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"body": "<p>An earlier timber cottage on this site partially blocked an alleyway that was here by the 1650s. It was called King David's Alley or David and Harp Alley.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-07",
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"id": 694,
"title": "75 Whitechapel High Street and site of Bull Court",
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"body": "<p>Although much repaired and extended, this substantial four-storey building is one of the few on the High Street that may retain eighteenth-century fabric – or possibly earlier, judging by red bricks, possibly reused, evident in the party walls.[^1] It is three windows wide, with a double-pitch M-roof.</p>\n\n<p>The site’s early history is uncertain, though it is likely to have been part of the ground between Angel Alley and what became Osborn Street occupied by the brewers James Enyon and Samuel Cranmer in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.[^2] By 1673 one Richard Bowler was in occupation of the High Street site, and by 1711 Joseph Bowler, a wealthy cordwainer and presumably a relative, left the house, along with other property on the south side of the High Street that had previously formed part of Enyon/Cranmer’s land.[^3] By 1735, when the house was conveyed along with those on the sites of Nos 74 and 76 by Henry Hall, grocer, to John Stone, a Covent Garden apothecary, it was divided into two parts, but described as ‘formerly known by the sign of the King’s Head’, suggesting earlier use as an inn.[^4] From 1753 it had reverted to single use, as a distillery owned by James Read (d. 1765) and his son William (d. 1809), who in 1763 married into the prosperous Rex family of Whitechapel distillers, by which connection he was able to remortgage his Whitechapel property and forswear distilling.[^5] The house ceased to be a distillery by 1781, and was occupied first by William Hale Demeza, stationer and constitutional reformer (1781-7), subsequent use being by a tea dealer and grocer, John Nightingale, who moved to No. 84 c. 1806, succeeded by Bligh, ironmongers, who were there when the premises were damaged by the fire that destroyed No. 74 and who remained till the 1830s.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>Thereafter it became successively a carpet warehouse, a grocers, and outfitters. In the 1880s the London School Board had a committee room in the building.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>Another fire in 1890, when it was occupied by the outfitter Philip Moses who then moved to No. 83, brought substantial repairs.[^8] After a brief interlude under another outfitter, the local Liberal politician Robert Rycroft (recently ousted from No. 79 which was demolished in 1890 for Whitechapel Library), had the shop (‘Ladies of Whitechapel say that Rycroft’s is the best place in London to buy corsets – they wear well, fit well, look well, and sell well’), followed from 1894 till c. 1935 by a branch of the outfitters Dunn & Co., founded from 1887 by the Quaker G.A. Dunn.[^9] It was then run as an amusement arcade until the 1950s, when it was used as premises for wholesalers of textiles and fancy goods, and the back of the building extended and reconstructed c. 1972.[^10] Since c. 2002 it has been a shop and storage for Audiotime (UK) Ltd, a wholesaler and retailer of electrical goods and homewares, established in 1972 by Iqbal Mahmood Shahid, and previously at 69 Whitechapel High Street, opposite.[^11]</p>\n\n<p><strong>Bull Court (demolished)</strong></p>\n\n<p>From at latest the mid-seventeenth century what is now No. 75 High Street has included a narrow entryway at its left side to Bull Alley, later Bull Court.[^12] In the seventeenth century the alley was lined with twenty small houses of between one and three hearths (of those recorded), but it was truncated in the early eighteenth century by the development of the Swan brewery and the creation of an entrance to its yard from what is now Osborn Street, and by 1761 had only around ten houses.[^13]. All but one of the remaining houses on the east side of Bull Court were pulled down some time in the early nineteenth century but the west side survived as four small houses for another half century. Occupants in 1841 included several weavers, a carman, a cooper, a tailor, a seamstress, a costermonger and a corn doctor (chiropodist). By 1851 only one house was inhabited, that by a carpenter, by 1861 it was unoccupied, by 1871 it was found that ‘Bull Court no longer stands’, and in 1881 Bull Court is said to be ‘closed up’.[^14] However, by 1891 a range of lodgings on the west side, 1, 2, 3 and 4 Bull Court, apparently accessed from Osborn Street, was occupied by fifteen single men, mostly labourers, though there is no sign of occupation by 1911 and in 1914 ‘1 to 4 Bull Court are pulled down and the land is unoccupied’.[^15]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 16 June 1827, p. 1: <em>York Herald</em>, 10 Jan 1890, p. 5] </p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, LMA/4453/F/01/001</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Ancestry, LMA London wills</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Tower Hamlets Local history Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/HLC/1/14/1</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, Land Tax returns, (LT)</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LT: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Census: LT: <em>East London Observer</em> (<em>ELO</em>), 17 Oct 1885, p. 5</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: LMA, District Surveyor's Returns (DSR)</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84796/1366: <em>ELO</em>, 31 Jan 1885, p. 5; 28 Oct 1893, p.8: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: TNA, IR58/84796/1366: ELO, 28 Oct 1893, p.8: POD: <a href=\"https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/01043215\">https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/01043215</a>: information Tom Reed, 69 Whitechapel High Street</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: Ogilby and Morgan, map of London, 1676: Morgan, map of London, 1682: LT: Hearth Tax returns (HT) 1666, 1674-5</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: LT</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: Census</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: Goad insurance maps: TNA, IR58/84800/1742: Census</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-05",
"last_edited": "2019-06-13"
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"id": 76,
"title": "Drinking Fountain, White Church Lane",
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"body": "<p>This drinking fountain was erected in 1860 on the Whitechapel Road railing near the east end of the seventeenth-century Church of St Mary Matfelon. It is inscribed ‘from one unknown yet well known’, perhaps a reference to the Rev. William Weldon Champneys who departed Whitechapel in that year, which is early for a public drinking fountain.</p>\n\n<p>In a gabled ragstone surround it has a Norman arch with pink granite colonettes and back panel. The form of the inner parts closely followed the example of London’s first free drinking fountain, put up at Snow Hill in 1859 to great public rejoicing. The larger Whitechapel fountain was to have been rehoused in an apsidal recess, centred between seats in an equivalent position, but was instead moved round to Church Lane in 1879, then, presumably to make way for the Clergy House (2 White Church Lane) in 1894, moved again a bit further north where it has stayed in front of a surviving section of the railings of the 1870s. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, LCF00550; P10077, P10099; L/THL/D/1/1/117 </p>\n",
"created": "2016-06-27",
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"title": "24-26 Ensign Street",
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"body": "<p>24–26 Ensign Street. Thomas Smither had a carpenter’s yard on Well Street in the 1830s, and John and William Smither, carmen, and North & Light, also carmen, had yards at the south end of Well Street’s west side by 1841. In the 1860s John Smither acted as Secretary of the East London Association for the Suppression of Vice from this address. Three-storey stabling went up for John Smither & Sons Ltd in 1894–5. The site was redeveloped in 1963–4 for Monarch Ltd with William J. Harvey, architect, as a two-storey office fronting a warehouse. This was replaced by Liberty House, fourteen flats built in 2001–2 for Alfred McAlpine Homes London Ltd, with Moren Greenhalgh architects.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/549/1199973; M/93/159/1; District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/FAR/1/3/7; Building Control file 21693: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-05",
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"id": 1098,
"title": "Whitechapel Charities’ Commercial School (demolished)",
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"body": "<p>The formation of the Charity Commissioners in 1853 led to the amalgamation of Whitechapel’s parish charities and the building of the endowed Whitechapel Charities’ Commercial School, a project championed by the Rev. William Weldon Champneys, the pragmatically reforming Rector of St Mary Matfelon. Constructed in 1856–7, this parochial school, aimed at the sons of tradesmen, was designed by a Mr Beck, probably William Beck (1823–1907), a Quaker architect. The proud five-bay palazzo front to Leman Street reflected the school’s ambitions. Raised ground-floor and upper-storey schoolrooms were set above a granite plinth perforated to light a basement playground. Steps led up to entrances on Buckle Street. </p>\n\n<p>The school opened in 1858 and its ‘commercial education’ soon gained high regard. In 1861 it was said to be full with around 200 boys and scholarships were strongly contested. By 1879 a large proportion of the pupils were Jewish, and therefore exempt from New Testament exams.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>A merger in 1888 of Whitechapel’s parish schools (the others being the Davenant School on Whitechapel Road and St Mary’s School on St Mary Street) as the Whitechapel Foundation caused the Leman Street building to be renamed the Whitechapel Foundation Commercial School and to be adapted to be one of two elementary schools serving a larger number of pupils as, confusingly, one of the Davenant schools. But in an era with much wider educational provision and a locality that was increasingly Jewish, this arrangement did not last. The school closed in 1897, its pupils transferred to Whitechapel Road.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>The building was thereafter converted to be the London Provident Dispensary, founded by Herman Landau. He employed Yiddish-speaking doctors, hoping to bring not only medical relief to the Jewish poor, but also knowledge of hygiene and sanitation. He was, however, dissuaded from making the institution wholly free to patients on account of fears of the pauperising effect it might have on people served well by numerous local charities. The Young Zion Institute made use of the building for lectures around 1902, and the East London Progressive Club met here in 1911. A branch of the International Bank of London had been set up on the premises by 1903 to serve as a ‘model emigration bank’ to serve the many Jews still arriving in Whitechapel from abroad. By 1932, the former school building was occupied by the Seamen’s National Insurance Society. After the Second World War, it became a rag-trade factory and warehouse. It was demolished around 2003.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, A/DAV/01/0/4; Collage 118792–3 and 118742: <em>The Builder</em>, 18 Oct 1856, p.576; <em>East London Observer</em>, 2 March 1861; 18 May 1861: Ordnance Survey maps: <em>Preston Guardian</em>, 13 Dec 1879, p.1: <em>The Standard</em>, 8 Jan 1879, p.1; 21 April 1894, p.8: information kindly supplied by Johanna Roethe</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: J. S. Cockburn, H. P. F. King and K. G. T. McDonnell (eds), <em>A History of the County of Middlesex</em>, vol.1, 1969, pp.293–4</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 30 April 1897, p.9; 8 Oct 1897; 7 Feb 1902, p.7; 2 Oct 1903, p.5: <em>Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Local Advertiser</em>, 16 Jan 1904, p.8: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2020-07-31",
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"title": "The site's early history",
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"body": "<p>This site was the south end of a mulberry garden from the seventeenth century (see under the Church of St Boniface). Use as a pleasure ground was wound up when John Holloway acquired the property in 1772. Development was deferred into the 1780s and by 1794 the road frontage to White Horse Lane (what later became the west end of Commercial Road) was the site of Severn, King and Company's substantial sugar house or refinery. The property was extensively redeveloped with a new 71-year lease granted to Benjamin Severn and Frederick Benjamin King in 1816. The refinery burnt down in 1819 and the insurers refused to pay the loss, until forced to after a court case, a cause célèbre. Rebuilding as two seven-storey ranges of a fireproof character ensued, evidently incorporating structural iron and jack arching and Edward Charles Howard’s patent enclosed vacuum sugar pans. But bankruptcy followed in 1829. Holloway’s estate as a whole was sold off at auction in 1839 by when the refinery had been taken by Fairrie Brothers and Co., whose processes were extensively described in George Dodd’s <em>Days at the Factories</em> of 1843.[^1] In the 1860s the refinery passed to Candler & Sons who used it for sugar and other warehousing up to the 1920s. There was then rebuilding for garages that included a petrol station to the west.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>This site was for most of the twentieth century an important location for Jewish institutions, notably two venerable synagogues displaced from the City that were constituents of the United Synagogue. The east side of Union Street south of Holloway Street was redeveloped in 1897-9 for the New Hambro Synagogue. This Jewish congregation, one of London’s oldest, moved from the City of London under Chief Rabbi Dr Hermann Adler (1839–1911), the son of and successor to Chief Rabbi Nathan Marcus Adler, founder of the United Synagogue. Lewis Solomon was the architect of a substantial and outwardly four-square Italianate building, with two entrances for men and one for women facing Union Street. The uppermost storey housed a committee room and caretaker’s flat. The interior seated 370 and had an unusual arrangement, with flights of stairs rising either side of the Bimah to reach the gallery at the Ark or east end for overflow male seating. The ladies gallery was to the west.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>The property was extended round to Mulberry Street in 1905 for an institute to house the Chief Rabbi’s office, a Jewish Court, and a large top-floor library and reading room with, to the south, a house called Court Lodge. The district had become predominantly Jewish, with some Germans still present. Booth’s survey noted tailors and bootmakers as prevalent in 1898, registering general good repair and ‘the constant whirr of the sewing machine or tap of the hammer as you pass through the streets’, as well as ‘the feeling as of being in a foreign town’.[^4] Union Street was renamed Adler Street in 1913. By the 1930s many of Mulberry Street’s houses were being condemned as dangerous structures and the synagogue closed in 1936. The London Mosque Fund attempted unsuccessfully to buy it in 1938–9 before securing property on Commercial Road.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>On the north side of the Adler Street/Holloway Street corner, the Grand Order of Israel Friendly Society built the Adler Assembly Hall in 1924–5, with F. J. Cornford as architect. This, which came to be called Adler House, was a neat three-storey polychrome-brick building with a Star of David between the upper storeys on a setback at the site’s corner. Its upper floor had a meeting room and a billiard room. Around 1931 it became the Regina Ballrooms and a boxing licence was approved in 1934.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>Heavy bomb damage in the Second World War led to the clearance of almost everything east of Mulberry Street, all but three houses on Plumber’s Row, and five houses and the Mulberry Tree pub on Mulberry Street. Plumber’s Row was entirely cleared and widened in 1962. The synagogue survived into the 1950s for use by the displaced Court and as a Jewish Reading Room, which transferred into Adler House. That had seen temporary war-time use as a synagogue and The Folkhouse (Beth-Am), then briefly in 1946–7 as the New Yiddish Theatre, before supporting a further range of Jewish community uses. Finally, from 1958 to 1977, synagogue use returned for the much-diminished Great Synagogue (Duke’s Place), bombed and then sold out of its historic Aldgate home. After a short period of commercial use Adler House was demolished around 1990.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, O/009/056: Bryan Mawer, Sugar Refiners & Sugarbakers website - <a href=\"http://www.mawer.clara.net/\">http://www.mawer.clara.net/</a>: <em>The Times</em>, 12–14 April 1820, p.3; 14 Dec 1820, p.3; 29 Oct 1829, p.4: George Dodd, <em>Days at the Factories</em>, 1843, pp.89–110: Bryan Mawer, <em>Sugarbakers, From Sweat to Sweetness</em>, edn 2011, pp.63–5</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The Builder</em>, 12 Dec 1874, p.1042: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <a href=\"http://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/hambro/index.htm\">http://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/hambro/index.htm:</a> <em>The Architect,</em> 6 Nov 1903, p.296: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 11 Aug 1899, p.13; 1 Sept 1899, pp.12-13: <em>A</em>, 6 Nov 1903, p.296: LMA, SC/PHL/02/1219: Sharman Kadish, <em>The Synagogues of Britain and Ireland: An Architectural and Social History</em>, 2011, pp. 128, 152-3, 340</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: London School of Economics Library, BOOTH/B/351, pp.35–7,49</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/THL/D/2/14/14; L/SMB/D/4/14: Ordnance Survey maps: Fatima Gailani, <em>The Mosques of London</em>, 2000, p.35</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/3285</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Ordnance Survey: THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/224: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/3285; ACC/2712/GTS/008: LCC Mins, 6 Feb 1962, pp.120–1: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 19 Nov 1976: <a href=\"http://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/city_gsduke/\">http://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/city_gsduke/</a>: Historic England Aerial Photographs: Tower Hamlets Planning </p>\n",
"created": "2016-11-16",
"last_edited": "2020-09-17"
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"body": "<p>Although it opened in 1901, the Whitechapel Gallery can date its effective foundation to 1881 when Samuel Barnett began an annual picture exhibition in three rooms at the St Jude’s schools behind St Jude’s church in Commercial Street. The exhibitions themselves grew, before the founding of Toynbee Hall, out of the Barnetts’ wider educational mission, more particularly the inspiration that art could bring in ‘the paralysing and degrading sights of our streets’ in Whitechapel. The Barnetts had often conducted rather awkward parties where their impoverished neighbours could see ‘interesting and beautiful things’ in the drawing room of the vicarage.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Despite the rather dimly lit rooms, hemmed in by other buildings, the exhibition attracted 10,000 visitors. It included one room entirely filled with items from the South Kensington Museum, paintings lent by artists and collectors, including work by G.F. Watts and John Brett, middle eastern and western ceramics, including Staffordshire, Wedgwood and contemporary work by De Morgan and others, and art-needlework and Morris & Co other textiles. Costs were low with catalogues a penny and several days with free entry. By 1886, visitors had reached 46,000, and three rooms were added to the school to expand the shows.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Barnett’s first idea for a site for the new gallery was the Baptist Chapel opposite St Jude’s. It was a convenient and spacious site, and had the potential, like the chapel building itself, for natural lighting on three sides. On several occasions over three years between 1893 and 1896, Barnett’s friend, Dr John Clifford, pastor of Westbourne Park chapel, approached the chapel's pastor on the Barnetts’ behalf. The pastor’s initial response in June 1893 was that he did not think the church ‘would be in the least disposed to sell’ the building.[^3] Despite this discouragement, by the following month a draft scheme for a charitable trust had been prepared and by February 1894 Barnett had come up with an ambitious proposal for a large building combining picture gallery, art school and accommodation for the Whitechapel District Board. The Board had met in inadequate accommodation in Little Alie Street since its inception in 1888 and in 1890-1 a special committee had assessed costs and plans of various other local town halls as models.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>In March 1894 the architect Charles Harrison Townsend had produced a grand outline scheme for the site.[^5] Townsend was a long-term associate of the Barnetts, whom he had met at a party in 1877, the year that his sister Pauline began her 22 years of work for the Barnetts, setting up a Whitechapel branch of the Society for Befriending Young Servants. He had also been on the committee that organised the St Jude’s picture exhibitions since they began. He was then working on the Bishopsgate Institute for the educational reformer Revd William Rogers, with public library, hall and meeting rooms, and would soon be building the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill.</p>\n\n<p>As well as the chapel, the scheme was to occupy the sites of seven houses to the rear in New Castle Place, ‘by its nature not likely to be expensive’. The building, known only from a letter to Barnett, would house not only a top-lit gallery, accessed by a wide staircase and lift, on the second floor, but an art school (on the first floor), 19 ‘vestry offices’ (in fact, offices for the Whitechapel District Board of Works) and a boardroom to seat 64 (on lower ground and first floors) and a vestry hall to seat 755 on the raised ground floor. An additional house in New Castle Place could be adapted as a caretaker’s house. Townsend estimated the cost of this building at a highly optimistic £8,000 to £10,000.[^6]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"C. Harrison Townsend, First design for Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1896\" src=\"/media/uploads/2016/07/05/wag-1896_vDWsIHD.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>Charles Harrison Townsend, elevation of first design for Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1896 (from <em>The Studio</em>, 10 [1897], p. 131)</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>In the summer of 1896 Townsend exhibited a front elevation of the picture gallery at the Royal Academy. It was radically original, a symmetrical frontage in warm yellow flanked by square towers topped by ogee-capped cylindrical final stages. Between the towers the upper half of the frontage was set back and convex, its upper half entirely filled with a 65ft-long mosaic by Walter Crane of classical figures, probably the Muses, set against an arcade, the lower half a real arcade of five semi-circular windows. These sat behind a straight balustrade topping the lower half of the frontage, striped in grey-green Cipolino marble, above a pair of doors set under a giant semicircular arch of reddish-yellow and white marble.[^7] Two years earlier Townsend’s art critic brother Horace had visited the radical American architect H. H. Richardson and had reported on this in the <em>Magazine of Art</em> in 1894. Harrison Townsend’s design, especially the rugged stonework of the battered ground level and the repeated bold semicircular arches, was one of the first expressions in the UK of Richardson’s influence.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2016/07/05/wag-1896-plan.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>Charles Harrison Townsend, plans of first design for Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1896 (from <em>The Builder</em>, 30 May, 1896)</p>\n\n<p>Although by the time it was exhibited in the summer of 1896 it was described merely as a design for the new picture gallery, the vast scale – it was around 110ft wide – can only mean it was designed for the site of the Baptist chapel and schools, that is the width of the seven houses in New Castle Place to the west that Townsend had mentioned to Barnett. It was evidently the site Barnett favoured, though Harrison’s design was more an aspiration than a serious suggestion for a building costing less than £10,000.</p>\n\n<p>Barnett had apparently abandoned the idea of including the Board of Works hall and offices in his scheme, after a final approach to the Board in 1895.[^8] The realities of financing the gallery were making themselves felt, more particularly the views of a significant potential benefactor. In 1894 the painter G.F. Watts, a long-term supporter of Barnett’s Toynbee exhibitions, had raised the possibility of a major donation for the new Whitechapel gallery with the Cornish philanthropist John Passmore Edwards, who had paid for the library and lecture hall at the South London Gallery. Edwards was a generous but controlling philanthropist, a position that was to dog the Whitechapel Gallery.</p>\n\n<p>‘Your idea of municipal buildings, picture gallery etc for Whitechapel is too capacious and composite for me,’ he told Barnett. ‘What Mr Watts and I talked over was a very different thing, and was merely a picture gallery as an addition to Toynbee Hall, as the Lecture Hall and Library I paid for at Camberwell … was an addition to the South London Fine Art Gallery.’[^9] Most tellingly he added ‘I am surprisingly egotistic to do a thing in this way wholly or not at all. I can’t carry out your big scheme and must confine my attention to smaller ones.’</p>\n\n<p>Until the summer of 1896 Barnett was still pursuing both the idea of an art school and the Baptist chapel site. He took soundings both on the advisability of including some kind of art school, perhaps in response to the closure of C.R. Ashbee’s Guild and School of Handicraft at Essex House in Mile End Road the previous year. The consensus was that the proximity of the nascent Cass Institute and the Whitechapel Craft school (for training elementary teachers) made another art school superfluous : ‘If the Cass Inst. has an art school there will hardly be room for another so near and there is no local clientele to draw on for such a school… You would probably find that those who used the gallery were by no means the same people as came to the school, and that the latter came from a distance.[^10] Another suggestion was that some kind of joint enterprise might be possible. At the same time Dr John Clifford continued to press for the Baptist Chapel site on Barnett’s behalf.</p>\n\n<p>Passmore Edwards, however, was not keen on the art school idea, and also favoured a site on Whitechapel High Street, adjoining the Free Library for whose building he had paid in 1891-2. This consisted of 80a, 81 and 82 Whitechapel High Street. One of the gallery’s other benefactors, the banker Samuel Montagu, Baron Swaythling, reported to Barnett that ‘your architect is not sweet on the site’, which had a frontage of only 50ft, which included shops and the west side of the notorious slum Queen’s Place,.and referred to the ‘difficulties of Mr Passmore Edwards’ selection of that particular site’, one being the ‘high’ price. Originally only about a depth of 80ft had been considered but Townsend could not fit in a usable building (the Guildhall Picture Gallery at 5000sq ft was the model suggested by Barnett), More land was added which extended about 130ft to Warner’s Osborn Street iron foundry to the rear. The site enjoyed a High Street frontage, including the four shops, and the cost was £6000. However, the offer of £5,000 by Edwards to pay for the building itself was enough to decide the matter in the site’s favour. Townsend had begun considering the possibilities of the High Street site in May 1896, when he had already come up with the basic eventual components of two nave-like galleries one above the other, the lower wider to allow strips of rooflights at the edges. Townsend politely quashed Barnett’s notion of a further gallery beneath: ‘As this is a basement room I hardly see how to arrange this.’[^11]</p>\n\n<p>There followed an exhausting two years for Barnett while he clawed together the funds for the site, all the while mollifying the demanding Passmore Edwards, and the over-optimistic Townsend who admitted in February 1898 that his building was likely to cost £7000. William Blyth, secretary to the trustees, went to see Passmore Edwards who ‘thinks Townsend a very expensive architect & one who places too much importance upon artistic effect’. He told Blyth he thought ‘his’ architect, Maurice B. Adams, editor of the <em>Building News</em>, which Passmore Edwards owned, and designer of the St George in the East Free Library in Cable Street, for which Passmore Edwards had paid, could have put up a suitable building for £5000.[^12] </p>\n\n<p>A further and trickier problem soon arose when Passmore Edwards made it plain that though he had offered a further £1200 it was dependent on the gallery being named the Passmore Edwards Gallery. Townsend tried manfully to squeeze the name Passmore Edwards Picture Gallery, ‘the Passmore Edwards… in a smaller font… [so as not to] make it the every eye and centre of the building as he wants’, on to the frontage, as he knew a lot of money depended on it.[^13] Townsend later told Barnett that Passmore Edwards had offered to make him the architect of a building he was about to ‘present’ if Townsend succeeded in having the gallery named after him. As a sop, Barnett succeeded in getting the neighbouring Free Library renamed the Passmore Edwards Library, but was adamant that ‘Neither by word, or by letter have you asked or have I given a promise about the name of the gallery’, expressing ‘regret that you cared to blot with a name charity so noble as yours’, later apologising to the sensitive Passmore Edwards for the word ‘blot’.[^14] Passmore Edwards was equally assertive about his ‘little weakness’ and withdrew the offer of the extra funds.</p>\n\n<p>The issue for Barnett was his incomprehension about personal vanity, which he lacked, and of fairness to the many other donors. His prominence as a social reformer meant these were varied in source and amount. Caroline Turner, Headmistress of the High School for Girls, Exeter, wrote to Barnett with a small subscription in October 1897: ‘During the Spring Term of this year, I gave some Literature Lessons to the elder girls on William Morris and his hopes and efforts for happier lives for the people. Soon after we saw a notice of your wish to get a permanent Picture Gallery for the East End, and the enclosed cheque represents a few subscriptions from those of my Literature Class who were able and willing to help.’ John Bullock, a Toynbee Hall resident, sent £5, which ‘he was ashamed to be enclosing’. But the bulk of the money came, directly or through their contacts, from the Anglo-Jewish community of City financiers with a long-standing interest in Barnett’s Whitechapel work. Samuel Montagu, who had offered £100 reward to help catch Jack the Ripper (because the murders had led to an upsurge in anti-Semitic attacks), gave £1000 and suggested finding another five similarly inclined donors. Chief among these was Barnett’s friend and fellow trustee, Edgar Speyer, future supporter of the Proms and the developer of the Tube network, who secured £700 from Schroeders, Hambros, Werhner Beit & Co. and L. Messel, and who gave more than £2,500 himself when the amount raised fell short.[^15] Other major donors were the shipbuilder A.F. Yarrow, whose firm was based on the Isle of Dogs, and the Cornish landowner, horticulturist and secret philanthropist J.C. Williams of Caerhays Castle, who gave £1000 on condition of anonymity.[^16] Fundraising in 1897 had not been made easier by demands made on the charitable purse by two major campaigns that year for Indian famine relief and the Prince of Wales Hospital fund. Speyer also found that ‘the scheme is one that does not appeal to everybody’.[^17]</p>\n\n<p>Whitechapel Art Gallery was established as a charity, its constitution finalised by the early 1899. Its trustee body and stated aims reflected the Barnetts’ 25-year mission to educate their parishioners and provide the spiritual balm of art. Trustees included among its co-opted Trustees, Henrietta Barnett and their long-term benefactor Speyer, and representatives of, inter alia, the neighbouring Free Library, the London Parochial charities, the Royal Academy, of Toynbee Hall and the Technical Education Board of the LCC. Its aims were to mount free loan exhibitions of ‘high-class modern pictures’, or those illustrating history, art and industry, and work by local people including schoolchildren.[^18] </p>\n\n<p>Building work had commenced in November 1898 and was completed a year later, despite Passmore Edwards withdrawing £1200 of his offered £7200 when Barnett stood firm on naming the gallery after him. A.F. Yarrow, the shipbuilder donor made up half the shortfall with the observation that ‘This seems to me a very funny sort of demand [the name of the gallery], as his name is pretty well scattered all over England.’ The builder was John Outhwaite & Son of East Smithfield, a some-time Whitechapel District Board member.[^19]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2016/07/05/wag-ground-floor-plan.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>Basement and ground plan of the Whitechapel Gallery as built, from the <em>Architectural Review</em>, 9 (May 1901), p. 129</p>\n\n<p>The gallery’s plan was limited by the narrow deep site, slightly offset because of the ancient, meandering building line to the High Street. The squarish entrance hall was flanked by a small space intended for a lift and a square staircase hall to the right leading to the first and second floors. The entrance hall led through to a 100ft x 50ft lower gallery, a spare nave-like room its trabeated ceiling set between higher pitched glazed roofed aisles, its south end lit by a light well created against the neighbouring library. At the north west end of the main gallery was a smaller top-lit gallery separated from it by another staircase.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2016/07/05/wag-first-floor-plan.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>First- and second-floor plans of the Whitechapel Gallery as built, from the <em>Architectural Review</em>, 9 (May 1901), p. 130</p>\n\n<p>The main stairs at the front led up to narrow first-floor gallery sitting over the central part of the lower gallery, with an exposed curved-brace top-lit roof. Over the entrance hall was a committee room across the front of the building, with store- and caretaker’s room above.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2016/07/05/wag-1898-cht-perspective.jpg\"> </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2016/07/05/wag-front-photo-1901.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>Photograph of tthe Whitechapel Gallery, 1901, from the <em>Architectural Review</em>, 9 (May 1901), p. 131</p>\n\n<p>The frontage to Whitechapel in an austere 1890s free-style, is arresting, a simplified, sleeker version of Townsend’s Baptist Chapel site design. It is dominated by a giant semicircular arch over twin entrance doors, asymmetrically set beneath a strip of simple square windows lighting the first floor. The second floor rooms were originally lit only from the side and rear to allow for a giant panel set between tapering square towers, each topped by four small steeply gabled roofs, but not the caps Townsend hoped to add. This panel was intended for a mosaic, <em>The Sphere and Message of Art</em> by Walter Crane, in a sinuous fin-de-siècle manner, adorned with peacocks and lilies. Figures of Poesy, Truth, History etc pay homage to a seated figure of Art, gazing into her speculum naturae.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2016/07/05/wag-1898-crane.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>Walter Crane's unexecuted design for a mosaic panel</p>\n\n<p>The money to pay for its execution was never forthcoming. The frontage was uniformly clad in buff terracotta tiles by Gibbs & Canning of Tamworth, the only decoration bracket voussoirs to the deep entrance arch, string courses and shallow-relief moulded trees in an art nouveau manner to the bases of the towers, and gilded Whitechapel Art Gallery lettering carved above the twin entrance doors by Daymond & Sons.</p>\n\n<p>The walls were lined in red-dyed linen, from Liberty, with a framework of battens from which to hang pictures, with a similar treatment to the moveable wooden screens to augment the hanging space.</p>\n\n<p>Ideas for a frieze in the entrance hall by Gerald Moira, then working on the frieze in the Bechstein (later Wigmore) Hall also came to nothing.[^20] Thrift determined the interior fittings – kamptulicon rubberised matting in the board room, coconut matting and woodblock in the galleries, a plain mosaic floor in the entrance vestibule.</p>\n\n<p>The gallery was opened by Lord Rosebery, on 12 March 1901, twenty years after he opened the first of Barnett’s Whitechapel exhibitions.[^21] By then Charles Aitken, a former schoolmaster, had been appointed director. He had experience lecturing on art at the Regent Street Polytechnic and the Social and Political Education League, and sported references from Charles Holroyd, director of the Tate Gallery, and Walter Crane, who described him as ‘a friend of ours… I believe he is a well-informed and cultivated man and would be well qualified for such a post.’[^22] At the end of the first year Barnett noted with satisfaction that the Trustees’ ‘aim has been to open to the people of East London a larger world than that in which they usually work, to draw them to a pleasure recreating to their minds, and to stir in them a human curiosity….[they] came in greater numbers than expected, they came both to enjoy and to question, they bought catalogues by the thousand, the attended lectures and they welcomed guidance.’</p>\n\n<p>In the first decade Aitken implemented the Trustees’ stated policies, continuing the St Jude’s schools’ Easter exhibitions, augmented with two or sometimes three themed exhibitions a year. The spring exhibitions, usually a mixture of living artists (works often lent by the artists, or by philanthropic-minded collectors) and old masters (Reynolds, Gainsborough, Romney, Constable, Turner), lent by the national galleries, regularly attracted more than 200,000 visitors. The exhibitions were free, as decreed by the Trust deed, and catalogues cost a penny. Among the themed exhibitions in the first decade were shows on Chinese art and Japanese art, and a pioneering exhibition in 1906 of ‘Jewish Art and Antiquities’, accompanied by lectures by Hermann Adler, the Chief Rabbi.[^23] The displays were (typically for the period) crowded, the mission still overtly pedagogic. Of the Chinese exhibition in 1901, Barnett wrote:</p>\n\n<p>‘Objects [were] arranged so as to illustrate the life of the Chinese people… bays of the Gallery transformed into a temple, a shop a rich man’s sitting room and bed-room and a poor man’s room…. ‘The result of the interest was, probably, a more vivid conception of the common humanity of the people's underlying habits so unlike those familiar at home – an increase, therefore, of good will.’[^24] </p>\n\n<p>The focus was not exclusively fine and decorative art: early exhibitions included one about shipping, complete with detailed ship models.[^25] Aitken also set the exhibitions within a wider programme of cultural and educational enlightenment within the gallery, with regular lantern lectures, and concerts by the Ladies’ Aeolian Orchestra.</p>\n\n<p>The upper gallery from the beginning was the focus for displaying the work of local schools, and not exclusively art work, but also ‘excellent displays of gym drill, singing, reciting, first aid and dressmaking.’[^26] A library of prints and photographs of works of art was open to children to borrow, a facility Henrietta Barnett thought ‘quite as important as lending books’.[^27] </p>\n\n<p>Regular guided school visits were arranged, and Barnett noted with satisfaction in 1903 that it was a ‘common sight on a Sunday a child acting as guide to the family party’.[^28] </p>\n\n<p>Barnett maintained his faith in the exhibitions as a universal social palliative: ‘A greater love of beauty means, for instance, greater care for cleanliness, a better choice of pleasures, and increased self-respect. The use of the powers of admiration reveals new interests which are not satisfied in a public house, but drives their possessors to do something both in their work and their play which adds to the joy of the earth. The sordid character of many national pleasures and the low artistic value of much of the national produce is due to the unused powers of admiration.’[^29] </p>\n\n<p>A first inkling of the Whitechapel’s engagement with the avant garde came in 1907 when members of the New English Art Club (though by then not quite the pioneers they had been when founded in 1886) were included in the Spring exhibition, with the more traditional popular exhibition to be held in the autumn. Much more overtly challenging were Twenty Years of British Art (1890-1910) held in 1910 and Twentieth Century Art: A Review, organised by Aitken, whose efforts at Whitechapel had secured him the directorship of the Tate Gallery, and his successor at Whitechapel, Gilbert Ramsey. Barnett had remained chairman of Trustees till his death in 1913, but Henrietta Barnett was made uneasy by the 1914 show, asking Ramsey ‘not to get too many examples of the extreme thought of this century, for we must never forget that the Whitechapel Gallery is intended for the Whitechapel people, who have to be delicately led and will not understand the Post-Impressionists’ or the Futurists’ methods of seeing and representing things’.[^30]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Henrietta Barnett, <em>Canon Barnett: His Life, Work, and Friends</em>, 2 vols, London, 1918, vol. 1, pp. 151-3</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>[^2]: ‘St Jude’s Loan exhibition’, <em>London Daily News</em>, 13 April 1881, p.2: <em>The Graphic</em>, 23 April 1881, p. 12: Barnett, op. cit., vol 1, pp. 151, 156] </p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Whitechapel Gallery Archives (WGA), WAG/EAR/1/5 </p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/WBW/5/5</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: WGA, WAG/EAR 1/1 (i); WAG/EAR/1/3]</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/4</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: The Studio, 10 (1897), pp. 130-1 </p>\n\n<p>[^8]: THLHLA, L/WBW/10/12</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/2</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: WGA, WAG/EAR1/1 (i)</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/3</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/2</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: WGA, WAG/WAR/1/3</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/2</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/1 (i)</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/1 (ii)</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/1 (i)</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: LMA, LCC/EO/HFE/05/0284</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: LMA, District Surveyor's Returns for Whitechapel (DSRs): WGA, WAG/EAR/1/3; WAG/EAR/1/8; WAG/EAR/1/9; WAG/EAR/1/10; WAG/EAR/1/11]</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/3</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: WGA, <em>Annual Report</em>, 1901, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: WGA, WAG/EAR/1/11</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: WGA, <em>Annual Report</em>, 1906, p. 9: Sarah MacDougall, ‘ “Something is happening there”: early British Modernism, the Great War and the Whitechapel Boys’, in <em>London, Modernism, and 1914</em>, ed. Michael J.K. Walsh, Cambridge, 2010, pp. 122-47</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: WGA, <em>Annual Report</em>, 1901, p. 10</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: WGA, <em>Annual Report</em>, 1903, p. 5</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: WGA, <em>Annual Report</em>, 1902, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: WGA, <em>Annual Report</em>, 1902, p. 15: ‘The Quasi-Autobiography of Dame Henrietta Barnett by her assistant Marion Paterson', LMA, LMA/4063/006</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: WGA, <em>Annual Report</em>, 1904, p. 3</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: WGA, <em>Annual Report</em>, 1906, p. 3</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: WGA, <em>Annual Report</em>, 1907, p. 6: MacDougall, op. cit., p. 131</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",
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"body": "<p>On this site a five-storey warehouse was built in 1869 by Holland and Hannen for Browne & Eagle, local wool merchants. Conveniently situated to receive goods from the docks and two nearby railway depots (Haydon’s Square, Minories, and later the Tilbury extension), the building was one of the first in a series of warehouses purpose-built for the firm in East London. Its form was to prove typical of other wool warehouses in Whitechapel of which only a couple remain today, see for example Loom House at 101 Back Church Lane. Unadorned brick elevations were punctuated by large windows and loophole bays, which, alongside wall-mounted cranes, allowed for the haulage of goods to and from every floor. This site was especially suitable because of frontages to Leman Street and Camperdown Street (formerly Duncan Street), as well as to Braham Street (formerly Nelson and then Beagle Street) and a narrower passageway spanning between Camperdown and Braham Street, both of which had been made private to provide exclusive access to the warehouse’s west and north elevations. The west end of Braham Street was blocked for many decades by Pickford’s White Swan Yard depot. The footprint of Browne & Eagle’s warehouse was large and Holland and Hannen were caught out in relation to its height (see figure 1). Having originally constructed a seven-storey warehouse, the building firm was convicted by Thames Police Court for exceeding the limits of the approved cubical area for such buildings as allowed by the Building Act and forced to take down the upper two floors. Accommodation expanded to include a further warehouse, veterinary forge and house on the north side of Braham Street. The farriers and house occupied the east end of the street, whilst the long narrow wool warehouse the west half. This warehouse, again built by Holland and Hannen, was linked to the southern warehouse by an iron bridge 25ft above the street. By 1878 the company also held warehouses at Haydon Street, Minories, Hooper Square, Alie Street and Back Church Lane, the latter two also built by Holland and Hannen in 1875-6 and 1889-1890 respectively. Premises at Durward Street had been added to the collection by the time the business changed hands in 1896. Although no longer associated to the Browne or Eagle families, the original company name was retained. ‘Beagle’ reportedly a derivation from ‘Browne & Eagle’, the firm’s long-running occupation of the site having been acknowledged when Nelson Street had been renamed Beagle Street in 1893. Only on its widening in the mid-1960s did it become the western extension of Braham Street.[^1] </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/os-1897.JPG\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Figure 1: OS Map of 1890s showing footprint of Browne & Eagle's warehouse</em></p>\n\n<p>Partial rebuilding of the northern Braham Street warehouse was undertaken in 1923 by Walter Gladding & Co. of 188 Whitechapel Road. However this building was destroyed by a high explosive bomb less than twenty years later in April 1941. It seems that the damage extended to two four-storey houses with shops (nos 18 and 20 Leman Street) and the Baker & Basket public house (no. 16 Leman Street) all at the north-east corner of the Braham Street, Leman Street, Camperdown Street block, and around which the Browne & Eagle warehouses were wrapped. In 1943 the surviving southern warehouse was requisitioned for use by the US army and returned to the company in July 1945. By the 1930s Browne & Eagle held a further four terraced houses on Alie Street (nos 9, 11, 13 and 15) which were occupied during the war by rent controlled tenants. The company was also in possession of the single-storey shed at 12 to 14 Camperdown Street which had been parcelled with Pickford’s goods depot and was most likely used for vehicle storage. In 1939 Browne & Eagle were refused permission to set up a slaughterhouse there but by 1945 one was in operation.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: PoDs 1878, 1892; MBW, 10 Dec 1869, 7 Jan 1870; <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 26 Feb 1896; DSRs; LMA, MBW/BA/24596</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: DSRs; Southwark Local History Library and Archive (SLHLA), A119/138, A119/24</p>\n",
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"body": "<p><em>Medieval churches</em></p>\n\n<p>The first church on the site that is now Altab Ali Park was built in the mid thirteenth century (by 1282), dedicated to Mary and from the outset identified as ‘de Matefelun’. This, which became Matfelon, may derive from a family name; Richard Matefelun, a wine merchant, is said to have been present in the area in 1230. If this is the derivation (matfelon as meaning knapweed is the least preposterous of numerous suggested alternatives), it was presumably in recognition of a pious benefaction, whether prompted by local need or not. It does seem clear that there would have been significant population growth in the area, and that the existing parish church of St Dunstan, Stepney, aside from being distant had been outgrown. Parish status was granted by 1320, the vicarage being in the gift of the Rector of Stepney. [^1] </p>\n\n<p>Archaeological evidence indicates that the church, always aligned to the adjacent road and not properly oriented, was of clunch or white chalk rubble. It thus, no doubt, came to be known as the ‘white chapel’, an appellation in use by 1344. Clunch was not uncommon in medieval churches, especially to the east and north of London, though it is friable so was often mixed with other materials. The building was reportedly wrecked in a storm and restored in 1362 thanks, it is said, to a papal Bull negotiated by the absentee rector, Sir David Gower, a Canon of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, that promised sinners a remission of penance for visiting Whitechapel with an offering. There were four priests in 1416 indicating a large congregation or at least a prospering parish. Documentation of legacies and archaeological investigation both point to fifteenth-century improvements, to the fabric of doors and windows if not more. [^2] Exceptionally, there were no chantries at the Reformation, when, in 1548 there were 670 communicants. [^3]</p>\n\n<p>Little is known about the form of the medieval church. It appears to have had a four-bay nave to which a three-stage crenellated tower and a north aisle and porch might have been fifteenth-century additions. George Birch’s claim from inspection of wall footings in 1876 that the medieval church was co-extensive with that of the seventeenth century seems doubtful, if only because it is known that a south ‘aisle’ was added in 1591. This was, it seems, separately roofed, and almost as tall as the nave, though not as wide, and possibly not as long. More a room than an aisle it would have generated not just more seating for a growing congregation, but also a much more auditory and less processional interior. That would have been in keeping with the Calvinist norms of the late sixteenth century that were strongly represented in east London and firmly upheld by Richard Gardiner (or Gardner), Whitechapel’s rector from 1570 to 1617. [^4]</p>\n\n<p>Protestantism had sparked early in Whitechapel, through the celebrated challenge Richard Hunne, a merchant tailor and probably a Lollard, had presented to the claimed rights of the rector, Thomas Dryfield, in 1511, and through John Harrydance, the Whitechapel bricklayer, arrested in 1539 for preaching from his window. [^5] Gardiner, in whose time the vestry sold off the church organ, was prominent among Elizabethan puritans and was embroiled in high-level religious–political controversy in the immediate run up to the extension of his church in 1591. [^6]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p><em>Seventeenth-century ructions and rebuilding</em></p>\n\n<p>In 1618 William Crashawe, an outspoken and leading London puritan, became Whitechapel’s rector, a posting that brought him upwards of £32 a year. He oversaw the insertion of a gallery in the south aisle which suggests that capacity was already again stretched. It bore a panel to commemorate the failure in 1623 of the Spanish Match. Crashawe died in 1626, preceded by 1,100 of his parishioners in the plague year of 1625. His successor in what his will called the ‘too greate Parishe’ of Whitechapel was John Johnson, another puritan, but one who married the daughter (Judith Meggs) of a wealthy parishioner in 1627 and trimmed thereafter to align with the Laudian tide. [^7] Johnson moved the communion table to the east end of the church, and undertook repairs in 1633–4 with £300 raised from parishioners and more from the Haberdashers’ Company, which in making the grant took into account the relative poverty of the parish. These works left the church ‘within and without, and in every part of it, Richly and very worthily beautify’d’. [^8]</p>\n\n<p>Archbishop William Laud and such beautifying initiatives faced strong local opposition. Johnson was among the first London clergy to be deprived of his living in 1641. In the early 1640s Thomas Lambe’s General Baptists formed in Whitechapel what was at the time ‘easily the most visible and notorious of all sectarian congregations in London’. [^9] After contested elections for parish overseers and violent confrontations in the church in 1646, Whitechapel’s Independents gained control and gathered under a new rector, Thomas Walley (or Whalley). When the tables turned in 1660 Johnson was reinstated and a schism resulted, most of the congregation departing to a meeting house in Brick Lane. In 1662 Walley was arrested preaching elsewhere in Whitechapel; he soon after emigrated to New England. [^10] Johnson was revealed as corrupt and deprived of his living in 1668, chiefly through the agency of his son-in-law, Ralph Davenant, who became the next rector of Whitechapel. A fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and a descendant of Bishop John Davenant, the moderate Calvinist who had represented the English church at the synod of Dort in 1618, he was also a cousin to Thomas Fuller. [^11]</p>\n\n<p>The largely medieval church was rebuilt in 1672–3. Davenant and the vestry came to an agreement about the project in January 1672 and work was probably complete by the end of 1673 which date was carried on a stone tablet that remained on the east side of the tower through subsequent rebuilds. Some joinery and other work was yet to be finished in June 1675. The principal benefactor was William Megges, who had one of the parish’s largest houses where Johnson, his brother-in-law, had lodged in the 1650s. Megges had been a member of Johnson’s vestry from 1660 and commemorated his parents' earlier patronage of the church with a large black-and-white marble aedicular mural monument. These links with Johnson notwithstanding, Crashawe’s panel of 1623 was relocated onto the new south gallery and a monument to Crashawe himelf was conspicuously re-erected on the north wall. Puritan inheritance was not obscured. [^12]</p>\n\n<p>In its architectural form the new brick-built church represented a rapprochement with moderate Nonconformity. It reused some old footings and lower parts of the tower, but in its regular cross-in-rectangle plan, 90ft by 63ft, with shallow transept projections and angle quoins, it closely followed pre-Restoration Calvinist models at Westminster Broadway and Poplar. High-level round windows to north, south and east, perhaps derived from Inigo Jones’s work of the 1630s at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Serliana to the west also had pre-Restoration precedents in London. There were transept pediments to north and south, segmental pediments above inner-bay entrances to the north and pine-cone finials. The less prominent south side was more humbly finished, with an outer-bay entrance. The west door had rusticated pilasters, cherub-head capitals and a pediment. Architects and builders remain unknown, but there are circumstantial reasons for suspecting involvement on the part of Robert Hooke. [^13] The assuredly if impurely classical auditory interior was ‘very lightsome and spacious’. [^14] The main east-west axis was emphasized by three ribbed cross vaults supported by four Portland stone Corinthian columns, their bases obscured by box pews. There was a step up to the chancel, otherwise only articulated by the inclusion of flanking vestries. The chancel was backed by a pedimented and enriched Corinthian reredos. Shallow north and south galleries were probably original. A mural monument to Megges was erected after his death in 1678, identical to that he had put up for his parents in the 1660s save for its arms and inscription. [^15]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/06/st-mary-matfelon-plan-1670s.jpg\"><em>Church of St Mary Matfelon, plan as rebuilt in the 1670s</em></p>\n\n<p><em>Vicissitudes, alterations and repairs, 1700 to 1860</em></p>\n\n<p>Davenant was succeeded in 1681 by Dr William Payne, a latitudinarian, fellow of the Royal Society and leading Whig among London clergy who was keen to embrace dissenters. The living was reduced by the loss of Wapping from the parish in 1694, and the liturgical politics of Whitechapel changed dramatically in 1697 with the appointment of the Rev. Richard Welton, a high-church Tory and Jacobite. Welton attacked Nonconformity and spurned the area’s recent Huguenot immigrants: ‘This set of rabble are the very offal of the earth, who cannot be content to be safe here from that justice and beggary from which they fled, and to be fattened on what belongs to the poor of our own land to grow rich at our expense, but must needs rob us of our religion too.’ [^16] He made beautifying alterations, moving the font and altering pews, oversaw the casting of six new bells by Phelps’s local foundry in 1709, and attracted high-profile controversy in 1713 when he placed a painting of the Last Supper by John Fellowes in the church as an altarpiece. Judas was prominently represented as a likeness of Bishop White Kennett, an antagonist of Welton’s. Through the Bishop of London, Kennett saw to the altarpiece’s removal in 1714. The same phase of works included an organ by Christopher Schreider, perhaps also the west gallery in which it stood. The organ case was later described as ‘carved and gilt, with carved oak trusses and gilt cherubim, surmounted by four richly-carved and gilt figures’ [^17] The gallery front sported a finely carved wood panel depicting King David playing the harp flanked by musical instruments. This survives close by in the church of St Botolph Aldgate. Refusing to swear loyalty to the Hanoverian succession, Welton was deprived of his position in 1715. Figures of Moses and Aaron were thereafter placed flanking where Fellowes’s altarpiece had been. A square window above, seemingly with painted glass, was surmounted by a painted glory, rays of light representing the Holy Spirit. [^18]</p>\n\n<p>The advowson was purchased by Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1708, then in 1711 the Commissioners for Building Fifty New Churches decided that Whitechapel needed two more churches.[^19] These did not materialize, but under a succession of latitudinarian rectors Whitechapel’s church appears to have steered clear of further controversy making it a quieter but duller place. It was ‘repaired and Beautified’ in 1735 and again repaired, in what was a wealthy parish, with funds raised through an Act of Parliament in 1762–3 when the tower, possibly unstable, was to have been cased in Portland stone – it was probably rendered instead. The clock stage gained aedicules and a large cupola took the place of the small bell turret. Similarities with the exactly contemporary St George’s German Lutheran Church on Alie Street suggest that the carpenter–architect Joel Johnson may have been in charge of this project. [^20]</p>\n\n<p>The pulpit was to have been removed in 1771, but perhaps nothing was done – a carved oak pulpit on fluted columns and with a tented tester that does not look later in date was present a century later. [^21] There were repairs worth £2,000 in 1805, with seats in the galleries divided into pews. Then in 1806 the pulpit was moved and there were more repairs for £4,133 11 2½, with James Carr as surveyor. These works probably included a cornice on the tower. By 1815 the east window had been replaced with an 18ft-tall arch-headed stained-glass <em>Adoration of the Shepherds</em>, said to have cost £600 and possibly by James Pearson. Structural repairs involving iron tie rods and costing £1,113 13 3½ followed in 1825–6, with John Shaw (the elder) as surveyor. Even so, the tower became dangerous. James Savage acted as surveyor for yet further repairs in 1829–30, for £1,686 8 4. To keep to the chronology and note in passing, on 12 January 1832 St Mary's was the location for the marriage of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, age 19, and Sarah Ann Garnett, age 22, who died on 27 May 1832 a week after giving birth to their daughter Anne. In 1839 Edward Blore reported on the state of the church and recommended rebuilding. Discussion was adjourned for a year, but not resumed, the notion presumably deemed too costly. [^22] The tower was again repaired in 1865, and given a new cast-iron bell frame made by Mears & Co. [^23]</p>\n\n<p>From 1837 to 1860 the Rev. William Weldon Champneys was Whitechapel’s rector. An evangelical, he started with a congregation of about 100, in a population of about 34,000, and by 1851 had built attendances up to more than 4,000 across three services on a Sunday. He brought numerous reforms to Whitechapel, from a Sunday school and mothers’ meeting, to ragged schools and a coal club and shoe black brigade. He attempted to convert Whitechapel’s many Jews, and battled cholera and house farmers. Champneys also divided the parish, founding three new churches. [^24]</p>\n\n<p><em>Victorian rebuildings</em></p>\n\n<p>An inspection in advance of an intended redecoration led to another condemnation of the seventeenth-century church as structurally unsafe in 1873. The parish reluctantly geared up to spend £4,000 on essential repairs. Then, in June 1874, Octavius Edward Coope (1814–1886) came to the rescue. Coope's father and grandfather had been sugar refiners on the west side of Osborn Street where he continued before attaining greater wealth as a brewer. He was a founder of Ind Coope & Co. in Romford in 1845, which firm maintained an Osborn Street depot and expanded to Burton-on-Trent in 1856. Coope had been an MP in 1847–8, but was unseated on grounds of bribery. After a long interval he was again elected to Parliament as a Conservative MP for Middlesex in February 1874. With that newly acquired status, Coope stepped forward claiming to be a Whitechapel parishioner, though he had been born and lived in Essex and, when in London, resided on Upper Brook Street in Mayfair. He offered to pay up to £12,500 towards a new church, presenting plans by his architect nephew, Ernest Claude Lee, who had been a pupil of William Burges’s, for a red-brick and stone-dressed High Gothic Revival building to seat 1,400. The offer was initially accepted with great relief and joy, but Coope had soon to defend the proposed use of red brick, averring, wrongly, that ‘our great church architect Street invariably uses it’. [^25] It was in fact to James Brooks’s recent red-brick churches in Haggerston, St Columba and St Chad, that a Vestry committee went for comparative inspection. This committee was led by the Rev. James Cohen, a converted Jew who had been Whitechapel’s rector since 1860, and subsequently spearheaded by Augustus William Gadesden, another sugar refiner. They were not impressed, convinced in their dislike of red brick, and anyway keen to have a larger church. Overall costs were estimated to be about £6,000 more than Coope was offering. Cohen’s committee concluded in September, with diminished alacrity, that ‘it is expedient that the offer of Mr Coope be accepted.’ [^26] Rebuilding began in 1875 when Cohen was succeeded by the Rev. John Fenwick Kitto. The builder was John T. Chappell, of Little George Street, Westminster. Work was completed in October 1876 and there was a consecration in February 1877. The upper stage of the tower and spire followed in 1878, built by Edward Conder of Kingsland Basin. The estimated total final cost had risen to about £30,000 of which it was later said around £10,000 came from public subscription, the rest from Coope. [^27]</p>\n\n<p>The large brick church comprised a nave (109ft long and 78ft high) and aisles, a round-apsed chancel, a baptistery under a west gallery and a three-stage north-west tower with an octagonal spire and corner turrets rising 175ft in all, sited so as to be prominent on the main road. It extended further west and south than its predecessor and was set less squarely to the road, to minimise disturbance of the graveyard and avoid building on southerly ground that was only leasehold. While adhering to red brick, Lee had amended his plans. The church had only 1,250 sittings and omitted a full-height north transept in favour of a gabled organ bay at the east end of the north aisle. An unusual feature, reflecting the local mission and a memorial to Champneys, was an external pulpit, placed on a staircase turret at the north-west corner of the nave. There was a large ‘church room’ to the south-east in which relics from the old church were displayed. The interior had ornamentally carved Bath stone dressings to naked brick surfaces (some at least were intended for painted decoration), Minton floor tiles and a ceiled wagon-vault, a form chosen for auditory reasons, ill-advisedly as the building had very poor acoustics. The old clock and bells were reset. Lee deployed thirteenth-century style details and himself designed fittings including the pulpit, lectern, font and a mosaic apse floor, executed by Burke & Co. of Regent Street. Horatio Walter Lonsdale, Lee’s brother-in-law, supplied stained-glass windows. Stone carving was by Thomas Earp of Lambeth. [^28]</p>\n\n<p>This church was short-lived, suddenly gutted by fire on a summer’s Thursday afternoon, on 27 August 1880. Flames in the organ chamber swept up the organ pipes into the timber roof. Little more than the shell and tower survived. Kitto and Gadesden led an approach to Coope, still an MP, who undertook to use his influence to secure insurance cover of £16,800 and to stump up further rebuilding costs. The acoustical shortcomings of the destroyed interior led him to make replacement conditional on a redesign by Lee. [^29] The church was rebuilt in 1881–2 on the same plan, but with a polygonal apse and an open pseudo-hammerbeam roof beneath a lower ridge which did bring acoustical success. The nave west wall was given three windows in place of two, and there were other detailed variations that favoured a style more characteristic of the fourteenth century. The interior was yet more richly sculpted than its predecessor, and this time lavishly decorated with stencilling that shows the influence of Burges. Conder was the builder and Lonsdale supervised painting and glass. [^30]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/06/st-mary-whitechapel-nd-ebay.jpg\"><em>The Church of St Mary Matfelon, around 1920</em></p>\n\n<p>An alabaster reredos intended since 1878 was at last made in 1886–7 as a memorial to Coope. Carved by Earp, it represented the Last Supper and the Tree of Jesse, and stood in front of stencilled decoration of the early 1880s by Lonsdale that included large angels for the Twelve Gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem. [^31]</p>\n\n<p>Rebuilds notwithstanding, church attendance was lower than it had been under Champneys. It was estimated in the early 1880s to be around 1,500 on Sundays, albeit in a reduced parish with an estimated population of 14,000, the main impediment being what the Rev. Arthur James Robinson called ‘the old story of indifference’. [^32] Yet this was among the best attended of East London churches, with fully choral services and psalms chanted morning and evening. By 1884 Robinson’s team included two Missioners to Jews, the Rev. J. H. Bruhl and the Rev. A. Bernstein. The open-air pulpit was in regular use, and by the 1890s and well into the twentieth century special services were conducted for Jews in Hebrew and German, with sermons preached in Yiddish to congregations of up to 500. A last notable rector was the Rev. John Augustus Mayo, who in 1917 lent a cellar (possibly in the rectory) to Maria Dickin for the first People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor. Mayo also gave the first radio sermon in 1922.[^33] </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/06/st-mary-m-1941-small_1VZhH0k.jpg\"><em>The Church of St Mary Matfelon in May 1941</em></p>\n\n<p>St Mary’s Church was gutted once again, this time by fire bombs on 29 December 1940. The ruined shell of the building was cleared in 1952. [^34]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Victoria County History Middlesex</em>: vol. 11, <em>Stepney, Bethnal Green</em>, 1998, pp.1–7, 13–19, 70–81: Jane Cox, <em>Old East Enders: A History of the Tower Hamlets</em>, 2013, p.52</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: ed. A. H. Thomas, <em>Calendar of the Plea and Memoranda Rolls of the City of London: vol. 1, 1323–1364</em>, 1926, pp. 208–9: G. Reginald Balleine, <em>The Story of St Mary Matfelon</em>, 1898, p.10: Kevin McDonnell, <em>Medieval London Suburbs</em>, 1978, pp.141–2: Historic England, GLHER, MLO3933</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: ed. C. J. Kitching, <em>London and Middlesex Chantry Certificate 1548</em>, 1980, pp.xxx–xxxi, 6</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: George H. Birch, ‘Stray notes on the Church and Parish of S. Mary Matfelon, Whitechapel’, <em>Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society</em>, old series, vol. 5, 1881, pp.514–18: LMA, Collage 35135: Richard Newcourt, <em>Repertorium Ecclesiasticum Parochiale Londinensis</em>, vol. 1, 1708, p.698: Balleine, p.14</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Balleine, pp.12–13: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em> for Hunne</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: George Hennessy, <em>Novum repertorium ecclesiasticum parochiale Londinense</em>, 1908, p.457: Patrick Collinson, <em>Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Anti-Puritanism</em>, 2013, pp.110-11</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>ODNB</em> for Crashawe: Balleine, p.15: Derek Morris, <em>Whitechapel 1600–1800</em>, 2011, p.152: TNA, PROB11/356</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Newcourt, <em>Repertorium</em>, p.699: John Strype, <em>A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster</em>, vol. 2/4, 1720, p.45: Keith Lindley, ‘Whitechapel Independents and the English Revolution’ <em>Historical Journal</em>, vol. 41/1, 1998, pp.283–91 at p.286</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Murray Tolmie, <em>The triumph of the saints: the separate churches of London, 1616–49</em>, 1977, p.76</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: London Metropolitan Archives, DL/C/344, ff.170v–72r: Lindley, <em>loc. cit.</em>: A. G. Matthews, <em>Walker Revised</em>, 1948, p. 52: A. G. Matthews, <em>Calamy Revised</em>, 1934, p.508: Balleine, pp.15–18</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: Newcourt, <em>Repertorium</em>, p.700: <em>ODNB</em> for John Davenant and Fuller</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: LMA, P93/MRY1/090; P93/MRY/091, pp.341–64; DL/C/345, ff. 88v, 112v; Collage 22631: Edward Hatton, <em>A New View of London</em>, vol. 2, 1708, p.406: Strype, p.45: Matthews, <em>Walker Revised</em>, p. 52: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, <em>London</em>, vol. 5: <em>East London</em>, 1930, pp.71–2</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: Peter Guillery, ‘Suburban Models, or Calvinism and Continuity in London’s Seventeenth-Century Church Architecture’, <em>Architectural History</em>, vol. 48, 2005, pp.87–92: Birch, <em>op. cit</em>.</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: Newcourt, <em>Repertorium</em>, p.699</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: Hatton, p. 406: Strype, p. 45: RCHM, <em>op. cit.</em>, p.71: LMA, Collage 22632; P93/MRY1/092, pp.7,9</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: As quoted by Anne J. Kershen, <em>Strangers, Aliens and Asians: Huguenots, Jews and Bangladeshis in Spitalfields, 1666–2000</em>, 2004, p.170. When this was quoted by G. Reginald Balleine in 1898 he added ‘how blind this prejudice was … May we learn the obvious lesson for ourselves!’, Balleine, p.22</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: <em>The Builder</em>, 30. Jan. 1875, p.93</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: LMA, P93/MRY1/90: Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, LC6854, P/MIS/330 and P10051: <em>ODNB</em> for Payne, Welton and Fellowes: Balleine, pp.19–25: David Hughson, <em>London being an accurate history etc</em>, vol. 4, 1807, p.431</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: Lambeth Palace Library, MS2690, p.10</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: LMA, P93/MRY1/90: <em>St James’s Chronicle</em>, 19–22 Jan 1762: THLHLA, P100058: Balleine, pp.28–9: Morris, <em>op. cit.</em>, p.165</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: LMA, P93/MRY1/90: <em>B</em>, 30 Jan. 1875, p. 93</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: LMA, P93/MRY1/90: <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em>, vol. 85/2, 1 July 1815, pp.28–9: information kindly supplied by Michael Kerney: Alexandra Wedgwood, 'Pugin's first and second wives', <em>True Principles</em>, vol. 3/2, summer 2005, pp. 67–9</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: <em>The Builder</em>, 18 March 1865, p.200; 30 Jan. 1875, p.93</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: <em>ODNB</em>: Balleine, pp.33–5: Lambeth Palace Library (LPL), Tait 440/433; Tait 441/457</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: THLHLA, L/SMW/A/1/1: LMA, P93/MRY1/092: Post Office Directories: Mark Girouard, <em>The Victorian Country House</em>, 1979, p.397</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: THLHLA, L/SMW/A/1/1: LMA, P93/MRY1/092</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: District Surveyors Returns: <em>The Builder</em>, 30 Jan. 1875, p.108; 24 July 1875, p.659; 23 Oct. 1875, p.962; 27 Jan. 1877, pp.89–90: <em>Illustrated London News</em>, 24 July 1875, p.93: <em>The Times</em>, 3 Feb. 1877; 1 Sept. 1880</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: LMA, P93/MRY1/092; P93/MRY1/173–4: THLHLA, LCF00550: <em>Building News</em>, 8 Sept. 1876: <em>The Builder</em>, 27 Jan. 1877, pp.89–90; 16 March 1878, pp.266–9: <em>The Architect</em>, 4 Aug. 1877; 15 Dec. 1877, p. 328: V&A Drawings, E2286–7-1911: RIBA Drawings Collection, PB179/23: Gordon Barnes, <em>Stepney Churches</em>, 1967, pp.48–53</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: THLHLA, L/SMW/A/1/1: <em>The Times</em>, 1 Sept. 1880, p.3; 12 Oct. 1880, p.7; 14 Oct. 1880, p.4: <em>The Standard</em>, 30 Aug. 1880: <em>ILN</em>, 4 Sept. 1880, p.248: <em>Pictorial World</em>, 4 Sept. 1880, p.432: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 15 Oct. 1880, p.467: <em>The Builder</em>, 20 Nov. 1880, p.630</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: THLHLA, LCF0051: <em>Building News</em>, 12 May 1882: THLHLA, A. J. Robinson, <em>A short history of the parish church of Whitechapel</em>, 1886: V&A Drawings, E2280–2284-1911: RIBA Drawings Collection, SD65/18</p>\n\n<p>[^31]: V&A Drawings, E2285-1911 and 2288-1911: Bishopsgate Institute, E. C. Lee, <em>A short history of the parish church of Whitechapel</em>, 1887, pp.15–16</p>\n\n<p>[^32]: LPL, FP Jackson 2, f.513</p>\n\n<p>[^33]: LPL, Benson 25, ff.96–8: Henry Walker, <em>Sketches of Christian work and workers</em>, 1896: THLHLA, Parish of St Mary Whitechapel, Annual Report and Accounts, 1913, pp.32–7: <em>ODNB sub</em> Dickin: information kindly supplied by Dr Sharman Kadish and Howard Spencer</p>\n\n<p>[^34]: LMA, P93/PAU2/044/1; GLC/AR/HB/02/375</p>\n",
"created": "2016-06-27",
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"title": "Early history of the site of 36-98 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>Long frontages of waste ground on the south side of Whitechapel Road were the subjects of 500-year manorial leases from Henry, Lord Wentworth, in 1585. A 528ft stretch on the site of 100–146 Whitechapel Road, extending back 132ft at its east end so as to include what was to become the site of Vine Court, went to James Platt, a London gentleman; Thomas Wilson, a brewer, already had tenure of the westernmost 66ft. John Leyland took an equivalent lease of a 237ft frontage adjoining to the west, his plot being of shallower depth and narrowing to 26ft at its west end; this took in the site of what is now the north part of the East London Mosque. Leyland already lived in a house here to which there pertained ‘a great hog yard and hovel or carthouse’,[^1] with a new barn and a number of other houses nearby. Smaller plots westwards were leased for 500 years in 1589 and 1591. ‘Sundrie’ houses and other buildings were built on Platt’s land, and by 1658 when Meggs’ Almshouses went up at its west end, there were twenty-one buildings further west on the Leyland land, which had come into the possession of Richard Garford. A windmill had risen on the corner with the footpath that later became Fieldgate Street. This whole Whitechapel Road frontage had been largely built up by 1682, with Tongues Alley roughly where the mosque now stands.[^2]</p>\n\n<p><em>Buildings from 1700 to 1840</em></p>\n\n<p>On the east side of what was to become the Fieldgate Street corner (the site of 36 Whitechapel Road) was the Three Colts public house, built in 1708 by William Crayford, a City carpenter. Thomas Holbrooke, an armourer from Barking, who held one of the smaller manorial leases of <em>c.</em>1590, gave Whitechapel parish six small cottages in trust in 1644 to house the poor, these being on the site of 42–44 Whitechapel Road (now part of the London Muslim Centre). Holbrooke’s cottages were replaced in 1804–6 by two shophouses built by William Green, a turner, and Richard Dames, a cooper, supervised by Samuel Page acting for the parish. There were bow-fronted shop windows and central-staircase layouts in 13ft-wide plots; the first occupants were brokers in household goods, typical of late-Georgian traders in the locality. Adjoining to the east was the Black Horse and Windmill, where William Quick had a brewhouse through the middle decades of the eighteenth century. His son, John Quick (1748–1831), left home aged fourteen to start a successful career as an actor.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Further east, Tongues Alley had been reshaped as two small yards. Around 1740 Little Tongue Yard (entered between the sites of Nos 52–54) enclosed about five houses and Great Tongue Yard (entered between the sites of Nos 76–78) comprised fourteen small houses and stables held by William Fillingham. The larger yard was part of a small estate with a number of small houses on the adjacent frontage that passed from John Guy to Anthony Denew in 1746. Denew’s widow Mary (née Gianinetti) held the property from 1755 to her death in 1800. Part of this holding, just west of the entrance to Great Tongue Yard, was the Three Goats Heads public house (on the site of 74–76 Whitechapel Road), present by 1730. It moved west to the site of No. 62 around 1800 under Joseph Smith and became the Brass Founders’ Arms; that disappeared in the 1840s. William Scourfield (d.1803), a tobacco-pipe maker, had a house and business on the site of No. 64 by 1781, continued by his son Thomas Henry Scourfield (d.1842). Thomas Higgs, an auctioneer and cabinet-maker, was at the site of No. 80 and a landlord in Great Tongue Yard through the early nineteenth century.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>Another small yard behind the site of Nos 86–88 was perhaps associated with James Turner, a timber merchant and the property owner at the site of No. 90 in 1790. It passed to Edward Stubbs, a coach and harness maker. In partnership with John Dixon Hancock, Stubbs extended premises on the frontage and into Great Tongue Yard in the early nineteenth century for a large coach-building factory. In that period Samuel Hetherington Hurt, a carpenter, had a timber yard behind the site of No. 96. Between what became Nos 98–100 was an entrance to Orange Court, which took its name from the Prince of Orange’s Head public house on Fieldgate Street. This small clutch of houses (alternatively Orange Row or part of Hampshire Court) was a late eighteenth-century westwards extension of Vine Court. Between the Earl of Effingham public house (see below) and Meggs’ Almshouses was the entrance to Hampshire Court, which comprised about thirteen small houses, evidently redeveloped in the late eighteenth century.[^5]</p>\n\n<p><em>From 1840 to 1970</em></p>\n\n<p>The stretch of Whitechapel Road east of the Fieldgate Street junction continued as a miscellany of humble and disparate two- and three-storey buildings in quotidian uses through the Victorian period up to the Second World War. One of the least usual businesses was that of William Shemida Halliday, a musical instrument maker at No. 40 in the decades either side of 1900. Also atypical were the presences of the <em>East London Observer</em>, which had its offices at No. 48 by 1870 until the Second World War, and of the Presbyterian Jewish Mission at No. 58 by 1890 to 1913, no more than a small mission room under classrooms. No. 78 was a beer-retailer’s through the Victorian period winding up around 1920 as the Veteran Beer House.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>Little Tongue Yard had a boot and shoe warehouse–factory on its north side, built in 1867 with Thomas Chatfeild Clarke as architect. Great Tongue Yard’s equivalent was a crockery warehouse that was converted to be a cigarette factory, held by Farmville Tobacco Ltd in 1910. Myer Woolf built a millinery factory–warehouse in Great Tongue Yard in 1926–7.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>David Hart, a weighing-machine maker at the site of Nos 82–84, had rebuilt what had been Stubb’s coach-making premises to the rear by 1864. These soon became part of Sydney Bryant Hodge’s sugar refinery, large premises with six- and eight-storey blocks extending back to Fieldgate Street (No. 17) across much of what is now the East London Mosque and Maryam Centre site. The refinery’s origins had been around 1803 with Henry Eggers, who was succeeded by Friend & Boden among others. Hodge took over in 1851. It closed after Hodge’s death in 1878 and a fire in 1879. The site was sold in 1882 and cleared around 1889, its back part giving way to Great Eastern Dwellings.[^8] The frontage at Nos 82–84 became that of the Barbican Mission to the Jews, founded in 1882. It moved from Finsbury Square to Whitechapel in 1900 and put up a red-brick building that was enlarged in 1909. The mission hall and chapel backed onto the Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue. As with a number of other such establishments in the East End, the Jewish community was chiefly attracted to the Barbican Mission for the free medical and dispensary services that it offered, services not available elsewhere.[^9]</p>\n\n<p>Krone & Sesemann, surgical instrument makers, were at No. 92 by 1870 to around 1900, followed by Nathan Margolis, an ironmonger. Benjamin Napper, a leather merchant, and his successors at Nos 94–96 from around 1870 to 1940 had a glass-roofed warehouse to the rear, probably built in 1887 to plans by Harry Oliver (Whitechapel’s District Surveyor), of the firm Wigg, Oliver & Son. At No. 98, John Ashbridge, solicitor, was followed around 1900 by Abraham Pincus Goldenfeld & Co., basket dealers.[^10]</p>\n\n<p>In 1937 a scheme was advanced for a large boxing hall extending from 54–78 Whitechapel Road across Great Tongue Yard and Little Tongue Yard to 23–37 Fieldgate Street. The architect for this was Richard Seifert, still in his 20s. It appears to have come to nothing.[^11]</p>\n\n<p>Across all this property Second World War bomb damage was extensive. Nearly all the Whitechapel Road properties had been cleared by 1953, survivors being at Nos 36–46, 54–56 and 68–72. By 1968 these too were gone, and the open ground (acquired by the Greater London Council) was used variously for the assembly of casual tailoring workers and others, and more enduringly for car parking. That use continued until the East London Mosque and associated buildings went up between 1983 and 2013.[^12]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/SLC/1/17/3–4 </p>\n\n<p>[^2]: THLHLA, P/SLC/1/17/4: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), M93/176, 202 and 241: Faithorne and Newcourt's map, 1658: William Morgan, <em>London Etc Actually Survey’d</em>, 1682</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: THLHLA, P/LAP/1/4/1–2: LMA, A/DAV/001/007–13; MR/LV/7/49; MR/LV/8/68; Land Tax returns (LT); Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks (THCS): <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub</em> Quick</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THLHLA, Map 233, Baynes Estate 1729: The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/751/258; PROB11/818/409; PROB11/1386/108: LMA, MR/LV/05/026; LT; THCS: Post Office Directories (POD): Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Rocque's map, 1746: Horwood's maps, 1799 and 1813: LMA, MS11936/487/976655; LT; THCS: <em>The Mirror</em>, Dec. 1835</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/22/ES/021585: District Surveyors Returns (DSR): POD: TNA, IR58/84804/2124</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>The Builder</em>, 18 May 1867, p.358: Goad maps: DSR: TNA, IR58/84804/2125: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes (MBW Mins), 1 Jan. 1858, p.34; 25 Nov. 1864, p.1168: Ordnance Survey map, 1873: <em>The Builder</em>, 22 March 1879, p.328: <em>The Times</em>, 1 July 1882: Bryan Mawer's sugar databases: Goad maps</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: LMA, A/FWA/C/D/128/001: TNA, IR58/84804/2126: DSR: Todd M. Endelman, <em>Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History</em>, 1990, p. 168</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>The Builder</em>, 19 March 1887, p.456: MBW Mins, 18 March 1887, p.482: Goad maps: PO</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>The Builder</em>, 16 July 1937, p.124: information kindly supplied by Jonathan Clarke</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: Goad maps: Historic England Archive, aerial photographs</p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-19",
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"id": 873,
"title": "Co-operative Wholesale Society Furnishing and Hardware Warehouse, 9 Prescot Street",
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"body": "<p>The seven-storey Furnishing and Hardware Warehouse and Showrooms at 9 Prescot Street (and 78 Chamber Street) were designed for the Co-operative Wholesale Society by its architect, L. G. Ekins, at around the same time as the Tea Office and Coffee Works in Prescot Street from 1934. Built in 1937–8, when the furnishing showrooms opened in May 1939, they were billed as evidence of the ‘further stage of peaceful penetration into the Metropolis by the CWS’ and the ‘fourth large contribution of the Wholesale Society in eight years to the changing face of East London’.[^1] The staff of the London Architects’ Department now numbered seventy, which together with the building, engineering, shopfitting and allied departments, completed not just the landmark buildings on Leman Street and Prescot Street but the warehouses, discussed above, on both sides of Leman Street.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The Furniture Warehouse is built in the same distinctive brickwork as the administrative offices above a Cornish (rather than artificial) granite base but without the green-tiled roof of its more striking neighbour. Inside, the building handled products from the six CWS furniture factories, displaying carpets, mattresses and pianos on the ground floor and, above these, toys, cycles and prams, hardware and electrical goods. The fifth-floor radio and television showroom walls were ‘treated in a novel way with corrugated asbestos blended with sycamore veneered fixtures’, and the sixth displayed wallpaper, paint and brushes. 10,000 square yards of Scottish CWS Falkland linoleum covered the three acres of floor space. In the sub-basement an electricity substation was designed to serve all the new premises and a 600ft borehole producing 10,000 gallons of water per hour was intended to feed the second portion of Ekins’s administrative offices, which had yet to be built. Together with a similar tank in the drapery department, the aim was to supply all the water for CWS premises locally.[^3] In 1949 there were still two functioning CWS wells for drinking water in Leman Street, out of only five still working in the borough, and these were checked regularly for quality by the Metropolitan Water Board.[^4] Assuming one was still within the Furnishing Warehouse, the other was presumably the artesian well sunk beneath the London Tea Department in the 1890s. The present single-storey extension at 74–78 Chamber Street was added to the furnishing warehouse in about 1953, built on a vacant site on the south side of the Princess of Prussia public house (which leased an adjoining portion of the furnishing warehouse’s ground floor[^5]) and the former county court.[^6] The furnishing warehouse remained in use by the CWS until around 2011 and was acquired, together with 16 Prescot Street, by Derwent London in 2012 but was let to the Co-op Bank until 2015.[^7] Part of the building is currently used as offices of the Barts Health NHS Trust.</p>\n\n<p>Towards the end of 1939 Ekins drew up plans for a first-aid post and air-raid wardens’ headquarters in the basement beneath the ‘old drapery’ at 99 Leman Street. In September 1941 he also signed the plans for adjustments to the public air-raid shelters created beneath the tea department at 100 Leman Street, which may represent some of his last work on site before his retirement in September 1942.[^8] During the Blitz, these were used by homeless employees, by air-raid personnel and policemen from Leman Street Police Station, whose sleeping quarters were on the top floor of the station.[^9] The CWS fire brigade took care of its own and neighbouring property during raids.[^10] During the First World War, when CWS cellars in Leman Street reportedly served as the official shelters for the area, the Tea Department had suffered £820 worth of damage in October 1915 and in 1917 one of the clock faces at 99 Leman Street was cracked by the blast from the accidental munitions-factory explosion at Silvertown, but otherwise its property was relatively unscathed.[^11] Unlike the CWS Silvertown works which were themselves destroyed in 1940, the Whitechapel premises again survived major devastation during the Second World War; there was some general non-structural blast damage to the Administrative Block at 1 Prescot Street and, to a lesser degree, the coffee works building on Prescot Street, but given its proximity to the railway, the City and the docks the CWS Whitechapel estate suffered remarkably little damage.[^12] The many incendiaries which fell on ‘most of the CWS properties’ during 1940 were said to have been extinguished by CWS firemen.[^13]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Plan showing proposed furniture warehouse and showrooms, August 1934, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), GLC/AR/BR/17/077326/02; ‘CWS Extensions in London’, <em>The Producer</em>, May 1939, p. 137.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>New History of the C.W.S.</em>, 1938, p. 423.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: ‘CWS Extensions in London’, <em>The Producer</em>, May 1939, pp. 137–8.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Report of the Medical Officer of Health for Stepney</em>, 1947, p. 37 and 1949, p. 14.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Plan showing portion of the ground floor of Furnishing and hardware warehouse to be leased to Truman, Hanbury and Buxton, Ltd, 1937, LMA, GLC/AR/BR/17/077326/02.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: CWS property plan, <em>c</em>.1948, LMA, GLC/AR/BR/17/077204; Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), Building Control file, 23214.</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <a href=\"https://www.buildington.co.uk/london-e1/9-prescot-street/9-prescot-street/id/1309\">https://www.buildington.co.uk/london-e1/9-prescot-street/9-prescot-street/id/1309</a>[accessed 1 March 2019]. </p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Leman Street drainage plans, 1941, THLHA, L/THL/D/2/30/88. </p>\n\n<p>[^9]: William Richardson, <em>The CWS in War and Peace, 1938–1976</em>, 1977, pp. 116, 117.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>Building Co-operation</em>, p. 211.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>New History of the C.W.S.</em>, 1938, pp. 120–1. </p>\n\n<p>[^12]: London County Council Bomb Damage Map, LMA, RM22/63.</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: Richardson, <em>CWS in War and Peace, </em>p. 115.</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-29",
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"title": "The Women’s Library and London Metropolitan University, c.1995 onwards",
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"cholera",
"library",
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"body": "<p> </p>\n\n<p>The conversion was not immediate. In 1995 Wright and Wright Architects won a design competition to remodel the site for London Guildhall, which was to be consolidated into the London Metropolitan University (LMU) in 2002. Ultimately the architects created the Law Department of LMU and, significantly, ‘The Women’s Library’ – a unique collection hosted by the University. Having lodged in a cramped basement of the adjacent Calcutta House for many years, the new Library costing £4.5 million was funded by private and public donors of whom the Heritage Lottery Fund was the most significant. The Women’s Library was completed in 2001, the Law Department followed shortly after in 2003.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>The client’s brief requested the new library ‘feel permanent’. Wright and Wright’s design made use of thick concrete walls which contributed to a restrained architectural aesthetic as well as providing substantial thermal mass for improved environmental performance. In its dignity and pragmatism, the building was regarded by the architectural press as a ‘model of politeness’. The design bore a resemblance to the technology-led original Baths. Both schemes shunned unnecessary ornamentation in favour of carefully considered efficiency and ventilation. Maintaining continuity with the thousands of women who had utilized the same entrances for over a century and a half, the practice elected to privilege the eastern façade of 1846 (see figure 3). Indeed it was this willingness to engage with the site’s history that Claire Wright believed won the architects the commission. Behind this punctuated black facade, a substantial new building of red brick stepped back, rising up to five storeys and down into a basement. Internally the purpose-built accommodation was arranged around a centrally located ground floor exhibition space lined with pocket courtyards and a cafe. A modest staircase led up to the archive, library, offices and reading rooms. The design for the interior clearly drew attention to the visual and physical connections between these diverse spaces. Because of these interlocking rooms and voids, <em>The</em> <em>Architectural Review</em> lauded the building possessing ‘the elegant complexity of a Chinese puzzle’. In this organisation, the design rejected conventional spatial hierarchies, an act which some argued was self-consciously ‘feminist’. In 2002 it was awarded the RIBA Journal’s ‘Best UK Building of the Year’ Award. [^22]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2016/07/27/p1150106.JPG\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Figure 3: Wright and Wright’s Women’s Library (photographed February 2015)</em></p>\n\n<p>The innovative library only continued in this purpose-built accommodation until 2012 when it was sold to the London School of Economics. Reminiscent of efforts to save the Baths, the ‘Save The Women’s Library’ campaign gathered a petition with over 12,000 signatories and was backed by prominent supporters, including RIBA President Angela Brady. One protester reflected that the Library and its award-winning home belonged together, like “a body and its insides”. According to the designs of Molyneux Kerr Architects, LMU substantially adapted the ground floor interior to house a new central lecture theatre and is presently preparing to relocate its own wide ranging archival collections to the site. [^23]</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: <em>AJ</em>, 23 Feb 2006, p.26; Adams, Annmarie, ‘Architecture for feminism?: The design of the Women’s Library, London’, <em>Atlantis: </em><em>Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice</em>, Vol 29.1, Fall/Winter 2004, pp.99-105, p.100; <em>Architectural Review</em>, 9 May 2012</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: <a href=\"http://savethewomenslibrary.blogspot.co.uk/\">http://savethewomenslibrary.blogspot.co.uk/</a> [accessed 6 July 2016] <a href=\"http://www.thepetitionsite.com/925/128/986/save-the-womens-library-at-london-metropolitan-university/\">http://www.thepetitionsite.com/925/128/986/save-the-womens-library-at-london-metropolitan-university/</a>, [accessed 6 July 2016]; <em>The Telegraph</em>, 8 Nov 2012; Information kindly supplied by Peter Fisher, Archivist at London Metropolitan University</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2016-07-27",
"last_edited": "2021-02-10"
},
{
"id": 247,
"title": "Some notes on the Lord Nelson",
"author": {
"id": 85,
"username": "stephen.r.harris"
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"street": "Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>The building at 299 Whitechapel Road was formerly the Lord Nelson pub. It was present here as a pub by 1807 when Joseph Louch, Victualler at the Lord Nelson, held an insurance policy with the Sun Fire Office. The pub held a full licence and by the turn of the twentieth century was advertising itself as a \"Wine & Spirit Stores\". A photograph of the pub dated around 1903 is held by the Museum of London and in the photograph the licensee's name can be seen displayed as Alfred Preston Starkey. Starkey may have been the last landlord here, as the pub seems to have closed at this time. </p>\n",
"created": "2016-12-21",
"last_edited": "2018-10-17"
},
{
"id": 56,
"title": "4 White Church Lane",
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"body": "<p>1852–3, stock brick, unaltered to rear, built as a sale room by and for Isaac Bird, auctioneer. Painted-shutter from 2012 by Hunto. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: <a href=\"http://blog.globalstreetart.com/walls\">http://blog.globalstreetart.com/walls</a></p>\n",
"created": "2016-06-22",
"last_edited": "2019-04-30"
},
{
"id": 184,
"title": "Samuel Prevezer remembered",
"author": {
"id": 25,
"username": "Aileen"
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"body": "<p>From <em>The Worst it Can Be is a Disaster </em>(2007), the autobiography of the theatre director Braham Murray (b. 1943):</p>\n\n<p>'My mother's paternal family name was Prevezer. Originally there were seven sons and four of them escaped from the Nazis to England. They came over on the onion boats with nothing. 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 [No. 86]. The moved to Finchley; Uncle Jack, the richest, to Brighton; Uncle Barney to Mayfair; and Uncle Max to Regent's Park.</p>\n\n<p>....The curse of the Prevezers was total emotional constipation. Inside they were cauldrons of feeling but none of it could be expressed.... If you gave my grandfather a present, he'd look at it with worry on his face and say, \"How much costs such a thing?\" Inside he was delighted.'</p>\n",
"created": "2016-11-02",
"last_edited": "2018-01-27"
},
{
"id": 874,
"title": "Social, political and cultural activity in the Co-operative Wholesale Society's premises in and around Leman Street",
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"username": "rebecca.preston"
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"b_number": "99",
"b_name": "Sugar House, 99 Leman Street",
"street": "Leman Street",
"address": "Sugar House, 99 Leman Street",
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"search_str": "Sugar House, 99 Leman Street"
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"tags": [
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"body": "<p>From its early days the Co-operative Wholesale Society organised social and educational activities for its staff and hosted meetings and other events, and later on leased property to co-operative and other organisations with whom it shared interests and values. At the suggestion of Mrs Benjamin Jones, wife of the London Branch manager, the first meeting of the Women’s Co-operative Guild took place at Hooper Square on 15 April 1886, attended by over seventy women and chaired by co-operative worker Catherine Webb.[^1] Representatives from Toynbee Hall had been present at the opening of the new headquarters building in 1887 and from at least 1885 the settlement had put on lectures for CWS workers at Hooper Square and also held classes for co-operators at Toynbee Hall.[^2] A library for employees was formed at the London Branch, not long after the fire had destroyed the premises in late 1885, when board meetings were transferred temporarily to Toynbee Hall.[^3] When Prof Sedley Taylor started a class in economics at Toynbee Hall, CWS staff were said to have formed the nucleus of his students.[^4] The Wholesale considered itself a beacon in the East End, its architectural presence drawing attention to its work in the promotion of co-operation, and provided office space for kindred organisations. Thus in the late 1880s and 1890s, 99 Leman Street was the address of the Co-operative Aid Association, the Tenant Co-operators Society, and the People’s Co-operative Society. No. 99 Leman Street also hosted public lectures on co-operative and related themes. A course of twenty university extension lectures was offered on the life and duties of the citizen on Saturday afternoons in 1893, held after the working week had finished at 4 o’clock on Saturdays in the Conference Hall. These were free to co-operators and 5s (or 2s 6d for the half course of ten) to the general public.[^5] In 1901, the Countess of Warwick presided at a conference at London Branch headquarters on London School Board Evening Continuation Classes.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>During the Co-operative Wholesale ‘tea girls’ strike’ over piecework at the tea department in 1904, Canon Barnett offered the women a room at Toynbee Hall while he opened negotiations between the CWS and the Women’s Trade Union League.[^7] In the 1930s, Toynbee Hall organised for parties of undergraduates and public school children to be taken around CWS premises locally.[^8] By the 1920s, in addition to the various departments and bank, 99 Leman Street was also home to the CWS Financial Propaganda Department, CWS Social Club, the Co-operative Press Agency and the Russo-British Co-operative Information Bureau.[^9] London Branch employees’ activities on site included a fine art club, with ‘notable exhibits of painting and sculpture from Leman Street’ being shown in the 1930s at the East End Academy in the Whitechapel Art Gallery.[^10] An Ethiopian Exhibition organised by Sylvia Pankhurst on behalf of the Princess Tsahai Memorial Hospital Fund, of which Pankhurst was the honorary secretary, was displayed during 1948 in the Boot and Shoe Showrooms at 99 Leman Street. Ancient Ethiopian traditional dress, embroidery, leather-work and illuminated books appeared alongside examples of modern textiles. This formed part of a project to form closer relations with ‘the brave Ethiopian people whose struggle against the aggression of Mussolini aroused sympathy and interest in this country’. A film, ‘This is Ethiopia’, was shown in the CWS film theatre at the Tea Office across the road in Prescot Street.[^11]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Catherine Webb, <em>The Woman with the Basket: The History of the Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1883–1927</em>, 1927, p. 28.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: ‘Opening of new Co-operative Premises in Whitechapel’, <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 5 November 1887, p. 7; Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, <em>Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years</em>, 1984, p. 45.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: National Co-operative Archive (NCA), CWS Minutes, 29 February 1886.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>London Branch of the CWS</em>, 1933, p. 30.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Co-operative Union Southern Section, <em>A Course of Twenty University Extension Lectures</em>…, 1893, [p. 1].</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: ‘Knowledge or Ignorance’, <em>Sunday Times</em>, 24 March 1901, p. 8.</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: ‘Co-operative Wholesale Girls’ Strike’, <em>London Daily News</em>, 12 October 1904, p. 8.</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Correspondence with the Co-operative Wholesale Society, Leman Street, re visit by Toynbee Hall students, November 1937, London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), A/TOY/015/002/047–048.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: <em>Daily Herald</em>, 1 January 1921, p. 6; <em>CWS Annual</em>, 1918, p. 289; <em>People’s Yearbook</em>, 1921, p. 377; <em>The Producer</em>, July 1925, p. 266.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>New History of the C.W.S.</em>, 1938, p. 506.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: ‘Ethiopian Exhibition’, <em>The British Journal of Nursing</em>, July 1948, p. 85.</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-29",
"last_edited": "2021-04-28"
},
{
"id": 349,
"title": "Amalgamation and Building Beagle House, 1956-1974",
"author": {
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"b_number": "1",
"b_name": "Maersk House",
"street": "Braham Street",
"address": "Maersk House (formerly Beagle House), 1 Braham Street",
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"body": "<p>In a deal that was met with some surprise and industry interest, Browne & Eagle amalgamated with tea merchants Colonial Wharves in 1956 to form a new company, Colonial & Eagle Wharves Ltd. <em>The Nautical Magazine</em> reported that the two companies were ‘among the most prominent wharfingers and warehousemen intimately concerned with the storage and lighterage business on the London River’. Wool, tea and other food stuffs such as canned fruits were to be handled by the newly formed company, a key aim of the merger being the ‘concentration of particular commodities under one roof’. Recognising the need to modernise warehouse practices, Colonial & Eagle sought to streamline its operations and use of property. The warehouse on the north side of Braham Street, empty since 1941, and 12 and 14 Leman Street were sold to the LCC in March 1956. The sites were cleared for the widening of Braham Street to facilitate the Gardiner’s Corner one-way traffic system between Leman Street and Mansell Street. Colonial & Eagle also considered the sale of the Alie Street warehouse (no. 3) but negotiations failed and it was retained.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>With money in hand from war damage reparations and the sale of the northern warehouse, the Board focussed on redeveloping the vacant corner plot once occupied by the Baker & Basket and 18 to 20 Leman Street. Designs for a five-storey warehouse and office block were drawn up by Stock Page & Stock and a tender of £84 922 from Y. J. Lovell & Co. was accepted ahead of the cheapest, £81 346, submitted by Holland, Hannen & Cubitts. Experienced in warehouse design, Stock Page & Stock were responsible for what was deemed ‘a model five-floor warehouse and office building’ for Pawsons and Leafs, built in Shoreditch six years later and still standing. Their scheme for Colonial & Eagle made provision for a ground-floor garage, first-floor offices and boardroom, with the remaining three floors for storage. The garage was expressed as a podium of coloured tiles that curved smoothly around the corner of Braham and Leman Streets (see figure 2). On its completion in December 1957, the company’s registered office shifted from Walsingham House, Seething Lane, to this new building, known as Beagle House.[^2]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/beagle_2.jpg\"><em>Figure 2: Photograph of Beagle House taken from Leman Street, c. 1958 (Collage 118708)</em></p>\n\n<p>The name Beagle House stuck, but any trace of Browne & Eagle was soon left far behind in a trail of corporate mergers and take-overs. In 1961 Butler’s Wharf acquired all the ordinary stock of Colonial & Eagle Wharves rebranding itself as Butler’s & Colonial Wharves Ltd. Alongside Beagle Shipping Ltd, this company was one of a collection of enterprises purchased by Wharf Holdings Ltd, a diversifying transportation business. Under the direction of Wharf Holdings, Butler’s & Colonial Wharves invested in buying up smaller transportation businesses and acquired shares in companies such as James Warren & Co., Canadian Railways and Wintle’s Transport then also backed Shell and BP a few years later. Shortly after becoming Butler’s & Colonial Wharves Ltd, the Alie Street warehouse was finally sold. Plans for an office conversion including an expansion of the IBM ‘machine room’ preceded plans to redevelop the whole Braham Street, Leman Street and Camperdown Street block, first raised in 1964.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Four years later, a substantial rebuilding consisting of a new nine-storey warehouse and showroom was proposed following designs by Trehearne & Norman, Preston and Partners, but this scheme was not taken forward. Instead, Compass Securities entered into an agreement with Wharf Holdings to lead the redevelopment of the site, intending to prioritise office rather than commercial space. Compass were granted the pre-requisite governmental ‘Office Development Permit’ for the site by ensuring the building was pre-let to Overseas Containers Ltd (OCL), but were frustrated by difficulties in obtaining planning permission for their designs and it seems abandoned the project. In response, the architect Col. Richard Seifert was engaged by Wharf Holdings to push through a successful outcome for a new scheme on account of his well-known fluency in the planning codes. An experienced negotiator, Seifert built his case on the detrimental local effects of the traffic management scheme the GLC had recently imposed at Gardiner’s Corner. Economic arguments that the offices would bring further employment to Tower Hamlets, and that OCL would contribute to national export figures, were also compelling and planning permission was granted on appeal. With an eye for exploiting the property potential of London businesses, Jeffrey Sterling’s investment company Sterling Guarantee Trust acquired the lead shares in Wharf Holdings Ltd after approval for Seifert’s scheme. Demolition of the old Beagle House and its warehouses began in 1971. The new Beagle House opened in January 1974.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: SLHLA, A119/138; <em>The Nautical Magazine</em>, Vol 175, Jan-Jun 1956, p. 78</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: SLHLA, A119/138; Collage 118708; <em>Financial Times</em>, 20 Aug 1963, p. 16; LCC Minutes, 25 July 1893, p. 825</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: SLHLA, A119/181</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/228; Frank Price, <em>Being There</em>, 2002, pp. 301-2; ‘Planning Gain in Tower Hamlets’, PhD thesis, Linda Carole Johnson, Brunel, 1988, p. 157; <em>Investors Chronicle and Stock Exchange Gazette</em>, Vol. 17, 1971, p. 392; <em>Accountancy</em>, Vol. 84, 1973, p. 76. John Glanfield, ‘Olympia: Corporate History 1884-1999’ in <em>Journal of Exhibition Study Group</em>, Jan 2012. [Accessed online: http://www.studygroup.org.uk/Articles/Content/112/OLYMPIA%20Corporate%20History%201884.htm]</p>\n",
"created": "2017-04-10",
"last_edited": "2020-10-27"
},
{
"id": 649,
"title": "Harun Quadi takes on the Bengal Cuisine",
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"body": "<p>Harun Quadi settled in the East End in the early 1980, having originated in Comilla, Bangladesh. In the 1990s he took over the Bengal Cuisine at 12 Brick Lane as his first restaurant venture.</p>\n\n<p>\"Surprisingly, this building [was] a laundrette in 1989. One of my predecessors [was] a Bengali gentleman, he made it a self-service laundrette. Upstairs was two flats.</p>\n\n<p>Then 1992, he transferred it to restaurant down below. Due to some reason he had to go to Bangladesh. He left it to his another friend who sold it to a friend. This friend is only running for about one year. After one year he could not run. He's saying that, \"It's difficult for me, I cannot run\". He wanted to sell it. He tried to sell it and finally could not sell it to anybody and he came to me and said, \"Whatever the price you give, I'll take it. You take it over. I cannot give all the outgoings”.</p>\n\n<p>I gave him small amount of money, £2,500, to take the possession of the business [in 1993]. He had outgoing debt, outstanding rent and he had all other lot of things outstanding. I took the responsibility of paying all these things. It was [named] Bengal Cuisine at that time.</p>\n\n<p>Though I was not a restaurant runner or restaurant worker, I kept it running as a restaurant. I employed people there. Surprisingly, after I have arrived and put some effort on it, the restaurant started doing good business.</p>\n\n<p>About 2002 and 2003, I made another refurbishment of the restaurant by a German architect. She was good architect. Then business was good and we had a grant for £15,000 to do the front of it, again, from the City Challenge. That helped us to improve the place.</p>\n\n<p>It was the first restaurant to be designed like a contemporary English fashion. Most of the restaurants are Indian fashion, outside and inside, but my restaurant was contemporary English fashion outside design. Also English inside. It's because my architect was saying that, \"Now Indian food it is not Indian food, Indian food is English food also. So why not [design] it for English? And English people come here\".</p>\n\n<p>I accepted her idea though it was risky for me. It was my final financial risk that is her idea. I took the financial risk, but it worked out well. People started liking it. Lot of people came down, enjoyed the food. I found out many other people followed me as well.</p>\n\n<p>Upstairs I left it as flats. I leased the building, at the beginning, for 20 years. Then I took it for 30 years.</p>\n\n<p>Then in 2002, in first and second floor, I had a college here. I took D1 permission from the council. Then we used it until 2010 throughout, as D1 permission.</p>\n\n<p>It was a college for doing diploma and higher diploma, College of Further Education. It ran for 10 years which is-- We help a lot of people. Students, especially the students come from abroad and they could not afford university fees.</p>\n\n<p>This first floor and second floor was classrooms. The university fees was very high, £10-12,000. We could afford to get students for £2,000. That's why you got lot of students from abroad they brought. I had here about 100 students.</p>\n\n<p>After my college grown bigger, then I rented another place where we did have 600 students. We ran it for two years there and after that the policy changed in England and English policy doesn't allow students to come abroad for small colleges like this. At the same time, it doesn't allow to work here as a student, a foreign student, so students lost interest, they didn't come anymore. [Then] I let building as flats.</p>\n\n<p>After 2010, everything changed [in the restaurant business], especially Spitalfields market. Spitalfields Market it was a vegetable market. [After the] vegetable market [had] gone, new Spitalfields Market came up and in the market, all around, there was plenty of food shop. All the city people [began to] eat in the Spitalfields Market, all around the Spitalfields Market. They [did] not pass the market and come to Brick Lane so Brick Lane lost the flavour [to] Spitalfields Market.</p>\n\n<p>City people used to come all the way from Broadgate to Brick Lane. They were passing through Spitalfields Market. On their way, there's plenty of beautiful new restaurants, all times, and cheap and expensive, all kinds of restaurants. There's a lot of temporary restaurants there. They do not have any big overhead and they just open up every day. They give food very cheap.</p>\n\n<p>Those who want very expensive food dish, very good quality restaurants also came up. These are all big companies so Brick Lane slowly died down. Now, Brick Lane restaurant is very, very bad, especially Indian restaurants.</p>\n\n<p>[Now we are thinking about] how to change to the modern atmosphere. We are losing every week, every day, but time to adapt.</p>\n\n<p>[The Sonargam restaurant further down on Osborne Street] could not afford their rent so they said, \"Okay, we'll make one restaurant [with you]. Two restaurants in one\". They had some buffet customers who came down to them. They joined us [and set up] a buffet thinking that first and second floor will be part of the restaurant and because it has got D1 permission we can congregate people there, but not to cook. Cooking is done below.</p>\n\n<p>I can see, every time new immigrant come in the country, they bring their culture and food with them. So many Indian came last 10 years, especially European immigrant, they have opened their food businesses. Any immigrant comes in new country, they can do only a business which is food, because they eat themselves and they sell it to others also.</p>\n\n<p>It's easiest. That's why there are lot of choice, various choices. Asian, European food in UK now. Indian restaurant, by comparison, it's going a little down. We are in a position that we're getting hardship to cope with it.</p>\n\n<p>I've got a long lease, but it's difficult to run the rent. My rent was £20,000. My present rent is going to be £70,000. From 22 came 40, 40 to 55, 55 to 70, within seven-eight year time. Now, £70,000 to pay, elsewhere it's 20. Last year was 55. Though we have a lease, what do we do with the lease? We have to pay all the money.\"</p>\n\n<p>Harun Quadi was interviewed by Shahed Saleem at 12 Brick Lane on 17.01.18</p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-15",
"last_edited": "2020-10-09"
},
{
"id": 601,
"title": "Mr Maud's Sugar House",
"author": {
"id": 69,
"username": "bryan_mawer"
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"street": "Ensign Street",
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"Board of Trade",
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"body": "<p>On the 1790s edition of Horwood's map of London, 'Maud's Sugar House' is named, abutting the Royalty Theatre in Well St (the old name for Ensign Street).[^1] Initially with Wackerbarth, later with Crook, Mr Maud ran the refinery from about 1789 to 1803.[^2] We can see the sugarhouse in an image of the theatre by Daniel Havell.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>In 1817 the premises were put up for sale: two-pan sugarhouse with 6 working floors, adjoining two-pan double house with mill room and 3 working floors, lump room, warehouses, loft, men's rooms and spacious yard.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The later edition of Horwood's map dated 1819 shows the sugarhouse had been demolished and the site empty.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <a href=\"http://www.romanticlondon.org/explore-horwoods-plan/#18/51.51034/-0.06780\">Horwood's Plan of London, 1792-9</a></p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Mawer, Sugar Refiners & Sugarbakers: <a href=\"www.mawer.clara.net\">www.mawer.clara.net</a></p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <a href=\"http://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/theatre-and-performance-2/guest-post-the-first-gas-lit-stage\">V&A Blog Guest Post - The First Gas-Lit Stage</a></p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 24 July 1817, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <a href=\"http://www.romanticlondon.org/explore-horwoods-plan/#18/51.51034/-0.06780\">Horwood/Faden's Plan of London, 1819</a></p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-11",
"last_edited": "2021-03-10"
},
{
"id": 699,
"title": "130 Whitechapel High Street",
"author": {
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"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
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"body": "<p>This former NatWest Bank branch is a 1955–6 rebuilding to the designs of Frederick George Frizzell (1902-76), architect, by R. R. S. Dean of Whitechapel Road, following war damage of a previous bank building erected in 1866.[^1] The current building is in a stripped-down but distinctively neo-Georgian style, a departure for Frizzell, a specialist before the war in Modernist pithead bath buildings.[^2] It is faced in orange-red brick with concrete-framed windows and pediment over the frontage set against a slightly recessed wall plane. </p>\n\n<p>An oculus in the pediment features the crest of the National Westminster Bank. The ground floor is in the house style of the National Westminster Bank of the 1950s, clad in black polished granite, probably from Finland, twin semi-circular-headed doors flank a triplet window (currently blocked off), the doorcases and window surrounds in Verdi Alpi serpentinite. [information Ruth Siddall]. In the 1960s and 70s the upper two floors housed offices (Simplex Seed Sorters Ltd, Conduit employment bureau, Brian Corcoran Ltd engineers).[^3] Since the bank merged with the Whitechapel Road Branch and closed in 2013, the building has housed a succession of gyms, but is currently (July 2018) empty.</p>\n\n<p>The previous London and Westminster Bank of 1866 was one story taller, an imposing Italianate palazzo, stone-fronted with four windows bays, pediments to the first floor, rusticated quoins and a heavy dentil cornice. Corinthian-porticoed doors either side of the frontage gave access to the bank and upper floors. The architect was E.N. Clifton (1817-89), who also designed London and Westminster branches in Lambeth and Southwark.[^4] It replaced a branch at 87 High Street, opened in 1835 (see xx). The building was deep, with a central lightwell running from first to third-floor level, the bank occupying the ground floor and basement with, by 1914, offices to first and second floor (dentist), and a caretaker’s flat in the mansarded attic level.[^5] Half the large garden was built over in 1893 by Brooke Bond with a three-storey warehouse behind No. 129 in Castle Alley (Old Castle Street), and the bank was extended in 1909 and 1936, with other alterations by H. Victor Kerr, architect. The building was blitzed in the war though the remains survived to first-floor level.[^6] The 1866 occupied the large site held in 1712 by Holland, and acquired in 1865 for £5,000, with two shop-houses (130 and 132) and a central entryway through No. 132 to, by 1849, a yard and a large square workshop (No 131), occupied for many years in the nineteenth century by horn manufacturers - Henry Hughes, and John and George Burnell, John Burnell senior having acquired the adjoining Goulston estate in 1776.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives (THLHLA), Building Control file 15878 loc. 46</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: http://www.scottisharchitects.org.uk/architect_full.php?id=206701</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Builder</em>, 19 Jan 1889, pp. 52-3</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84815/3235</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: THLHLA, Building Control file 15878 loc. 46</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: TNA, PROB 11/2109/276: POD: London Metropolitan Archives, SC/PM/ST/01/00; Land Tax returns : Ogilby and Morgan's map, 1676: Census: information Lyn Crawford, RBS Archives, Edinburgh</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-06",
"last_edited": "2020-08-18"
}
]
}