</a></em>, ed. F. H. W. Sheppard (London, 1957), pp. 256-264</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Report from Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements</em>, 2 Aug. 1836, p. iii, 27-8</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), THCS/057</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Report from Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements</em>, 2 Aug. 1836, pp. 43-6: <em>Second Report from Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements</em>, 22 April 1838, p. 95</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Second Report from Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements</em>, 2 Aug. 1838, pp. viii, 55</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: ibid, pp. 101-4</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>Report from Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements</em>, 2 Aug. 1836, pp. 27-8: <em>Fourth Report of the Commissioners . . . [for] Improving the Metropolis</em>, 23 April 1845, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: <em>Second Report from Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements</em>, 2 Aug 1838, pp. viii, 101-4</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>Second Report from Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements</em>, 9 April 1838, pp. 101–4</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: The National Archives (TNA), WORK 6/93, p. 265-6</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: <em>First Report from Select Committee on Metropolitan Improvements</em>, 27 March 1839. p.v</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: TNA, WORK, 6/99, pp. 6, 19: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: TNA, WORK, 6/99, p. 6: 2 and 3 Vict., c. 8o, public</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: <em>First Report from Select Committee on Metropolis Improvements</em>, pp. 49–50</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: ibid, pp. 39-41</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: <em>First Report from Select Committee on Metropolis Improvements</em>, 11 Feb 1840, p. 9</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: 3 and 4 Vict., c. 87, public</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: <em>The Westminster Review</em>, July-Oct. 1841, pp. 423, 428</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 1 Sept 1843, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: <em>The Builder</em> (<em>B</em>), 1 April 1843, p. 90: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 10 May 1844, p. 3</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: <em>John Bull</em>, 7 Oct 1843, p. 7: TNA, WORK 6/93, p. 215 </p>\n\n<p>[^23]: TNA, WORK 6/94, p. 54</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 5 Feb 1844, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: TNA, WORK 6/94, p. 150</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: TNA, WORK 6/94, p.225</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: <em>B</em>, 7 Dec 1844, p. 611: TNA, WORK 6/94, p.225: <em>B</em>, 11 Oct 1845, p. 488</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: <em>B</em>, 11 Oct 1845, p. 488</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: TNA, WORK 6/96, p.66</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), B/ELL/2/2: TNA, WORK 6/96: <em>East London Observer</em> (<em>ELO</em>), 14 Dec 1861, p. 2</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-22",
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"body": "<p>This frontage was cleared and in 1949 put to use as Osborn Garages, motor-car repairs, with petrol tanks and pumps in a forecourt and a single-storey flat-roofed workshop behind, erected in 1950 on the site of the Amor foundry. The south wall of the former Warner foundry to the north was also rebuilt. Retaining its hipped timber-trussed roof, that early range, possibly dating back to the last years of the Swan brewhouse, was thereafter used by the Commercial Processing and Stove Enamelling Co. Ltd and Bradley & Gale Co. Ltd, silk-screen printers. A further garage building was added in 1969 on the northern section of the street frontage. The walls of a once three-storey building in the south-west corner of the site, used as storage in the 1890s for the Warner foundry, with a single-storey building inserted in the 1950s as part of the enamelling works, survive in a derelict condition.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In 1973 Ronald Trebilcock, architect, prepared a scheme for redevelopment of the site at Nos 15–25 with a three-storey office and warehouse range, but this did not proceed.[^2] A generation later, in 2000, SDI Display Ltd, owners of the site and occupants of the former Warner foundry, proposed complete redevelopment of the Swan Yard site, taking in Nos 15–25 and the former Coope beer-barrel store, which was the only building to be retained. The scheme, designed by Clive Hough, architect, intended a brick-faced five-storey L-shaped block of fifty-eight flats, with twenty-five per cent ‘affordable’ accommodation to be acquired by Providence Row, the occupants of neighbouring buildings to the west (see p.xx). But this too was dropped. In 2001 the site was sold to the Zeloof Partnership, developers of the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane; ownership transferred in 2012 to Truman Estates Ltd, based in Jersey. A new application in 2003 excluded Nos 15 and 17 and proposed refurbishment of the existing buildings as an entertainment venue, with a function room in the foundry and bars below studios and offices in the beer-barrel store. This was withdrawn and the site was squatted for several years, every accessible surface adorned with street art. In 2012 lawyers acting for the City Hotel across Osborn Street complained to Zeloof that ‘“Your land is being used as a centre for crack cocaine drug dealing and use; a hive of anti-social behaviour ranging from intimidation and petty crime to begging and arson” and that it was “entirely common” to see rats, fires and “people walking around completely naked and defecating” in the yard … “One night an individual jumped over the hoarding of your land, walked up to the {hotel's} bar manager and asked whether he wanted to buy cocaine.”’[^3] Security was improved with metal fencing and in late 2018 the barrel store underwent consolidation works.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/THL/D/2/30/110; Building Control (BC) file 14715: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): Goad insurance maps</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: THLHLA, BC file 15077 </p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>The Times</em>, 25 June 2012, p.35: THP: www.private-eye.co.uk/registry</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Prince Emmanuel Yemoh, <em>XV: Urban Design Project</em>, University of Greenwich, Year 1 Diploma project, 2012, via issuu.com/peny86/docs/prince_emmanuel_yemoh_2012_portfolio: THP: information kindly supplied by Jack Renwick</p>\n",
"created": "2019-10-04",
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{
"id": 499,
"title": "221 Whitechapel Road with 1 Fulbourne Street",
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"body": "<p>A 498-year lease of this corner property was granted in 1675. A century later it had come into the possession of Luke Flood, a painter, who held the whole row approximately back to No. 207. Rebuilding appears to have been undertaken in 1847 for Lescher Son & Co., starch manufacturers who had premises at the north end of what was then Thomas Street. There have been humble shop uses throughout. Formerly brick-faced with Italianate dressings, the building was wholly rendered around 1990.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, Land Tax returns; Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: The National Archives, IR58/84806/2329. </p>\n",
"created": "2017-11-17",
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{
"id": 709,
"title": "86 Whitechapel High Street",
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"body": "<p>Within this unassuming, indeed dull, little building that might have been knocked up any time in the past thirty years, lurks a much earlier house, probably mid-nineteenth century. Only the floor heights indicate its age. Alterations and extensions have, grandfather’s axe-style, eroded possibly all original fabric, though a 19th-century outbuilding, part of No. 87 since it housed the George Yard Mission in the 19th century, survives to the rear.</p>\n\n<p>Until the Second World War No. 86 was stuccoed, the frontage flanked by giant pilasters, the windows with scroll-bracketed pediments, the whole topped with a cornice. These decorative affectations were scraped off after war damage, the depredation completed by refronting in brownish bricks and concrete cills, brown metal windows and a projecting tiled mansard attic c. 1991.[^1] In the nineteenth century the building housed one of the longest-lived businesses on the High Street, John William Stirling, pharmaceutical chemist, who arrived in 1816 and remained till his death there in 1871. His business, whose frontage bore a royal crest in the 1880s, was sustained on an impressive range of Stirling’s Pills, aimed variously at women, children and officers of the army and navy, claiming to cure everything from gonorrhoea to flatulence.[^2] It continued as a chemist’s until 1930 when Samuel Prevezer, wholesale hosier, took over: ‘My grandparents, Sam and Fay, waited outside the stocking factories where each night the rejects were thrown out. They matched them up and sold them off their barrow in the East End. Eventually they made enough to buy a proper shop, S. Prevezer Hosiery in Whitechapel High Street’.[^3] It remained Prevezer’s until the 1970s, when another hosier took over until it became a bureau de change in the 1990s, and from 2004 a café.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): Photograph c. 1960 from Ron Roberts</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Census: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 13 July 1871, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Braham Murray, <em>The Worst it Can Be is a Disaster</em>, London 2007: Post Office Directories (POD): London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's Returns (DSR)</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: POD: THP</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-11",
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{
"id": 732,
"title": "Only memorial to Frederick Treves in Whitechapel",
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"body": "<p>Treves House appears to be the only local memorial to Sir Frederick Treves (1853-1923), the Victorian/Edwardian notable surgeon of the nearby London Hospital, who identified and assisted Joseph Merrick, otherwise known as the Elephant Man (1862-1890). In later life Treves rose to be the leading surgeon in the UK for the procedure of removal of the appendix and is credited with saving the life of Edward VII by this procedure in 1902.</p>",
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"street": "New Road",
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"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 1,
"search_str": "121 New Road"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>No. 121 New Road extends to a large range behind 109–119 and 128–130 Whitechapel Road (where there had been a clothing warehouse), is a four-storey 25-flat development of 2007–8, brown brick to New Road, yellow brick behind. Designed in 2003 by Paul Johnston for Goldact Ltd, the project transferred to the Paddington Churches Housing Association Ltd and McCann Homes, with the Ian Darby Partnership as executant architects.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Three houses built in 1836 through Isaac Bird, perhaps with John Burnell, became 123–127 New Road. Following development at Nos 117–123 by N. & R. Davis, a synagogue was put up behind Nos 125–127 in 1895-6. This was promptly removed on the District Surveyor’s orders.[^2] The shophouses were cleared after Second World War bomb damage; their numbers now apply to a former warehouse to the rear of 132 Whitechapel Road (see p.xx).</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 41186: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives, Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-09",
"last_edited": "2018-05-09"
},
{
"id": 968,
"title": "15 Osborn Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
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"body": "<p>No. 15 Osborn Street (previously 15A) is a tiny single-storey café, built in 1951–2, with a long rear range, now derelict. The architect was Carl Fisher and use was by surgical-instrument polishers in the 1950s to the ’70s when a former boilermaker’s house of around 1850 still stood to the rear as No. 15, housing Arthur Blooman, a watchcase-maker. The Whitechapel Gallery’s extension displaced this in the early 1980s. The front building was altered in 1984 to be a sandwich bar. Since about 2012 it has been the Love in a Cup café.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives, IR58/84800/1754: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, WG/2/20/1–2; Building Control file 15077: Goad insurance maps: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2019-10-04",
"last_edited": "2019-10-04"
},
{
"id": 723,
"title": "The Green Man and the Sons of Lodz chevra, 40 Newcastle Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"properties": {
"b_number": "",
"b_name": "Calcutta House annexe, Old Castle Street",
"street": "Old Castle Street",
"address": "Calcutta House Annexe, Old Castle Street",
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"count": 8,
"search_str": "Calcutta House annexe, Old Castle Street"
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"body": "<p>From its creation in the early 1730s, Newcastle Street (later Tyne Street) was developed with small three-storey houses, one of which, part of a parcel of forty houses, stables, a brewhouse and warehouse leased by the developer William Newland to Thomas Peckham in 1733 and 1734, became the Green Man inn.[^1] The inn was situated on the west side of Newcastle Street, on the site of the north end of the Calcutta House Annexe, the former Brooke Bond welfare centre.[^2] In its early days it was itself more of an annexe to the adjoining stables, the landlords in the 1730s and 1740s, Francis Milson and Henry Davis (d. 1748), using it as the base for sale of donkeys for milk, and for hiring horses to collect hay and straw from Essex.[^3] In the early to mid nineteenth century another Green Man existed, concurrently and confusingly, in Mansell Street. In the early 1840s the Green Man’s landlord, John Clarke, ran the United Helpmates Birmingham Benefit Society and Coal Club, low-priced subscription clubs for cheap life insurance and coal, as well as dog fights and boxing into the early 1850s.[^4] The low-life, low-rent character continued into the 1870s when the Green Man was raided as an illegal gambling den, when only coppers were recovered.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>By October 1884 a synagogue, known as the Bikkur Cholim Sons of Lodz Chevra (possibly a merger of two Hevros: Bikkur Cholim ‘Visitors of the Sick’, and Bnai Lodz, ‘Sons of Lodz’) had been created within the former Green Man.[^6] It was described in unfavourable terms in 1888: ‘there is a synagogue on the first floor, which is approached by a disgraceful staircase, and … there is no provision to enable women to worship. On the ground floor of this house is an eating house where there is reason to fear gambling is not unfrequently practised, while the upper floors are occupied by many poor families crowded together’.[^7] As the synagogue was still in operation in May 1894, but not known subsequently, and the Sons of Lodz Chevra in New Goulston Street opened in 1896, it seems likely that this was the same congregation.[^8] Following the synagogue’s departure, there was a further prosecution for illegal gambling, after which the three-storey building reverted to residential use and the site was cleared by March 1931 for the building of the Brooke Bond welfare centre fronting Old Castle Street.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: West Sussex Record Office, HARRIS/266: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MDR/1734/5/215</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), B/PBE/6/7</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, Land Tax returns (LT): <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 4 Nov 1743: <em>Derby Mercury</em>, 9 Jan 1746, p. 2: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Bell’s Life in London</em>, 12 Sept 1841, p. 4; 16 Jan 1842, p. 4: <em>The Examiner</em>, 13 Aug 1842, p. 523: <em>Bell’s Life in London</em>, 3 Dec 1843, p. 4: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 24 June 1844, p. 1: <em>The Era</em>, 28 Oct 1849, p. 6: <em>Bell’s Life in London</em>, 4 Sept 1853, p. 6</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Luton Reporter</em>, 12 July 1879, p. 6</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Jewish Chronicle (JC)</em>, 31 October 1884, p. 6: THLHLA, B/PBE/6/7</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>JC</em>, 19 Oct 1888, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>JC</em>, 4 May 1894, p. 18</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: LMA, District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): <em>Illustrated Police News</em>, 22 April 1899, p. 10: The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84818/3532 to 3537</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-15",
"last_edited": "2021-03-30"
},
{
"id": 941,
"title": "Herbert House and Jacobson House",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 355,
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"properties": {
"b_number": "",
"b_name": "Herbert House",
"street": "Old Castle Street",
"address": "Herbert House, Old Castle Street, London E1 7TW",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 8,
"search_str": "Herbert House"
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"body": "<p>Herbert House and Jacobson House are blocks of flats built in 1935–6 by the London County Council on the site of its Old Castle Street School as part of the Holland Estate the rest of which lay to the north in Spitalfields. The builders were Rowley Brothers of Tottenham, working to designs from the LCC Architect’s Department, then headed by E. P. Wheeler. Jacobson House to the north is a single range, Herbert House is three ranges enclosing a yard that is open to the west. Both are typical LCC housing of the 1930s, of five storeys with rear balcony access, steel-framed on a concrete substructure, and plainly neo-Georgian in red bric. There are tentative gestures at more modern styling, as in the first-floor concrete balconies and top-floor bands of incised render. Like all the flats on the Holland Estate these were well-specified, having large kitchens with gas cookers. Most had two bedrooms, and there were large communal drying rooms on the first and second floors.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Both blocks were renovated to the designs of Jestico + Whiles in 2015–16, as part of the refurbishment of the Holland and New Holland estates for EastEnd Homes. Works included new windows, secure access gates, two lifts and hard and soft landscaping with play areas.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/AR/CON/03/4119</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2019-08-02",
"last_edited": "2020-09-14"
},
{
"id": 498,
"title": "211–217 Whitechapel Road",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"properties": {
"b_number": "211",
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"street": "Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>This 60ft frontage, probably already then built up, was the subject of a manorial lease of 99 years in 1670 to Sarah Wadeson, a local widow. Divided into four plots, the two to the east were converted to be a public house, the ‘Red Lyon, Towns End’, that was here by 1730 and perhaps much earlier. Sir Benjamin Truman took a new lease of the group in 1764 and his successors at the Brick Lane brewery held the property into the nineteenth century. The present asymmetrical and loosely Italianate four-storey five-bay block was built in 1846–7 as four properties, the Red Lion to the east larger than the others with two closely spaced window bays. William Harrap, a Finsbury carpenter, was the builder for William Walker of St Martin’s Lane. The pub became known as the Old Red Lion around 1900, having gained a top-lit back building. It closed in 1991. In 1912 Isaac Rachovitch, a ‘talking-machine dealer’, was at No. 215. A century later white paint was removed from the whole group and new shopfronts were fitted.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, M/93/304–5; MR/LV/05/026; Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 15514: https://pubshistory.com/LondonPubs/Whitechapel/RedLionWhitechapel.shtml.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-11-17",
"last_edited": "2017-11-23"
},
{
"id": 969,
"title": "17 Osborn Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"properties": {
"b_number": "17",
"b_name": "17 Osborn Street",
"street": "Osborn Street",
"address": "Stolen Space, 17 Osborn Street",
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"body": "<p>No. 17 Osborn Street is a single-storey building of 1949, erected by Ian G. Mactear, surveyor, for Woolf & Partners, monumental masons of Stoke Newington. It replaced three temporary Nissen-hut shops put up in 1947 for the site’s owners, D. Rose & Co., following bombsite clearance. The flat-roofed showroom and office had display windows to the front and side (the entryway to Swan Yard), the shopfront faced in black Vitrolite panels, the interior with black and white terrazzo. A rear workshop has a south-light roof and a small grinding room was added at the back in 1950.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Woolf & Partners specialised in Jewish headstones. Around 1955 the business became a branch of A. Elfes Ltd, founded in Plashet Road, Plaistow, in 1894 by Albert Eugene Elfes (1871–1959). The grandson of Christian Prussian immigrants, Elfes found success through furnishing Jewish funerals and graves because of the proximity to his premises of the United Synagogue’s cemetery. A further branch at 130 Edgware Road opened in 1995, and an existing concern in Mile End was taken over in 1996, by which time the firm had passed from Elfes’s son Sidney’s hands to Mark Linley, who had married Sidney’s daughter. The Osborn Street branch closed in 2008 and moved to Gants Hill, where it continues as The Memorial Group with a head office in Aveley, Essex.[^2] No. 17 was in use for art exhibitions by 2012 and in 2013 opened as the StolenSpace Gallery, founded in 2006 in Brick Lane by D*Face (Dean Stockton), who moved the gallery when its premises were scheduled for demolition. It features artists, many of whom began as graffitists, and those who are ‘influenced by society’s prevailing subculture; where there are few rules and anything is possible’.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlet Local History Library and Archives, L/THL/D/2/30/110; Building Control files 14715, 15077</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 26 April 1996, p.11; 30 June 1995, p.71; 26 April 1996, p.11; 23 May 2008, p.8: Ancestry: www.memorialgroup.co.uk/</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: www.underground-england.co.uk/news/underground-loves-stolen-space-gallery/: <a href=\"https://www.stolenspace.com/\">www.stolenspace.com/</a>: <a href=\"https://www.stolenspace.com/2013/07/11/vii-group-show-teaser/\">www.stolenspace.com/2013/07/11/vii-group-show-teaser/</a>: <a href=\"https://www.artrabbit.com/events/vii\">www.artrabbit.com/events/vii</a>: <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, 25 June 2013, p.24</p>\n",
"created": "2019-10-04",
"last_edited": "2019-10-04"
},
{
"id": 462,
"title": "193A-195 Whitechapel Road",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"tags": [
"Metropolitan and District Railway"
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"body": "<p>In the early nineteenth century there were seven small shophouses east of the site of the Pavilion Theatre’s entrance passage up to the Baker’s Row corner, which was to move west in the 1870s when what became Vallance Road was widened. The western pair housed Benjamin Gomes da Costa, a surgeon and apothecary, and David Cardozo, a tobacconist, up to 1818 when both men died, leaving widow Lucky Da Costa in possession.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In 1881 the Metropolitan and District Railway acquired the freehold of the site, to build the line that now passes directly beneath the corner. With sewerage works carried out in conjunction with the railway works in 1884, the MBW put up a ‘deodorising’ shed behind the cutting. Complaints about its unsightliness forced alterations in 1886 for workshop use, but it was not until 1908 that Press, Robinson & Co., builders, concealed this behind the present two-storey red-brick group of shops, retaining one unit for themselves and the back workshop, access to which was and is via a passage from a pedimented doorway. Dallas Clothing occupied the premises up to about 2013.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; E/BN/124,140; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/466/917591; Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/WBW/13/1/1–4 and /2/1–5</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: District Surveyors Returns: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 3 Oct. 1884, p. 413; 11 June 1886, p. 1123: Goad insurance map, 1890; The National Archives, IR58/84806/2313–4</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-25",
"last_edited": "2017-08-25"
}
]
}