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"body": "<p>The site of the Coope sugarhouses and Ind Coope & Co. Ltd’s beer stores and offices, has been in use for electricity generation or distribution since it was acquired by the Whitechapel District Board of Works in March 1899. It is currently a substation for UK Power Networks.</p>\n\n<p>The Whitechapel Board acquired a Provisional Order for electric lighting from the Board of Trade in 1892 but was slow to act on it, probably because of impending local-government reorganisation, rather than because, as was alleged, members were ‘bewildered in their perusals of the latest inventions’.[^1] The Osborn Street site was especially attractive as it adjoined the Board’s George Yard works depot to the west. By October 1899 cables had been laid in several major streets and there was a temporary generating station, consisting of six turbines driving an engine working two dynamos. The permanent turbine hall was built on the north-west part of the site in 1899–1901, to the designs of Matthew William Jameson, the Board’s and, from 1900, Stepney Borough Council’s Surveyor. Arthur Wright was the consulting engineer and W. Griffiths of Bishopsgate the builder. Jameson followed through in the manner he had deployed in the adjoining depot, using orange-red brick with engineering-brick plinths. The hall was open to a light steel-truss roof, with white-glazed tiles facing blind-arcaded internal walls, with grey-blue tile dressings to the arches and pilaster capitals. Along Osborn Street a plain three-storey red-brick range, eleven windows wide with an off-centre entryway went up in 1901, the south end with a rear range, the north end backed by a chimney, octagonal in plan and around 180ft high, erected by Wilson Bros of Kensal Green in 1900–2. The front range housed offices above and below a first-floor committee room and meter-testing station. Demand for electricity doubled annually between 1901 and 1905 and the hall was extended southwards for further boilers and generators in 1905 by B. E. Nightingale, builders. It was twice further extended to the east by 1909, when a showroom opened to display electric motors, fans and lights, the shopfront lit with four large pendant globes.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>By 1903 it had been recognised that additional capacity would be needed to cover all of Stepney Borough. A larger station was built in 1908–9 at Blyth’s Wharf, Limehouse. The limited size and enclosed nature of the Osborn Street site were constraints, and, distant from the river, it necessitated expenditure on coal cartage. By 1909 it was anticipated that Osborn Street should become a distribution substation, for transmitting electricity generated at Blyth’s Wharf, a transformation that had happened by 1918. The turbines were removed and replaced by transformers, and the chimney was dismantled in the 1920s. In 1928 the building at No. 25 was acquired and demolished, and a further three-bay office block was built, extending the three-storey red-brick frontage of No. 27.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The substation sustained significant damage in 1941 and ceased supply until post-war repairs, when the original office and shop range was cut down to two storeys. Following the nationalisation of electricity supply in 1947 the premises passed to the London Electricity Board. In 1954–5 the yard was extended to the south for open stock-brick pens to house transformers with a switch-room beneath.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>Privatisation of the electricity supply network in 1990 led to the LEB becoming part of Electricité de France (EDF) Energy Networks in 1998, which in turn was sold in 2010 to the Cheung Kong Group, which operates the Osborn Street substation as part of UK Power Networks. The shop ceased to be an electricity showroom by 1990 and was sublet till it closed in 2007.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>By 2008, the substation required updating and augmenting to increase capacity, and the original turbine hall, long since empty save for car parking, was in poor condition. Permission was secured to demolish the hall, entrance and shop blocks of 1899–1905 to the north, retaining only the transformer bays of the 1950s and the office building of 1928 to the south-east with three bays of the reduced original front range adjoining. A replacement north block was approved in 2009 and built in 2011–13 to designs from Freedom Power Networks. It is a bulky, red-brick faced, three-storey box, mildly enlivened by white-brick courses and blue-brick decorative patterning. To reduce the bulk visible from the Dellow Centre and Universal House, the north and west elevations have white-brick facing to the top stage, with a graphical replication in polychrome brick of the pedimented west gable end of the original turbine hall. The Osborn Street front, with the site’s entryway retained, also references its demolished predecessor in a three-bay block with white banding and blank windows, for the embellishment of which a competition was held in local primary schools. Designs featuring aspects of East End life including docks, textiles, bridges, and music-hall entertainment by, <em>inter alios</em>, Sadhia Rahman, Momota Akter, Samirah Sultana, Isfahan Masud, Maria Ahmed and Rumah Begum, were executed in mosaic by an artist, Julie Stedman, and unveiled in 2014.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>East London Observer (ELO)</em>, 13 Oct 1894, p.5</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Pall Mall Gazette</em>, 7 Oct 1899, p.4: The National Archives, IR58/84800/1762–3: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), LC9360; L/SMB/D/4/1: <em>ELO</em>, 2 April 1904, p.4</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: THLHLA, LC9360; L/SMB/D/4/8: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THP: Goad insurance maps</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <a href=\"https://www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/internet/en/about-us/our-ownership/\">www.ukpowernetworks.co.uk/internet/en/about-us/our-ownership/</a>: <a href=\"https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-edf-ukgrids-exclusive/edf-sells-british-grids-for-5-5-billion-sources-idUKTRE66S6EK20100730?pageNumber=1\">uk.reuters.com/article/uk-edf-ukgrids-exclusive/edf-sells-british-grids-for-5-5-billion-sources-idUKTRE66S6EK20100730?pageNumber=1</a></p>\n\n<p>[^6]: THP: <em>Docklands and East London Advertiser</em>, 5 July 2012: <em>EastEnd Life</em>, 20 Jan 2014, p.25</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Recalling her arrival in Whitechapel in 1873, Henrietta Barnett remembered ‘Whitechapel High Street, where some forty keepers of small shops lived with their families. ... There were two or three narrow streets lined with fairly decent cottages occupied entirely by Jews, but, with these exceptions, the whole parish [St Jude’s] was covered with a network of courts and alleys. None of these courts had roads. In some the houses were three storeys high and hardly six feet apart, the sanitary accommodation being pits in the cellars; in other courts the houses were lower, wooden and dilapidated, a standpipe at the end providing the only water. Each chamber was the home of a family who sometimes owned their indescribable furniture, but in most cases the rooms were let out furnished for eight-pence a night, a bad system which lent itself to every form of evil. In many instances broken windows had been repaired with paper and rags, the banisters had been used for firewood, and the paper hung from the walls which were the residence of countless vermin. In these homes people lived in whom it was hard to see the likeness of the Divine.’[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Henrietta Barnett, <em>Canon Barnett, His Life, Work, and Friends</em>, vol.1, 1918, pp.73–4</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Local businessman and community activist, Abdul Shukar Khalisdar started his first business in rented rooms above the shop in this building in 2006, here he describes his working conditions.</p>\n\n<p>I was operating from the top of the PFC, fast food shop, 124 Whitechapel road, I was on the third floor above a fried chicken shop, that's where I took my first office. It wasn't desirable, it was really horrible but that was the best that was on offer locally. I thought, \"Hang on. There has to be something more than [this]”… It was a bit embarrassing, it wasn't the most presentable place but I kept saying, \"Look, if the business does well, I'm going to move out.\"</p>\n\n<p>[It was two rooms] up the stairs, [you had to] climb over dead rodents and things at times as well, genuinely, it was that bad. I used to go and use the bathroom in the shop.</p>\n\n<p>It was a private landlord but he didn't care. The landlord had no vision, he somehow ended up buying the property and people asked him, \"Would you rent it?\" And he was renting out space but it was not dedicated to the business space. Anyway, in a very short space of time, three months I think, into the business, I realised I need to expand..</p>\n\n<p>I was finding out [about] big employers, security employers and offering them a free recruitment service for all the candidates that we were getting qualified. Because of that guaranteed job interview, everyone was prepared to pay me as opposed to the two or more established training provider because we were doing something different which is guaranteed job interviews. Within a very short space of time I outgrew the space so I started looking for more office space, but at the same time, I wanted to get the centre accredited.\"</p>\n\n<p>Abdul Shukar Khalisdar was interviewed by Shahed Saleem on 10.06.16</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>This is an extract from a longer piece of observational writing about a walk undertaken in 2018 by Mariame Amouche, a first year architecture student at the University of Westminster:</p>\n\n<p>My journey at New Road began as I stood opposite Wapping High\u2028 School’s main building. As the clock struck three o’clock in the\u2028 afternoon, the school bell rang signalling that the academic day had \u2028finally ended. I watched the crowded building as it started to empty, as\u2028, one by one, the rowdy students exited through the automatic doors\u2028 and entered the sidewalk of the street. Some of them hurriedly raced\u2028 home with their big rucksacks bumping against their backs, whilst\u2028 other students decided to linger around the entrance for friends\u2028 allowing snippets of conversations to bounce across the walls along \u2028the street. Eventually, the once densely populated road became \u2028empty and deserted as the students diffused into thin air, leaving the\u2028 glassy superstructure of Wapping High School to openly tower \u2028above me. This observation was interrupted by the moving red double decker bus which caused my feet to pivot towards its direction and look further down the street. My gaze lingered at the public vehicle as it stopped at the crowded bus stop to allow the students to get in. The disappearance of the bus left the empty street to occupy my vision. </p>\n\n<p>Continue walking up New Road with Mariame <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/919/detail/#three-oclock-walk\">here</a>.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Kempton Court (2 Durward Street and 7–23 Brady Street) was an early project by Sean Mulryan’s Ballymore Properties Ltd, previously Kempton Homes (London) Ltd. Built in 1996, the development comprises 110 flats with ground-floor shop and office units on Brady Street that have since 2004 housed The Haven, an NHS and Metropolitan Police sexual-assault referral centre. Plain, even austere, the long four-storey brick elevations are punctuated by gables over recessed bays with balconettes. The street ranges conceal an inner block aligned with the railway cutting. The estate has been gated since 2005 following complaints from residents about security.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>I am a product (pre-war) of Whitechapel. Mid 1930s, my father, Wolf Goldenberg, rented a shop at 7 Brady Street, from a Mr. Cockerell and the shop was known as Cockerells.</p>\n\n<p>We lived above the shop where we had two bedrooms one of which I shared with my brother. Our bathroom, toilet and kitchen were located in the open air on what was the roof of my dad's storage room at the back of the shop. Somehow my mother managed to keep us clean and cook our meals. My bedroom overlooked an area that belonged to a stonemason and it had a lot of tombstones waiting to be used. Whitechapel Station was a little way beyond. I remember being kept awake by the shunting of the trains in the middle of the night.</p>\n\n<p>When the war started, together with my gasmask, I was evacuated alongside my school - Robert Montefiore - to a village called Mepal just outside Ely in Cambridgeshire. At six years old I was very unhappy, and as nothing warlike seemed to be happening at home for the first nine months of the war, my parents decided to bring me home to Brady Street where I was when the Blitz started. </p>\n\n<p>My father left during the war owing to the difficulties involved with food rationing and coupons, and customers constantly asking for an extra ounce of this or that over and above the rationing. I was re-evacuated to a village called Stretham, also just outside Ely, where I went to school and stayed until the end of the war. I was billeted with a Jewish family who had three kids of their own and who treated me like dirt. My folks eventually moved to Dollis Hill. </p>\n\n<p>Number 5 Brady Street was occupied by Alec the barber. Number 9 was a stone mason by the name of Levy (whose relative coincidentally now lives near me in North London). </p>\n",
"created": "2017-05-30",
"last_edited": "2018-01-08"
},
{
"id": 643,
"title": "115 New Road (including the former New Road Synagogue).",
"author": {
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>A warehouse on this site and that of No. 113 by 1817 was replaced by plain three-storey shophouses, probably put up in 1851 for Duler and Giles of Leman Street, and possibly extending to Nos 117–119. Around 1950 Nisar Ali opened a restaurant at No. 113 that came to be called the Great Tajmahal, then the Jhorna Tandoori Indian Restaurant around 1980. In the mid 1980s No. 113 was rebuilt under a long hipped roof and No. 115 was refronted.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>From the back of 115 New Road there is access to a building that was the New Road Synagogue. Built in 1891–2 to the rear of a large plot of vacant ground (117–121 New Road and back buildings had been cleared in the 1880s), it extended north–south to lie behind Nos 113–119. Its origins were with two Fieldgate Street <em>hevros </em>(prayer circles), mostly people of Polish origin whose premises had been condemned. They combined through the Federation of Synagogues, which had been founded in 1887 by Samuel Montagu, a banker and the Liberal MP for Whitechapel, to help consolidate small <em>minyanim </em>(prayer quora) into larger congregations. Plans were prepared by Lewis Solomon, the Federation’s architect, in what was an early opportunity to provide a ‘model’ purpose-built East End synagogue. A 99-year lease was immediately mortgaged to the Federation through senior congregants: Jacob Singer, a fur merchant of 5 Greenfield Street; Wolf Weber, a Mile End shoemaker; and David Silverberg, a Dalston grocer. The builder was William Reason, of St John Street, Clerkenwell. Of the building cost of £1,350 about £400 came from the <em>hevros</em>, the rest was contributed by the Federation, in reality, most likely by Montagu himself. In a notable rapprochement in what was a prickly relationship between the Federation and the more established Anglo-Jewish United Synagogue, the United’s President, Lord Rothschild, laid a foundation or memorial stone at the opening of the New Road Synagogue – ‘God Save the Queen’ (it was Victoria’s birthday) was sung in Hebrew. </p>\n\n<p>Despite its tucked-away situation, New Road was one of Whitechapel’s more ambitious and architecturally distinctive synagogues, though suitably unpretentious. The interior was lantern-lit and ventilated from above through an ornamentally finished queen-post roof that remains intact. There was space to accommodate more than 300 worshippers (500 was claimed) on the ground floor and in the gallery on three sides. Surprisingly, in a new-build synagogue, albeit on a restricted site, the Ark was on the north wall. In 1955 New Road Synagogue was renovated out of monies that came to the Federation as a result of war-damage and compulsory-purchase orders. However, the congregation dwindled and the synagogue closed in 1974, amalgamating with the East London Central Synagogue, Nelson Street. The foundation stone was removed to Whitechapel Library and thence to London Metropolitan Archives. Sold, the building became a garment workshop for a Bangladeshi manufacturer. The roof-space aside, the interior, including galleries, has been reconstructed.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives (TNA), C13/2777/49: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyors Returns (DSR); Collage 119234: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P04845: Goad maps, 1890: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, ACC/2893/315/001–6; ACC/2943/046; DSR: Goad: Ordnance Survey maps: London County Council Minutess, 23 Dec 1891, p. 1344; 26 Jan. 1892, p. 57: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 15 Jan 1892, p. 15; 27 May 1892, p. 15: <em>Daily Graphic</em>, 26 May 1892: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 28 May 1892; 25 Oct. 1974: TNA, IR58/84798/1517: William J. Fishman,<em>The Streets of East London</em>, 1979, p. 92: Geoffrey Alderman, <em>The Federation of Synagogues, 1887–1987</em>, 1987, pp.24,100,114: Judy Glasman, ‘London Synagogues in the late nineteenth century: Design in context’, <em>London Journal</em>, vol. 13/2, 1988, pp. 151-3: Sharman Kadish, <em>The Synagogues of Britain and Ireland</em>, 2011, p. 153: Tower Hamlets planning applications online </p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-09",
"last_edited": "2018-10-31"
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{
"id": 668,
"title": "Pettitcoat Lane in full song, 1960",
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"body": "<p>BBC Archive footage of market traders in Middlesex Street portion of Petticoat Lane in 1960 <a href=\"https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/577895085916859/\">https://www.facebook.com/BBCArchive/videos/577895085916859/</a></p>\n",
"created": "2018-06-05",
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},
{
"id": 545,
"title": "Early development",
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"properties": {
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"body": "<p>In 1796–7 Thomas Barnes, Whitechapel’s leading builder, took a large plot of land north of Ducking Pond Row between the Liptraps' Whitechapel Distillery and Thomas Street and up to the parish boundary on a building agreement and lease from the Rev. Charles Phillips, undertaking to spend £1000 on building houses within five years. He duly laid out John Street (to the east and erased in the 1860s), Queen Ann Street and Cross Street and built about 100 small houses using available land for brickmaking during the process.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>At this time Barnes was one of the Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers, a committee chaired by the notoriously corrupt Joseph Merceron, under whom ratebook fraud was widespread. It is notable, therefore, that entries in a sewer commissioners’ ratebook from 1803 that record the Liptraps and Barnes on successive lines as holding property valued respectively at 12 shillings and £9 were overwritten and reversed in January 1804, a marginal note claiming an error. The Liptraps' struggle with bankruptcy in 1804 was perhaps not unrelated.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Further west, by 1803 Samuel Special had a slaughterhouse and there was a varnish factory on White’s Row by 1838. Joseph and William Lescher, starch manufacturers, were on the west side of the north end of Thomas Street by 1803 and as Lescher Son & Co. were building extensively in 1847–9.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The starch factory site on the west side of Thomas Street was replaced around 1890 by Blackwall Buildings, 156 dwellings in four ranges built by and for the Great Eastern Railway Company. They were sold in 1933 and cleared around 1970.[^4] St Barnabas Mission Church, a corrugated-iron hall at the north end of Thomas Street, was built in 1893 to plans by H. O. Ellis, architect. It was extended with a clubroom in 1902 and cleared after war damage.[^5] The Sir John Barleycorn public house was further south on the east side of Thomas Street.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>Thomas Street was renamed Fulbourne Street in 1904, after Hugh de Fulbourne, the earliest known rector of Whitechapel. In 1912 Queen Ann Street was renamed Wodeham Street and Cross Street Trahorn Street (after Whitechapel vicars). Queen Ann Street had been noted in Booth’s survey as having some of the area’s worst housing in 1898, with ‘all english’ as opposed to Jewish occupancy. The Pemberton-Barnes Estate still owned many of the Barnes-built houses in the 1930s and the last remnants of replacement housing survived into the 1970s. The streets have gone, but their secondary names have been recycled.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), E/PHI/76A; THCS/289,338: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 7 March 1810</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, THCS/289, p.64</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, M/93/321; /333; /412; /418; Land Tax returns; Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; District Surveyors Returns (DSR)</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Builder</em>, 20 April 1889, p. 305: Goad map, 1890: DSR: London School of Economics Library (LSE), Booth/B/351, p. 239: <em>Estates Gazette</em>, 4 Feb. 1933, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: DSR: London County Council Minutes, 28 Feb 1893, p. 205</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LMA, M/93/159/1</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: DSR: LSE, Booth/B/351, p. 245</p>\n",
"created": "2018-01-03",
"last_edited": "2020-09-21"
},
{
"id": 784,
"title": "Graces Alley",
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"body": "<p>The alley from the north-west corner of Marine Square was first called Boat Alley in 1683. Felix Calverd, a brewer, tax farmer and Fire Office trustee associate of Nicholas Barbon (who undertook the development of Wellclose Square), was then assigned the superior interest of the frontages. Leases were given to Francis Hooper for the east end of the north side, Charles Armistead, west end of the north side, and William Blackwell, south side. Building work was doubtless slow to get underway, but in early 1694 Calverd was taxed for eight empty houses at Well Close. George Jackson, a City bricklayer, built at least two 14ft-frontage houses on the alley’s south side in 1694–5 under a lease from Calverd to Edward Wright, a Clerkenwell glazier.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>By 1720, with its frontages fully built up with ten houses on each side, Boat Alley had come to be known as Graces Alley, a reference to the former abbey of St Mary Grace that had stood on the site later occupied by the Royal Mint. Next to Wellclose Square on the north side at 1 Graces Alley was the George Prince of Denmark’s Head, or Prince of Denmark public house, the name a nod to the square’s Danish church and occupancy – Prince George of Denmark and Norway, Queen Anne’s husband, died in 1708. This pub was part of Hooper’s block of ten houses which passed to Benjamin Collyer, a Surrey merchant. In 1732 John Harper, a citizen needlemaker, was given a new lease of the whole row on the north side of Graces Alley to run to 1805. Soon thereafter Collyer was obliged to sell and by the 1770s part of a larger property, which also included fifteen houses along the south side of Cable Street, was divided in the ownerships of Edmund Probyn, William Coward and the Duke of Bridgewater. Leases were co-ordinated to fall in together in 1805.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>John Yarrem, a silversmith and hardware dealer or toyman, was at 4 Graces Alley by 1760. In the years around 1800, Benjamin Abrahams, a slop (clothing) seller, was at No. 2 and George Holding, a confectioner at No. 3. In December 1807 Probyn, the Earl of Bridgewater and Ann Jemima Wroughton issued new leases for the unusual term of 46 years; rebuilding was probably associated. William Marsh, a publican, took 1–2 Graces Alley, the former continuing as the Prince of Denmark. Holding and Yarrem’s son, also John, continued respectively at Nos 3 and 4, which appear both, like the alley’s other houses, to have been two full rooms deep at this juncture.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Shop use was general along both sides of the alley through the nineteenth century. After many years as an empty site, 7–8 Graces Alley were rebuilt in 1897–8. The American Stores beer house was at No. 10 in the decades either side of 1900, and the Royal Standard public house was at the west end of the south side, on the Well (Ensign) Street corner.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>Up to the 1960s the stretch of Cable Street immediately north between Well Street and Fletcher Street had a row of around twenty early- and mid-nineteenth-century three-storey shophouses, which included the Bricklayers’ Arms at No. 26, and the Admiral Blakeney’s Head at No. 56 on the Fletcher Street corner. When general clearance of Graces Alley and both sides of this stretch of Cable Street was programmed in the early 1960s, the houses on the south side of the alley had already been demolished. Particular complaints were made about an unlicensed club at 7–8 Graces Alley, owned by George Gavrilides and frequented by ‘coloured men’. Clearance of all but 1–4 Graces Alley and what had been Wilton’s Music Hall ensued by 1968.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: John M. Sims, ‘The Trust Lands of the Fire Office’, <em>The Guildhall Miscellany</em>, vol. 4/no. 2, April 1972, pp. 88–113, at p.109: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), COL/CHD/LA/03/040/007; CLC/521/MS00922: Patricia Richardson, <em>Felix Calvert & Company, a Capital Brewing Family</em>, 2015.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, Q/KAS/006: Huntington Library, MSS EL10389, EL10432–3: <em>London Gazette</em>, 12 Jan. 1739: Carole Zeidman, ‘Wilton’s, a history of the hall and houses’, 2015, pp. 9–11.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, Land Tax returns; MDR/1808/8/498–504; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/338/522512; 397/628656; 400/630603: information kindly supplied by Frank Kelsall.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: LMA, District Surveyors Returns: Ordnance Survey maps: London County Council Minutes, 15 March 1898, p.205: Post Office Directories (POD): Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/RUC/1/14; P/MIS/15/1/3; The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84827/4475–90.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: POD: LMA, GLC/MA/SC/03/1477–9; GLC/DG/EL/03/G017: TNA, IR58/84822/3962–83.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-07",
"last_edited": "2021-08-06"
},
{
"id": 713,
"title": "90 Whitechapel High Street and the site of Inkhorn Court",
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"body": "<p>A model of cut-price fin-de-siècle jauntiness, with scrolled broken pediment and dainty oriel, No. 90 is best remembered as Blooms restaurant, which was opened in 1952 by Solomon (Sidney) Bloom (1921-2003). The building was erected in 1910 by E. Laurance & Sons of Eagle Wharf Road to the designs of E. N. Clifton & Son for Edmund H. Hodgkinson, retired marine insurance broker and inventor.[^1] Until the advent of Blooms, the building was in typical High Street rag-trade use, with doctor’s and dentist’s surgeries in some of the upper parts.[^2] The restaurant’s name - M. Bloom (Kosher) & Son Ltd - honoured Sidney’s his father, Morris, who had run salt-beef shops and snack bars in Brick Lane before the war.[^3] To the end, Blooms retained much of the character of its 1950s refit. The front of the restaurant was a retail delicatessen with a counter to the left of the door, outside which a bagel-seller often sat. Reviewing it in 1995, not long before it closed, the writer Will Self described the ‘large, lozenge-shaped room … empty save for rank upon rank of snowily clothed tables. One side of the restaurant is dominated by a huge photo-mural of Petticoat Lane, shot from the air. The other side is entirely mirrored. So despite the lack of clientele, we still felt as if we were in a lively street scene’.[^4] Marcus Binney, visiting a few years earlier, found ‘the interior is Festival of Britain, down to the 'hairpin' pattern balustrades… The ceiling has the cove lighting of the jukebox age. It's not high style, far from it - just a time warp.. the colours are pure GWR – chocolate and cream’. [^5]</p>\n\n<p>When Blooms closed in 1996 (a branch in Golders Green survives), salt beef and lokshen pudding gave way to burgers, as the restaurant reopened as a branch of Burger King. The upper floors, previously in office use, were converted to five self-contained flats c. 1998.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>The 1910 building replaced a substantial shop-house, perhaps anciently an inn, that gave access to an alley called Windmill or ‘Wine Mill’ Court by 1674, but soon renamed Inkhorn Court (see below).[^7] By the time of its rebuilding in 1910 it was a brick-built house, four windows wide, of late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century appearance. From the 1770s to the 1830s it was Mary Phipps & Sons, carpet warehouse.[^8] James Armstrong, ‘exhibitor of figures’ – a sort of low-rent Madame Tussaud’s, with wax figures - was there in 1851, followed, almost exclusively, till the rebuilding by a succession of shoemakers, on an increasingly industrial scale, the shop portion in use sometimes as a greengrocers.[^9]</p>\n\n<p><strong>Inkhorn Court</strong></p>\n\n<p>Inkhorn Court is first identifiable as ‘Wine Mill Alley’ in 1674, a corruption presumably of Windmill Alley, the name on seventeenth-century maps. Then it held eleven houses, mostly of three hearths, though with one of six, along its east side and narrow north end only.[^10] By the early eighteenth century it had become Inkhorn Court, sometimes ‘5 Inkhorn Court’ (It is not to be confused with Ink Horn Court, on the City side of Petticoat Lane). By 1803 there were ‘nine substantial brick-built houses of three stories’ in the court.[^11] John Hollingshead characterised it in 1861: ‘The lowest order of Irish, when they get an opportunity, will take a room and sub-let it to as many families as the floor will hold. Inkhorn Court is a fair sample of an Irish colony. The houses are three stories high and there is not a corner unoccupied’.[^12] Then the three two-storey double-fronted houses on the west side were newly built but, the court was not even 6ft wide and had already attracted the attention of the Whitechapel District Board, whose Medical Officer of Health, John Liddle, found that while the seven old houses on the east side (and one at the north end) each had a small yard with a privy, the new houses on the west side, as in Queen’s Place, built on the site of a warehouse and the penny theatre behind <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/323/detail/\">No. 91</a>, were lit only from the court, and shared three ‘open and exposed privies’ at its south end.[^13] Twenty years later the whole court was in squalid condition: ‘At Nos 3, 4 , 5 and 6 Inkhorn Court, the yards are flooded with liquid filth. The public privies are stopped, and they are in a filthy condition.’ By the time the houses were demolished in 1881-2 for the Metropolitan Board of Works’ Flower and Dean Street (and Goulston Street) improvement there were 100 people living there.[^14]. A successful appeal in 1886 by the MBW against the amount of compensation offered to the leaseholder for the demolished houses saw its solicitor highlight the conditions in Inkhorn Court: ‘It is impossible to speak too strongly of the disgraceful character of these premises, the approach from High Street, Whitechapel, being some 3ft wide, and the courts being of wholly insufficient width for sanitary requirements’, and that the leaseholder had had numerous Nuisance Removal notices served on him. <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/325/detail/\">Sir George’s Residence for Respectable Girls</a> was built on the site the same year.[^15]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84815/3207: Census: <em>Daily Telegraph & Courier (London)</em>, 19 Oct 1895, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: DSR: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB): William D. Rubinstein, Michael Jolles and Hilary L. Rubinstein, eds, <em>The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History</em>, London 2011, pp. 104-05</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Observer: Life Magazine</em>, 5 Nov 1995, p. 51</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Evening Standard</em>, 19 May 1992, pp. 40-2</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Hearth Tax returns (HT) 167-5: LMA, Land Tax returns (LT)</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: LT: <em>The New Complete Guide to…the City of London and Parts Adjacent</em>, London 1783, p. 280: <em>Wakefield’s Merchant and Tradesman’s General Directory for London</em>, London 1793, p. 241</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: POD: Census: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 12 Dec 1868, p. 1: <em>Daily Telegraph and Courier (London)</em>, 21 June 1881, p. 3</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: HT 1674-5: Ogilby and Morgan map of London 1676</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>Morning Post</em>, 30 July 1803, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: John Hollingshead, <em>Ragged London</em>, London 1861, p. 45</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: <em>The Builder (B)</em>, 28 Dec 1861, p. 892: TNA, IR58/84795/2016</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: Census</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: Francis Peek, <em>Social Wreckage: A View of the Laws of England as They Affect the Poor</em>, London 1883, pp. 207-8: <em>The Housing Question in London, being and Account of the Work done by the Metropolitan Board of Works between … 1855 and 1900</em>, London,1900, p. 121: <em>B</em>, 18 Dec 1880, p. 376: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 19 March 1886, p. 537</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-11",
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},
{
"id": 551,
"title": "Kearley & Tonge",
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"body": "<p>Kearley & Tonge was a tea-importing firm founded in 1876 by Hudson Ewbanke Kearley with headquarters at Mitre Square near Aldgate. The company diversified into provision wholesaling and by 1890 had 200 branches known as International Stores. It first moved into Whitechapel to a bacon factory on the west side of Thomas Street immediately south of the Vallance Road recreation ground, enlarging it in 1892. Then a former soda works to the south on Durward Street was taken for replacement in 1894–5 by a six-bay, six-storey block, part warehousing, part a factory for making jams, cakes, biscuits and sweets. William Eve & Son were the architects. Kearley & Tonge’s wholesale grocery business, henceforward also known as International Tea Company’s Stores, had what it called its London Central Depot on Durward Street, employing 140 men and 51 women at what was said to be the largest facility of its kind in the UK.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Expansion eastwards to the Thomas (now Castlemaine) Street corner was blocked in 1896 in a dispute with Arthur Crow, District Surveyor, about regulations regarding warehouse sub-division. The plans were altered and carried forward in 1902–4 as an eight-storey block with five more bays to Durward Street and nine to the Thomas Street return. In 1911–12 a separate six-storey seven-bay eastern block went up on the other side of what had become Fulbourne Street, with linking bridges and a tunnel, all designed by William Eve & Sons. There was internal steel-frame construction and some concrete flooring.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Through all this David Stanton & Sons, hay and straw dealers, had held on to stabling premises of 1891 on the south side of the bacon factory. That firm had also built a warehouse and dwellings at the west end of the north side of Durward Street in 1894–5, and redeveloped on Thomas Street in 1901–4. Kearley & Tonge swallowed up their site and almost all of the rest of the block south of the recreation ground and built further to a height of eight storeys in 1924–8. The provisioners were taken over by British American Tobacco in 1972; the Whitechapel premises were promptly sold and the site cleared.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyors Returns (DSR); GLC/AR/BR/22/037446/01–02; GLC/AR/BR/22/ES/000280: http://www.internationalstores.co.uk</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The Builder</em>, 12 Dec 1896, p. 501: LMA, DSR; GLC/AR/BR/22/037446/01–02; GLC/AR/BR/22/ES/000280</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>The Builder</em>, 13 June 1891, p. 480: Post Office Directories: LMA, DSR; GLC/AR/BR/22/037446/02</p>\n",
"created": "2018-01-04",
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"body": "<p>Built in 1894 and once extending to No. 123 as four units, this was an early project by Nathaniel and Raphael (Ralph) Davis, the youngest of the seven Davis brothers. Red brick and four storeys, these were dwellings between shops and top-floor tailors’ workrooms. By 1902 No. 117 hosted the Provident Medical Aid Friendly Society.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 41192: Post Office Directories: Isobel Watson, ‘Rebuilding London: Abraham Davis and his Brothers, 1881–1924’, <em>London Journal</em>, vol. 29, 2004, pp.62–84</p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-09",
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"id": 94,
"title": "Re-opening and Extension, c.1871 to 1889",
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"body": "<p> </p>\n\n<p>The density and poverty of the area surrounding Whitechapel Baths was frequently noted in late nineteenth-century reports. Two years after their closure, Dr John Liddle, Medical Officer for Health in Whitechapel, reported families living, eating and sleeping in one room. With women washing and drying clothes in the same space, the inhabitants were ‘drinking in the seeds of disease from an atmosphere reeking with foul steam’. Well-placed supporters rallied to resurrect the Model. Progress towards re-opening was however painfully slow. [^7]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>The Baths found their saviour in the Vestry of Whitechapel. The Vestry agreed to take over the management of the Baths as long as money was raised to cover its debts and ensure its repair. To raise funds, a musical benefit was held in the Royal Albert Hall, the amateur orchestra assisted by no less than the Duke of Edinburgh. By 1876 a scheme of reconstruction had been approved and £8,500 was borrowed from the Metropolitan Board of Works to support the refurbishment. D. B. Glass undertook the building work and the Baths opened once again in 1878. [^8]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>In that same year a revision to the Baths and Wash-houses Act extended legislation to enable the provision of swimming pools by local authorities. Responding to the ‘great recreational explosion’ and to the opportunity presented by the revised Act, Frederic Mocatta and the Rev. Samuel Barnett led a proposal to erect two new swimming baths in 1884. These eminent East End social reformers promised to secure the purchase of land to the north of the site, reclaimed by the Artizans' Commission, from the MBW. Three houses annexed to the Baths on the south side were also sold to raise the necessary funds for construction to begin. Local architect, John Hudson, drew up the design in 1885 and the building contract was granted to Mark Gentry. In May 1886 the new swimming baths were opened by the Lord Mayor before the performance of ‘a series of clever aquatic evolutions’. Entry into the first class pool was set at 6d and 2d for the second. [^9]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>The addition of the new swimming baths doubled the area occupied by the Model and a new entrance canopy to Goulston Street extended out beyond the previous building line. The internal arrangement of the bath house was also adjusted to further prioritise ‘men’s second class’ slipper baths. Both pools, accessible only to men, were lined with dressing boxes above which galleries were constructed in 1890 along with two waiting rooms which lay to the east. The new swimming baths enabled many local school children to learn to swim and were especially frequented by the parish Board schools. The old bath house on the other hand continued to serve a diverse range of local inhabitants. One paper reported “Jews, English, German, Dutch, Polish, harkers and costermongers, the dirtiest of the dirty” using the slipper baths once weekly. [^10]</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>B</em>, 19 April 1873, p.311</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>B</em>, 28 Feb 1876, p. 199; 12 July 1873, p.556; <em>ILN</em>, 21 June 1873, p.595; MBW Mins, 28 March 1884; <em>The Metropolitan</em>, 27 Dec 1873; DSR</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: A. Campbell, <em>Report on Public Baths and Wash-houses in the United Kingdom</em>, 1918, p.4; <em>B, </em>26 July 1884, p.145; 18 August 1877, p.856; 26 July 1884, p.145; 21 March 1885; C. Love, <em>A Social History of Swimming in England, 1800-1918: Splashing in the Serpentine</em>, p.2; THLHLA, Pamphlet, ‘Whitechapel Public Swimming Baths’, n.d., 611.1; MBW Mins, 28 March 1884; <em>London Daily News</em>, 19 May 1886, p.6</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: THLHLA, L/SMW/D1/1, p.82, p.131; <em>Pall Mall Gazette</em>, 31 May 1882, p.2</p>\n",
"created": "2016-07-27",
"last_edited": "2021-02-10"
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"body": "<p>Yoel Sheridan grew up in Goodman's Fields in the 1930s and 40s and has written about the experiences of his family at this time in a book called 'From Here to Obscurity' (Tenterbooks, 2001). He recalls that he visited the Goulston Street Public Baths with his brothers every Friday on his way home from school. Here he describes attending the baths for the first time with his elder brother:</p>\n\n<p>\"Yulus was escorted, on his first visit, by his eldest brother who had the appearance of an expert bather. He always looked immaculate...Having paid on entry Yulus was given a ticket that he handed to an attendant in exchange for a clean neatly folded white towel and a bar of soap. Yulus sat with his brother on a bench against the wall of a clinical white-tiled ante-room that had a strong smell of chlorine. Next! Shouted another attendant who wore white overalls over white trousers and white canvas shoes. Yulus was ushered through swinging doors, his brother at his side, into a long, wide corridor flanked on either side by cubicles, all but one, with their doors closed. The doors were not full-sized, there being a large gap between the bottom and the floor and of such a height that the attendant, by stretching, could see over. There was a clock on every door, each showing a different time. On the outside walls of each cubicle were hot and cold water taps that were operated by a large removable key handle, presently attached to the tap of the open cubicle. The attendant swung the door open further to reveal a white bath that in Yulus's eyes was enormous, big enough for a swim. The bath was half full of water. Clean looking but yellowish in colour. Test it, said the attendant as Yulus stared at the bath in bewilderment. It's his first time, said his brother. Put yer 'and in and see if it's too 'ot, said the cockney attendant standing at the open door, broom in hand. Yulus touched the water gingerly and said Ouch! Too 'ot? Fought so, said the attendant as he moved the key from the hot to the cold tap and swung it round. A strong gush of cold water streamed out of the elephant-sized tap outlet for a few seconds and then stopped as he swung the key handle back. Try it now. He ordered. Go on, stick yer 'and in. Be''er? (the 't's' of better and other words were not pronounced) he asked. Yulus nodded. Fought so, said the attendant as he adjusted the clock face on the door. You's go' twen'y mini's, tha's till 'alf pas' the 'our, like the clock sez and not a mini' more. Unnerstan'? How will I know, if the clock is on the other side of the door? Cos there's a real clock up there, ain't there? He said pointing upwards with his broom to a large clock hanging from the ceiling that could be seen from every cubicle.</p>\n\n<p>Ask him now, said his brother, nudging Yulus to instill confidence. Yulus had been told that it was more private to bathe in the public baths than at home. If that's the case, said Yulus, then why don't they call them private baths? You'll have to ask at the baths, he was told. Whadge wanna know? Asked the attendant with a momentary show of kindness. Why are the baths called public when each cubicle is private and why are they called slipper baths? Ventured Yulus, never short of adding a question. Wha' a bloody question! How should I know? I only work 'ere. Retorted the attendant as he turned to Yulus's brother...You're next. We ain't go' all day yer know. Nah you! He said turning to Yulus. Ge' yer clothes orf, ge' in and ge' washed. Every bi' of yer nah. There ain't much of yer, so i' shoodden take long...E's a bright un, the attendant could be heard muttering. Why is private public? What a bloody question!</p>\n\n<p>The water that had felt comfortable to touch was too hot for the body, but Yulus was too embarrassed to call for more cold water having said it was OK. He got in, turned pink all over and washed and dried within five minutes. He wanted to get out as soon as possible but was afraid that they would suggest that he hadn't washed at all, so he stood by the bath splashing the water and said everything was OK again when asked. After a couple of visits he soon got used to the atmosphere and learned to call out like the rest of the bathers for more hot or cold water or joined the communal singing that would break out from time to time. One song that was sung to the tune of the Volga Boatman contained the lines: Hot water number forty four, repeated three times and followed by Ooh Ooh and a long drawn out Aaaah and shouts of laughter. Quiet! The attendant would shout above the din. Carn 'ear myself wash ou' the barvs! Which he did dexterously with his long-handled yellow broom after each bather and before the next.\" </p>\n",
"created": "2018-02-06",
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},
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"id": 559,
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"body": "<p>Following the failure of shopping-mall schemes, plans for developing the five-acre area north of the east end of Durward Street were advanced in 1991 by the Spitalfields Development Group, headed by Michael Bear with John Miller and Partners as architects, proposing 118 low-rent flats (58) and houses (60) and a public leisure centre with two swimming pools, a leisure pool having been part of the shopping-mall scheme from 1986. This ‘community benefit package’ was put forward as part of a deal for the redevelopment of the Spitalfields Market site.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>A second scheme was submitted in 1995 and after approval in 1996 work went ahead on the building for Tower Hamlets Council of the Whitechapel Sports Centre, with funding from English Partnerships and the Bethnal Green City Challenge. Pollard Thomas & Edwards were the architects, working with Price & Myers, structural engineers, and Hall & Tawse City, contractors. Completed in 1998, the sports centre opened in 1999 as a low-slung irregular block with saw-profile east-light roofing. A single-storey gently curved red-brick screen to the street has cogged bands for decorative texture. Certain facilities are reserved for women only, to take account of the local Bangladeshi-origin population’s preferences.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 27 Sept. 1991: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Whitechapel Shopping Centre Development Brief, 1986</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>RIBA Journal</em>, June 1998, pp. 40–45: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: http://pollardthomasedwards.co.uk/project/whitechapel-community-sports-centre/</p>\n",
"created": "2018-01-04",
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"id": 787,
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"body": "<p>The site to the west and north of Wilton’s Music Hall, empty since the 1960s, was sold off by the London Residuary Body in the late 1980s. A 1994 proposal for a multi-storey car park (Skypark) was seen off and the site was built up in 1997–9 with two- and three-storey stock-brick faced ranges fronting Cable Street, Ensign Street and Graces Alley for thirty flats and maisonettes. A weak Neo-Georgian treatment extends to rusticated rendering.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: Theatres Trust Resource Centre files</p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-07",
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{
"id": 586,
"title": "My family's shop at 28 White Church Lane",
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"body": "<p>My grandfather Harry Kleiman, and then my father, Alfred Kleiman, had a woollen merchant’s shop at 28 White Church Lane from before World War 2 to the mid-1960s when my father relocated the business to the West End. I have vivid memories of spending time there during school holidays in the 1950s.</p>\n",
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"title": "A family business",
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"body": "<p>Upholsterer Richard Fawcett (1798-1868) came to London from Kirkby Stephen in Westmorland. He was joined in business by his brother-in-law, Thomas Paddon (1803-1887), born in Pilton, Barnstaple, Devon, who became a Churchwarden of the Parish of St George in the East. On the retirement of Fawcett & Paddon, the business was managed by Paddon's eldest son Thomas (1834-1918).</p>\n",
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"title": "88 Whitechapel High Street",
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"body": "<p>This substantial four-storey building, three windows wide, appears to be as largely rebuilt and extended in 1838, apparently by James Goldie, distiller.[^1] Its predecessor was already a substantial building, with nine hearths, by 1666 when it was in the tenure of Hugh Best (perhaps the vintner and tenant of the Star Inn in Bishopsgate, who had leased Whitechapel property to John Sanford before 1677, see below) who had departed by 1674.[^2] By 1720 it was the London premises of Samuel Bellamy, coppersmith of Whitechapel and Erith, who that year became tenant and subcontractor to the English Copper Company, of two coppermills and a dwelling house on the Wandle at Wimbledon.[^3] Bellamy left all his property in Whitechapel and Wimbledon to his widow, Elizabeth, who in turn in 1732 bequeathed them to William Thoyts (1708-73), whose father, her husband’s executor, was her cousin.[^4] From then till his death in 1773, No 88 was run by Thoyts, described as ‘a great Coppersmith in Whitechapel’, and ‘the King of the Tinkers’, who married well and died in 1773 possessed of a substantial fortune. From 1753 the governess of Thoyts’s two young daughters was Jane Warton, who published proto-feminist literature anonymously.[^5] Thoyts’ business and property in 1773 passed to his son John, who outlived him by only two years, leaving the business, including copper mills William had taken at Merton in 1769 (having previously moved from Bellamy’s mills to some at Carshalton) to be run by his assistant Peter Robinson, until his son, William Thoyts, achieved his majority, and the firm, as Thoyts, Miners and Co. was at 88 Whitechapel High Street till 1807, succeeded by Morgan & Ward, and Thoyts, Morgan & Ward moved to 63 Whitechapel High Street in 1809, continuing there, as G. Thoyts & Tritton, with a warehouse in Wapping, until 1828.[^6] By 1812 No 88 was the Coffee Mart, John Johnson, agent for the West India Merchants.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>No. 88 appears to have been substantially rebuilt in 1838 after it was taken over from Dudderidge & Co., drapers, by a Scots distiller, James Goldie, who had in 1836 built a new distillery adjoining to the rear in George Yard (Gunthorpe Street).[^8] Goldie over-extended himself financially – it was said on his own house, Blake Hall in Wanstead – and was bankrupt by 1841.[^9] The premises were taken over by a newly formed, and inadequately financed gin distillers, the British Hollands Company, who employed Goldie as manager, a role he fulfilled concurrently as founding Secretary of the Commercial Gas Light and Coke Company from the same address.[^10] While the British Hollands was out of business by 1843, the gas company flourished, having secured an ‘eligible site’ on the Regent’s Canal in Mile End, and were soon supplying most of East London.[^11] The gas company moved offices by 1845 and Goldie left London, and from 1847 for nearly ninety years, No. 88 was an auctioneer and pawnbrokers, firstly George Bonham, ousted by the expansion of Venables drapers into his former premises at <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/373/detail/\">Nos 104-05</a>.[^12] The large distillery room built in 1836 by Goldie to the rear of the premises in George Yard had become the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/386/detail/\">George Yard Ragged School</a> in 1855.</p>\n\n<p>Ashridge Brothers, pawnbrokers, had been in situ for fifty years when No. 88 became offices in 1934-5 for the short-lived <em>Jewish Daily Post</em>, the ground floor reinforced by Holland, Hannen & Cubitts to take the presses. ‘Its primary object is to give an unbiassed account of daily happenings of interest in Jewish life’, However, the paper struggled to compete with its long-established rival <em>Di Tsayt </em>(‘<em>The</em> <em>Jewish Times</em>’) and went into liquidation in 1935 after being sued by a rabbi over a salacious story it printed about him.[^13] The new paper no doubt also came into conflict with the vested interests of the ‘closed shop’ English print unions, not to mention ruffling the feathers of assorted Nazis and fellow travellers.[^14]</p>\n\n<p>The most striking addition from the Post’s brief sojourn, are the decorative metal reliefs by Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), commissioned by the paper in 1935. Szyk was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Lodz, and had studied drawing and painting at the progressive Académie Julian in Paris. He had also developed a line in political caricatures, which earned him considerable fame after he emigrated to the United States in 1940, but his earliest anti-Hitler cartoons were published in February and March 1935 in the <em>Jewish Daily Post</em>.[^15] The same year the Post commissioned metal reliefs from Szyk, two of which survive over the main door of No. 88, and inside above the entrance to the lift. That on the entrance depicts a Magen (Star of) David supported by two Lions of Judah and wielding sabres. Beneath is a pair of medallions, decorated with Menorot or seven-branched candelabra. That above the lift entrance on the first floor (another was destroyed in a fire) depicts traditional Jewish symbolism often found on Torah Arks: two Lions of Judah holding the <em>Luhot</em> (the Tablets of the Law) inscribed with the first Hebrew letters of each of the Ten Commandments.[^16]. The current business, Albert's menswear, has been in occupation since 1942, the front of the shop latterly augmented by an additional business offering Jack the Ripper tours and vaping accoutrements. The shopfront of polished granite with brass-framed windows, along with shop panelling, apparently dates from alterations in the 1950s.[^17] The entry arch to Gunthorpe Street through No. 88 has tiled decoration painted with a map of the area, inspired by Ogilby & Morgan's 1676 map of London, partly undertaken by pupils of <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/399/detail/\">Canon Barnett School</a> under the artistic direction of Rachel Johnstone, as part of the Bethnal Green City Challenge regeneration programme, c. 1995.[^18]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax returns (LT)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Hearth Tax returns (HT) 1666 and 1674-5: The National Archives (TNA), PROB 11/367/97: Kenneth Rogers, ‘On some issuers of 17th-century London tokens, whose names were not known to Boyne and Williamson’, <em>The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society</em>, Fifth ser./8, 1928, p. 64: Charles Matthew Clode, ed., <em>Memorials of the Guild of Merchant Tailors of the Fraternity of St John the Baptist</em>, London 1875, pp. 32-3</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>London Gazette</em>, 2 to 5 Jan 1720: LMA, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/012: E.N. Montague, <em>Copper Milling on the Wandle</em>, Merton Historical Society, 1999: <a href=\"http://www.wandle.org/mills/mitchammill.pdf\">http://www.wandle.org/mills/mitchammill.pdf</a>: <a href=\"http://www.wandle.org/aboutus/mills/mcgow/mcgow37.htm\">http://www.wandle.org/aboutus/mills/mcgow/mcgow37.htm</a>: <a href=\"http://www.wandle.org/mills/wimbledonmill.pdf\">http://www.wandle.org/mills/wimbledonmill.pdf</a></p>\n\n<p>[^4]: TNA, PROB 11/593/72; PROB 11/653/366</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>London Daily Post</em>, 28 Nov 1735: <em>Lloyd’s Evening Post</em>, 24 to 26 Nov 1773: <em>Gentleman’s Magazine</em>, March 1799, p. 259: Stephen Hughes, <em>Copperopolis: Landscapes of the Early Industrial Period in Swansea</em>, Aberystwyth 2008, p. 44: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub </em>Warton</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Post Office Directories (POD): E.N. Montague,<em> The ‘Amery Mills’ of Merton Priory, the Copper Mills and the Board Mills</em>, Merton Historical Society, 1997: <a href=\"http://www.wandle.org/mills/amerymill.pdf\">http://www.wandle.org/mills/amerymill.pdf</a></p>\n\n<p>[^7]: POD: LT: <em>The New Complete Guide to All Persons who Have Any Trade Or Concern with the City of London or Parts Adjacent</em>, London 1788, p. xx: <em>Wakefield’s Merchant and Tradesman’s General Directory for London</em>, London 1794, p. 307: TNA, PROB 11/1007/26: <em>Bury and Norwich Post</em>, 18 March 1812, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: LT: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 2 July 1836, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Census: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 26 March 1840, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 11 April 1838, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: Anthony Francis, <em>Stepney Gas Works: The Archaeology and History of the Commercial Gas Lighgt and Coke Company’s Works at Harford Street, London E1, 1837-1946</em>, London 2010</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: <em>JC</em>, 10 Sept 1999, New Year Pull Out pp. x-xi</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: <em>Daily Herald</em>, 5 Feb 1935, p. 11: <em>Londonderry Sentinel</em>, 7 March 1935, p. 2: <em>Sheffield Independent</em>, 24 April 1935, p. 6: Gregor Schwartz-Bostunisch, <em>Juedischer Imperialismus</em>, Landsberg-am-Lech, 1935, p. 388: Leonard Prager, <em>Yiddish Culture in Britain, Frankfurt</em>, 1990, p.526</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: information Dr Jaap Harskamp</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: National Heritage List, 1391964: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/THL/D/2/30/170: Szyk identification first made by Charles O’Brien for <em>Pevsner City Guides: London East, New Haven & London</em>, 2005, p.428: Joseph P. Ansell, <em>Arthur Szyk: Artist, Jew, Pole</em>, Oxford 2004, pp.88-9: Steven Luckert, <em>The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk</em>, Washington, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2003</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: POD: THLHLA, L/THL/D/2/30/170</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: <a href=\"http://www.exploringeastlondon.co.uk/eel/Whitechapel/Whitechapel.htm#Radicals\">http://www.exploringeastlondon.co.uk/eel/Whitechapel/Whitechapel.htm#Radicals</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-11",
"last_edited": "2020-08-18"
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