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"title": "Boar's Head Playhouse",
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"body": "<p>A late-Elizabethan playhouse, the Boar’s Head, stood just east of the south end of Petticoat Lane. On that account the early history of the immediate area has been exhaustively investigated.[^1] First incursions behind Petticoat Lane to the east here were probably associated with houses on Whitechapel High Street. Thereafter, the most notable and substantial development was of an extensive yard behind the Boar’s Head Inn which lay on the site of the future 141–144 Whitechapel High Street, near the corner. This had probably taken place by the 1530s, when John Transfeild, a gunner in the service of Henry VIII, appears to have acquired a connection to the property. While in Ireland in 1557, Transfeild gave permission for the staging of a ‘Lewde Play called a Sackfull of Newes’ in the inn yard of the Boar’s Head, This brought the unwanted attention of the Lord Mayor, who briefly imprisoned the players. Transfeild died in 1561 and his widow Jane (née Grove), married Edmund Poley, who had the copyhold of the Woodlands estate of which, or part of which, Transfeild appears to have been a leaseholder. In 1594 Jane Poley, again widowed, granted a lease of the Boar’s Head inn that ordained the building of a public playhouse. By this time there were already several houses on the west side of the inn yard, in one of which she took up residence; she died in 1601.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>The lease of the inn was to Oliver Woodliffe, a haberdasher and financial speculator, for twenty-one years from March 1595. It required Woodliffe to spend £100 within seven years building a tiring house (dressing rooms) and stage. The decision to proceed, despite threatening noises from the Lord Mayor, may have been encouraged by the demise of the Burbages’ Theatre in Shoreditch in 1597. Before work started, the Whitechapel High Street frontage covered what would become Nos 141 to 144, a range of two-storey buildings including, from the west (Nos 142–144) a hall, parlour and kitchen below three chambers. Beyond was the inn’s entrance with a room over, and then the end of a building (No. 141) that stretched northwards to face the yard’s east side. This had a drinking room, three parlours, a cellar and three stables below seven chambers with access from a gallery. Remains of what is believed to be this building were discovered during archaeological investigation in 2018. A lateral barn enclosed the yard’s north side, the west side had an ‘ostry’ (probably the inn’s public stable) adjoining other stables reserved to Poley and Woodliffe. There was also a garden that had likely once pertained to one of the High Street houses.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Woodliffe sublet the inn and part of the yard to one Richard Samwell who built narrow galleries north and south, while Woodliffe built one on the west side and a simple rectangular stage, 40ft by 25ft, in the middle of the yard. The existing eastern gallery leading from the back of the inn formed the fourth side. This arrangement separated the inn and the theatrical enterprise, and meant that neither man was entirely liable for the legally questionable structure. No sooner had it been built than Woodliffe took up with a theatrical entrepreneur, Robert Browne, leader of the Earl of Derby’s men, and a more substantial playhouse was built in 1599, the year the Globe opened at Bankside. Constructed by a carpenter, John Mago, at a cost of around £520, this had seven-foot-deep galleries and a tiring house on the west side adjoining a new stage with a tiled roof. The galleries provided only about a third of the accommodation. Overall, the Boar’s Head was similar in size to the Fortune, the contemporary playhouse on the edge of the City to the north-west.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>The Earl of Derby’s men played at the Boar’s Head in the winter season when it was permitted, but most of the drama was taking place in the courts, where Woodliffe, Browne and Samwell were embroiled with an investor, Francis Langley, who had hoped to exploit the ambiguous title to the inn and theatre. Difficulties were compounded by a Privy Council order in 1600 forbidding acting in inns, and matters further complicated when Browne went on tour, subletting to the Earl of Worcester’s Men. Langley died, then in 1603 Woodliffe and Browne, who had returned with his players, suing and countersuing one another, were both carried off by the plague.[^5] The Boar’s Head continued as a playhouse. Browne’s widow, Susan (née Shawe), who held the lease, married Thomas Greene (d. 1612), a member of the Queen’s Men, and in 1607, even after the Queen’s Men had departed for the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, ‘comon Stage Plaies … are daylie showed and exercised and doe occasion the great Assembleis of all sortes of people’.[^6] Once again a widow, Susan Greene, who may have retained at least part ownership, married James Baskervile in 1613. Further information is elusive up to 1616 when the lease reverted to Jane Poley’s son, Sir John Poley. Following a loosening of manorial constraints on copyholders, Poley was able to agree in 1618 to enfranchise most of the Boar’s Head property.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>The tiring house and stage were probably pulled down in 1621 when Poley sold the land on which they stood as sites for small houses. The purchaser was William Browne, who already held the house on the site of 145 Whitechapel High Street, immediately west of the Boar’s Head Inn. The eastern galleried range survived into the eighteenth century. The Boar’s Head name, like those of many other former inns, endured long after inn use ceased.[^8] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Herbert Berry, <em>The Boar’s Head Playhouse</em>, 1986</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Berry, pp.11–17,21–2</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Berry, pp.24,26–30,77,95–8,155: information kindly supplied by David Sankey</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Berry, pp.30–36,106–09</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Berry, pp.37–46,55,63–9</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: as quoted in Berry, p.74: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub</em> Baskervile and Greene</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: The National Archives, E135/23/78: Berry, pp.76–8</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Ancestry, London Metropolitan Archives London wills: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/SLC/1/17/13–14: Berry, p.80</p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-03",
"last_edited": "2021-05-04"
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"id": 855,
"title": "8 Cable Street",
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"body": "<p>8 Cable Street, probably built in the 1890s for Bridger, was then occupied by Nathan Van Flymen, a cigarmaker, followed by other tobacconists into the 1950s. It was raised in 2002–3 in a flat conversion for Danny Newland by Dransfield Owens de Silva, architects.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
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"id": 618,
"title": "104-106 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>There were three-storey nineteenth-century buildings here, that at No. 104 of the mid 1830s and first occupied by Jeremiah Holloway, a chair-maker, that at No. 106 somewhat later and by 1880 occupied by Abraham Mordecai, a cigar manufacturer. They were damaged in the Blitz and rebuilding for Mark Marks & Co. Ltd, wholesale grocers, was begun in 1951–2 when a single-storey building extending back to Vine Court went up to designs by Norton, Trist & Gilbert, architects, with R. J. Adams Ltd as builders. The two upper storeys of an intended grocery warehouse were never built.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control files 41895–6: Goad map, 1953: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>This was the site of the Dolphin public house by the early nineteenth century. The premises were rebuilt in 1927–8 for the Commercial Gas Company as offices and showrooms, in neo-Georgian brick with a canted corner. Victor Wilkins was the architect, with Walter Lawrence & Son Ltd the builders. The North Thames Gas Board was here into the 1970s. Above a faience fascia the upper storeys were Lewis Sheldon’s garment factory. Clothing wholesaling continued and the shop premises became a branch of the Islamic Bank of Britain (established in 2004), conveniently situated opposite the East London Mosque.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
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"title": "Robert Rycroft the draper",
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"body": "<p>Robert Rycroft moved south from his Lincolnshire birthplace to be an errand boy at his uncle’s drapery business in Colnbrook. He then moved to 141 Whitechapel High Street as an apprentice draper before setting up in business himself at St. Pancras and getting married. Later he moved back to Whitechapel High Street to No. 79. before being forced to move to No. 75. While Robert Rycroft was in business at No. 75 he not only ran his drapery business but was also prominent in local affairs. In May 1887 he petitioned the Queen on behalf of the Whitechapel traders. She had been invited by the committee of the East London Palace to open the Queen’s Hall. The invitation was evidently for a Saturday and the petition was to ask the Queen to vary the day. Saturday was market day, and the traders did not want to have to close their businesses for the Queen’s visit on their most important trading day on which they derived the bulk of their weekly income.</p><p>The affair of Jack the Ripper must have had a devastating effect on the residents and Robert’s name tops the list of petitioners who asked the Home Office in October 1888 to improve policing in Whitechapel, a petition which led to the resignation of Sir Charles Warren as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in November 1888.</p><p>The exploits of Jack the Ripper led to criticism of the street lighting in Whitechapel and in December 1888 Robert was made Chairman of the newly formed Lighting Committee of the Whitechapel Board of Works, tasked with improving the lighting.</p><p>His time at No. 75 ended rather sadly: in 1892 his youngest daughter, Gertrude, died at the age of ten from peritonitis and in September 1893 his wife died of phthisis (tuberculosis). He abandoned the business shortly afterwards and moved to Ilford where he became a member of the Council and a civil servant.</p>",
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"title": "The clearance of Wellclose Square",
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"body": "<p>By 1950 the London County Council’s plans for the Stepney and Poplar Reconstruction Area involved ‘slum clearance’ all around Wellclose Square, the district initially zoned for ‘general business’ use, with plans for a new Catholic secondary school to its east. Of the square’s old houses, now listed, though only at Grade III (except, oddly, Nos 37 and 43), LCC officers said: ‘So much of the interest of the buildings has been lost by neglect and wanton damage that no strong case could now be made for their preservation’, and ‘Wellclose Square has already lost its character as a residential square owing to the intrusion of large commercial and industrial users.’[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The territory was divided into sub-areas. Compulsory purchases for what was called the Harad’s Place Area housing scheme on the square’s west side came forward in 1957. There was also the Pell Street Area to the east, and the Graces Alley Area, across the north side of the square, which included the Cable Street ‘Vice Area’. </p>\n\n<p>Vice was under attack from another direction. The Rev. Joseph Williamson’s vigorous moral campaigning and knack for publicity from his base at St Paul, Dock Street, was instrumental in pushing forward clearances in and around Wellclose Square. Under ‘Father Joe’s’ aegis the Committee for the Moral Improvement of Stepney, St Paul’s and St George’s Area, first met in March 1957. It included other local clerics, social workers and Edith Ramsay, a comparably vociferous reform-minded councillor. Prostitution was shown to have increased greatly since the war, being based in cafés (called clubs) mainly run by Maltese men – ‘These places are open all night and screaming juke boxes keep the horrors alive.’[^2] Immigration from many other parts of the world was seen as an aggravating factor and the west end of Cable Street as an especially bad nexus. Ramsay campaigned more widely against appalling living conditions and pushed hard in 1961: ‘We should build faster and more.’[^3] Williamson too saw the LCC’s reconstruction promises as the key to moral reform, and dilapidated buildings, especially at the west end of Cable Street, as the proximate cause of vice. In highlighting Williamson’s campaign in 1961, <em>The Economist </em>described Wellclose Square as ‘small, quiet and decrepit’, and the wider area as having ‘no Dickensian charm, merely a scabrous and unrelieved squalor’.[^4] That year clearances were programmed with plans for the widening of Cable Street and for the new school to the southeast. Yet Williamson continued to deprecate slow progress. He prompted the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Duke of Edinburgh to make representations in 1962. The LCC’s Clerk responded to the attention by calling Williamson ‘less than fair’, reminding critics that ‘local authorities are not armed with dictatorial powers.’[^5]</p>\n\n<p>Among those affected were Tofazzul Ali, who owned and occupied 20 Wellclose Square as a lodging house for Bengali seamen in the late 1950s, and Abdi Warsama Shirreh, who from 1955 had a hostel and dining rooms for Somali seamen at 25–27 Ensign Street (on that street’s east side). The corner pub that had been the Royal Standard (9 Ensign Street) had been adapted to be a café in the 1940s. It was run by Mokter Miah from about 1950 and came to be known as the Rio Café (‘riyo’ means dream in Somali). Another café on the opposite Graces Alley corner (7 Ensign Street) was run by Mohammed Hassan in the 1950s, and Mehmet Salih had dining rooms on the corner directly to the north at what was then 14 Cable Street, a former beerhouse. Desmond Wilcox, television presenter, used the Rio Café in 1961 to illustrate a <em>This Week </em>broadcast about prostitution. The proprietors, Omar Haji Ahmed and Eva Gertrude Ahmed, took libel action against Associated Rediffusion Ltd. Edith Ramsay was a member of the Rio Club and spoke in defence of the establishment’s respectability, but the case was dismissed.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>Against this background it is unsurprising that arguments for preservation at Wellclose Square were again dismissed. There was some resistance; Geoffrey Fletcher used drawings as a weapon. Nos 1–6, 1819, 33–37 and 50–52 stood into the 1970s, and Nos 10–11 to the middle of that decade as a ships’ chandler’sstore. Otherwise all had come down and there were large open spaces.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive (THLHLA), L/THL/D/1/1/91: Denis Munby, <em>Industry and Planning in Stepney</em>, 1951, map 4</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, DL/A/K/01/16/099</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: THLHLA, P/RAM/1/4/2: <em>The Economist</em>, 19 Aug. 1961, p. 72</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Economist</em>, 19 Aug 1961, p.72</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/259; P/RAM/2/3/1; P/RAM/2/4/5; P/RAM/5/5; L7832, <em>The Pilot</em>, July 1960, May–July 1962: Lambeth Palace Library, Ramsey 27, ff. 159–184</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), GLC/AR/BR/22/TP/003045; GLC/MA/SC/03/1477: THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/191,193 and 259; P/RAM/7/3: Post Office Directories: information kindly supplied by Kinsi Abdulleh and Hudda Khaireh </p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, 23 Aug 1962: Geoffrey Fletcher, <em>City Sights: A City of London portfolio</em>, 1963, pp. 72–3: <em>The Sphere</em>, 27 June 1964: <em>Geoffrey Fletcher’s London</em>, 1968, pp. 25–27: William Palin, ‘“This Unfortunate and Ignored Locality”: The lost squares of Stepney’, <em>The London Gardener</em>, vol. 12, 2006–7, pp. 94–112: David Granick, <em>The East in Colour 1960–1980</em>, 2018: photographs by Dan Cruickshank, 1971</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-09",
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{
"id": 796,
"title": "Hutchison House Club and Camperdown House",
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"body": "<p>Yoel Sheridan grew up in Goodman's Fields in the 1930s and 40s and has written about the experiences of his family at this time in a book called 'From Here to Obscurity' (Tenterbooks, 2001).</p>\n\n<p>\"Although one could not generally see silent films in the many cinemas, private clubs would show them to members. One such place was the Hutchison House Club of which Yulus's athletic twenty one year old diamond mounter brother was a member. One some Saturday evenings, after Shabbas, his brother would take Yulus to a silent film show in Camperdown House in Half Moon Passage. The hall, that was utilised for all types of physical and social activities, had a polished wooden floor. One wall was lined with wall-bars up which athletes could climb and lift and stretch themselves in all directions. In one corner, a vaulting horse and other athletic equipment had been placed to clear the centre of the hall for rows of chairs and wooden benches. A cinema projector stood on a raised table at the back of the hall and the projectionist was focusing the strong white light onto the silver screen at the other end of the hall. The screen was secured by cords stretching from its four corners to two upright posts on either side. Classic silent films were shown. These included Charlie Chaplin, Our Gang, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and other comedies, serious dramas, and Cowboy and Indian films. Sometimes there was piano accompaniment but on most occasions the audience provided the music by singing whatever song they thought was appropriate for the scene being displayed. Members of the audience might shout out some comment at a crucial moment such as, Look out behind you, when a hero was being stalked by his enemy or make some amusing remark that would cause the audience to break out into laughter. In some ways silent films had an advantage over talkies, because going to the silents was like going to a social gathering.\"</p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-13",
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"title": "Whitechapel High Street - its early history",
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"body": "<p>Evidence for development before 1500 that can be pinned directly to Whitechapel High Street is scant, but as its hinterlands were largely undeveloped until the mid-sixteenth century, it may be inferred that most early references to Whitechapel refer to the High Street or the west end of Whitechapel Road. Speculation around the route of the Roman road to Colchester has ranged widely: it may have followed a line close to the High Street and Whitechapel Road, or may have followed Hackney Road.[^1] The discovery of Roman metalling in Aldgate High Street supports ancient use of the route, as does the discovery, about 2m below the level of the High Street, of Roman funerary urns in 1836.[^2] Whitechapel High Street’s early name was Algatestreet, presumably a reflection of its status as an extension of Aldgate High Street beyond Aldgate Bars, the gates, latterly vestigial, across the west end of Whitechapel High Street that marked the eastern boundary of the City. The land either side of this route was waste of the Manor of Stepney and probably remained unbuilt on until the thirteenth century when the building and siting of the ‘white chapel’ might suggest the High Street to the west was already built up. Taxation evidence indicates that what development there was had then recent origins.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Algatesetrete is recorded as one of the settlement areas of the Manor of Stepney in 1348-9.[^4] Some indication of the character of landowners and uses in the High Street is given by property transactions of this universally transformative period, the time of the Black Death. Predictably, perhaps, property holders tended to be wealthy merchants, already possessed of substantial property and influence within the City, and sometimes with connections to the Court. In 1350 John de Gosebourn, who was an auditor of the Exchequer by 1370, was involved in a transfer of unspecified premises in ‘Whitechapel in Algatestrete’, part of a large landholding in Stepney which by 1400 included eighty-six acres, though only a few houses in Whitechapel High Street.[^5] Sir John de Stodeye (otherwise John Stodie), a vintner and alderman, a Member of Parliament in 1354–7, and Mayor of London in 1357–8, acquired premises in 1358 ‘in the parish of the Blessed Mary “de Whitchapelle” without Aldgate, London, and in Stebenheth’, followed in 1361 by a tenement of Gosebourn’s, ‘by le Whitechappel’.[^6] Then, in 1365, Stodeye acquired ‘24 shops and two gardens in the parish of St. Mary “Matefeloum”, without Algate’, from John Chaucer, another vintner, and his wife Alice – the parents of the poet. This may have included property that had been left to Alice Chaucer by her uncle Hamo de Copton in 1349, and so many shops strongly suggests a location in the High Street. The same is true of a similar transfer of 1375–6 by John de Cantebrigia and Thomas Broun of ‘3 shops with gardens adjoining’ in ‘St Mary’s parish in Algatestret’.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>In 1430 property on the north side of Algatestrete in the parish of St Mary Matfelon was transferred from John Roppele to Margaret Wyngerworth, a widow who had already held it with her husband from Edmund Bys, a stockfishmonger, Ellis Clidermore, a citizen mercer and Roppele. The location is given as between the tenements of John Stamp on the west, the lands of the heirs of John May on the east, and property of William Haunsard on the north. Haunsard owned large tracts in Stepney and Whitechapel including a messuage north of Algatestreet near the City boundary.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>A list of alehouses compiled from 1418 to 1440 mentions three in Whitechapel, the ‘Hamer’ (hammer), an unusual name, perhaps later the Crown and Hammer on the High Street's north side near present-day Tyne Street, the Swan, perhaps near the east end of the High Street’s north side, and the ‘hertishorn’ (Hart’s Horn). The ‘Cok’ was also present by the 1450s, probably on the High Street’s south side. Firmer indications of activity on the north side of the High Street date from the 1460s. The brewhouse then called the ‘Hertyshorne’ or ‘Herteshorne’ is named in two court cases. It might have been near what became the east corner with Goulston Street, as a house built there in the 1590s by William Megges bore the name the Harte’s Horn. One case concerns the property immediately to the east. This was then in the occupation of John Morth, a bladesmith, and Simon Hollerville, a barber, for a term of eight years from Christmas 1462, and was held by them from William Couper, a butcher. The ‘Hertyshorne’ itself was held by William Wolston and Walter Bodenham (or Bodman), who is described as a citizen Brasier and bellfounder, but there is no evidence nor is it probable that the brewhouse was used as a bellfoundry. The other case concerned the brewery’s owners, the Walssh family, who had acquired it and three shops around 1440 from John Bythewode, a timbermonger. This appears to have been a reversion. In 1394–5 Nicholas Walssh, a citizen clothworker, had granted a messuage and shops in Whitechapel to Christina Bithewode, the widow of a timbermonger, with a remainder to the Abbey of the Minoresses of St Clare without Aldgate. At the end of all this, in 1468 Nicholas Walshe granted the ‘Herteshorn’ to the Minoresses.[^9]</p>\n\n<p>Earliest representations of the High Street, such as Anton van den Wyngaerde’s panorama of around 1543, are somewhat schematic but conform in depicting a continuous frontage of mostly gable-fronted houses of two or three storeys. The only development behind the High Street on the ‘Agas’ map is around what became Goulston Square, and perhaps represents the ‘Herteshorn’ brewery. Beyond walled gardens or yards were the ‘pleasant fields’ whose loss by the end of the century was bemoaned by John Stow.[^10] East of the ‘Herteshorn’ site a wall on the ‘Agas’ map conforms with a property line that ran roughly parallel to the High Street into the nineteenth century. Seventeenth-century and later maps suggest that this section of the High Street frontage had evolved, presumably in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, as many long narrow ‘burgage’ plots, but, developing slowly and piecemeal, was haphazardly laid out and broken by numerous alleys and yards. </p>\n\n<p>Evidence also supports Stow’s assertion that the whole High Street on both sides was by 1600 ‘pestered with cottages and alleys’.[^11] In March 1616 William Hearne of Whitechapel was charged with having ‘presumptuously endevoured’ to make and erect ‘divers tenements {in} an auntyent stable in a common Inn called the Redd Lyon in Whitechapel Street contrary to his Majesty’s proclamacion, and to the great annoyance of parishioners by bringing poore people there to inhabit, who dying leave their children to be mayntayned by the parish’. He was ordered to pull down the new chimneys and to restore the tenements to use as a stable.[^12] Others adopted a more positive tone when describing how, by the 1650s, ‘without Aldgate, there is a spacious huge Suburb, about a mile long, as far as White Chappell and further’.[^13]</p>\n\n<p><em>Topography of the High Street after 1600</em></p>\n\n<p>By the 1670s, the High Street’s alleys numbered around twenty. Some, such as the Nag’s Head Inn yard (on the site of the Relay Building, previously No. 115) and the Swan brewhouse yard (on the site of the Whitechapel Gallery at Nos 81–82 and returning to Osborn Street) were substantial, while many others had been or remained unnamed, probably private closes leading to a single house and its dependent stables, workshops and outhouses. Some such yards had been lined with small houses and workshops – Bull Alley (on the site of No. 75), Grid Iron Alley (approximately on the site of No. 122), and Harte’s Horne Court (on the site of Nos 133–137). Typical of these was Three Bowl Alley, roughly on the site of Tyne Street. By 1623 it was a short alley containing six small houses.[^14] They had been built after 1589 when Thomas Golding sold two messuages called the Crowne and Hammer (later the Three Pidgeons) and the Three Bowls, which passed by inheritance to a whitebaker named Ralph Thickness. In leases of 1697 and 1700 from Thickness’s great-grandson the site is described as the two houses (the Three Pidgeons and another now known as the Patten, the Three Bowls having ‘fallen down’), and an entryway between them leading to stables, workshops, garden ground and an old house that Thickness had occupied; this had a 12ft by 8ft jettied window at one end.[^15] Three Bowl Alley and Grid Iron Alley, immediately to its west, were eradicated in the creation of New Castle Street (later Tyne Street) in the early 1730s.[^16]</p>\n\n<p>Other such closes developed into proper alleys leading northwards into Wentworth Street – George Yard (now Gunthorpe Street), Angel Alley (now truncated), Moses and Aaron Alley and Castle Alley (now Old Castle Street) and Catherine Wheel Alley (obliterated by Commercial Street). </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: ed. T. F. T. Baker, <em>A History of the County of Middlesex: </em>vol. 11<em>, Stepney, Bethnal Green</em>, 1998, pp. 5–6 </p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Gentleman’s Magazine</em>, vol. 159, April 1836, pp. 371–2 </p>\n\n<p>[^3]: ed. T. F. T. Baker, <em>A History of the County of Middlesex: </em>vol. 11<em>, Stepney, Bethnal Green</em>, 1998, pp. 13–19: Hubert Llewellyn Smith, <em>The History of East London</em>, 1939, pp. 88–9</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: The National Archives (TNA), SC2/191/60 </p>\n\n<p>[^5]: ed. W. J. Hardy and W. Page, <em>A Calendar to the Feet of Fines for London and Middlesex: </em><em>vol. 1</em><em>, Richard I – Richard III</em>, 1892, p. 139</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Ibid, p. 136: TNA, C148/48</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: ed. W. J. Hardy and W. Page, <em>A Calendar to the Feet of Fines for London and Middlesex: </em><em>vol. 1</em><em>, Richard I – Richard III</em>, 1892, p. 143: Alfred Allan Kern<em>, The Ancestry of Chaucer</em>, 1906, pp. 95–7, 135–6: ed. R. E. G. Kirk, <em>Life Records of Chaucer IV: Enrolments and Documents from the Public Record Office,</em>1900, pp. 136–7: TNA, E40/1507</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: ed. A. E. Stamp, <em>Calendar of Close Rolls, Henry VI: </em><em>vol. 2</em><em>, 1429–1435</em>, 1933, pp. 63–5 </p>\n\n<p>[^9]: TNA, CP40/810, rot. 469; C1/26/357; C1/29/115; C143/425/3: John Strype, <em>A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster</em>, vol. 1/2, 1720, p. 14: London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/L/BF/A/021/MS05440, ff.120v,150,162v: Laura Wright, <em>Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names</em>, 2020, pp.184–5,191</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: John Stow, <em>A Survey of London</em>, 1598 (1994 edn)</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: Ibid, p. 384 </p>\n\n<p>[^12]: ed. E. G. Atkinson, <em>Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 34, 1615–16</em>, 1925, p. 460</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: James Howel, <em>Londonopolis; an Historicall Discourse or Perlustration of the City of London</em>, 1657, p. 341</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), E/PH1/001: Hearth Tax returns 1666, 1674–5</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: LMA, EH1/002–3 </p>\n\n<p>[^16]: West Sussex Record Office, HARRIS/266</p>\n",
"created": "2019-06-11",
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"id": 100,
"title": "The Working Lads' Institute",
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"body": "<p>The Working Lads’ Institute was founded in 1878 by a city merchant called Henry Hill. It was one of many nineteenth-century initiatives to give urban youth a more legitimate outlet for their energies. Aimed at young men who had to work for a living (rather than the local poor), the Institute offered them the chance to better themselves and thus improve their employment situation. From its original site at 12 Mount Place [Mount Street?], Whitechapel Road, it moved in 1885 to new premises at 285 Whitechapel Road. As can be seen from the entrances to the building, the facilities offered included not only a lecture hall and a library, but also a swimming bath and a fully-equipped gymnasium with an instructor: a healthy mind in a healthy body.</p>\n\n<p>The project was not to succeed however. By 1896 the Institute was running out of money and was threatened with closure. Henry Hill wrote a letter to <em>The Christian </em>appealing for help to keep the Institute open. This was read by Revd Thomas Jackson, a Primitive Methodist preacher who had been active in Bethnal Green, Walthamstow and Clapton. Jackson was able to buy the Institute, which he transformed as a Primitive Methodist mission to help friendless and homeless boys who would otherwise be on the streets. It operated also as a hostel, providing beds for homeless boys.</p>\n\n<p>Outdoor activity was encouraged, many boys being sent to work on farms in Devon. In 1901 the Mission acquired a property on Marine Parade, Southend, which was used to provide holidays and convalescent stays for poor boys. The mission performed probation work, though this ceased when it was given a house called Windyridge at Thorrington in Essex, which became the mission’s probation wing. The Institute remained a hostel for boys, principally in the age group 17 to 21.</p>\n\n<p>In 1943 the hostel began to move out of Whitechapel to Whitechapel House, Tulse Hill. However, in 1971 the compulsory purchase of Whitechapel House forced the Mission to move the hostel again. It returned to Whitechapel, and resumed its activities at 3 Maples Place. Though the hostel closed in 1973, it provided the foundation of the Whitechapel Mission, which is still active and providing support for the homeless.</p>\n",
"created": "2016-07-31",
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"id": 651,
"title": "Whitechapel's Slum Sisters in the 1890s",
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"body": "<p>78 Wentworth Street should be Listed, being the only remaining example of the late nineteeth-century replacement buildings for the Jack-the-Ripper landscape: you can still see where it was attached to George Yard Buildings, where Martha Tabram was murdered. Not only that, but during the murders and until 1906, it was where the pioneer Whitechapel Salvation Army Slum Sisters lived and worked, as depicted in Margaret Harkness’ <em>Captain Lobe</em> (1889). Their first leader and social explorer, Captain James Cooke, though terrified by the murders, inspired his 'Lassies' to put their fight against poverty first, and has as much right to appear on the mural near the Salvation Army’s birthplace in Mile End Road as the more famous explorer Captain James Cook – who was murdered! Contemporary sketches of 78 in the Army’s press very clearly identify it with the present mini-shopping complex. </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/05/16/1894-78-wentw.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>This is from <em>The Social Gazette</em> (1 Sept 1894). I wrote a feature on it in <em>Salvationist</em> (17 Sept 2016), called 'A Work to Stand Eternally', which is what I hope for the building.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>This three-storey shophouse, only one-room deep, is an isolated survival. It was built in 1888–9 by Thomas Brevetor, a speculative builder of Mare Street, Hackney, on a strip of cleared land left over from the widening of Wentworth Street, just north of George Yard Buildings. Above a shop there was a ‘queer little barracks’ of the Salvation Army Slum Sisters, previously resident in a house at the north-east end of Angel Alley that had been improved by Bond and the Earl of Pembroke. The sisters were a corps of Salvationists founded in 1884 to give ‘practical and spiritual aid to the poorest of the poor’: ‘The true Slum Sister … must combine the housemaid and the parson, the sick nurse, medico, district visitor, chaplain, labour agency and rescue society, not to mention a dash of the athletic performer’ with homes to be established ‘wherever there was a centre of moral pestilence’. The first floor was a ‘slum hall’, with benches for meetings, and ‘about as big as a decent West End scullery’ according to Salvation Army Commissioner Coombs. The upper storey could accommodate five sisters, though only two, Emily Haines (1875–1951) and Susan Shaw (1869–1940), were in residence in 1901. The sisters departed in 1906, the building having been sold.[^1]<br>\nThere were alterations in 1919, probably subdividing the upper floors, and the shop, sometimes two shops, had various uses until the 1930s when one became a sweetshop, which remained into the 1970s. Demolition has been threatened on several occasions since the 1960s in connection with developments on the Toynbee Hall estate. The shops and upper floors have been used variously as a Balti house, minicab office, estate agency and, most recently, a diner and convenience store.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Clare Falvey, ‘A Work To Stand Eternally’, <em>Salvationist</em>, 1 Sept 2016, pp.10–11: <em>Social Gazette</em>, 1 Sept 1894: information kindly supplied by Clare Falvey: <em>Sheffield Independent</em>, 20 Oct 1890, p.5: <em>Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Local Advertiser</em>, 1 July 1903, p.6: <em>Morning Post</em>, 6 April 1906, p.3: Census: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: POD: information kindly supplied by Carol Fisher and John McDiarmaid</p>\n",
"created": "2020-12-01",
"last_edited": "2020-12-01"
},
{
"id": 754,
"title": "The Lane",
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"id": 250,
"username": "Spring"
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"address": "Greater Whitechapel: Brune House",
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"body": "<p>I was born in Brune House in 1945; both my parents and my father's parents lived there. When I was a few years old we moved out to the wilds of Hornchurch, Essex. Many years later when I was a teenager, I worked only a few yards away in the Lane on a Sunday, not knowing that was where I was born.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-26",
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},
{
"id": 689,
"title": "The draw of English Martyrs",
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"body": "<p>Interview with a parishioner, 'V', on 29th June 2018</p>\n\n<p>Parishioner V: I have lived in this parish and attended English Martyrs Church for nearly forty years. However, my family's connection goes much further back - to the late 19th Century, and the years when Tower Hill was developing as a parish. My maternal grandparents lived here: my grandfather was a non-Catholic, but he was baptised and converted to Catholicism. He and my grandmother were married in English Martyrs Church in 1893. They had seven children - one boy and six girls one of whom, Mary Wood, was my mother. The family was very poor. They lived in two main rooms; my grandparents slept in one of the rooms and my uncle slept in the other. At that time it was not accepted for boys and girls to share bedrooms, so for sleeping my mother and her sisters were farmed out to other parts of the family so as not to break the rule! In due course the whole family moved to live in the adjacent parish, St Mary and St Michael's, further east on Commercial Rd.</p>\n\n<p>Interviewer 2: You told me that your mother attended the parish school of English Martyrs. How did that happen?</p>\n\n<p>PV: Although we lived in a different parish, my grandfather always thought of English Martyrs as his parish. So he was determined to send all his children to English Martyrs school, which was the building attached to the back of the church, fronting on to Chambers St.</p>\n\n<p>[NOTE: The school moved to its present location in St Marks St in 1970, and the Oblates recently converted it into a retreat centre, called De Mazenod House]</p>\n\n<p>I2: Can you tell me a bit more about your mother's time at English Martyrs School?</p>\n\n<p>PV: The school was run by the Holy Family Sisters, who often worked with the Oblate Order. In my mother's time the headteacher was Mother St Aidan. The nuns lived in a convent in Prescot St, which was eventually knocked down in the 1980s and replaced with the Premier Inn. My mother did all her schooling at English Martyrs. She was born in 1907, started school in 1912, and finished at the age of 14. After that she went into service in Highgate for a short time. But she was not happy there, and came back to East London, where she trained and worked as a book-keeper.</p>\n\n<p>I2: Did you and your parents live and worship in the Tower Hill parish?</p>\n\n<p>PV: No. My parents got married in 1934 and the family was brought up in the parish of St Mary and St Michael's. I was born and went to school there, not at English Martyrs. But we still had lots of connections here and kept in touch with friends my family had known in Tower Hill. The biggest reunion took place during the parish May processions, when everyone like us who had moved away would come back to Tower Hill and take part during the day. Then in the evening the bands would come out, and we all enjoyed meeting up. Finally, my parents decided that they wanted to return to live in the parish so I moved back with them in the early 1980s. They always joked that they had 'emigrated' to the parish in Commercial Rd, and that their true roots were here at English Martyrs. My mother really loved this parish and, like many parishioners, she had a particular love for the Lady Chapel.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-03",
"last_edited": "2021-08-05"
},
{
"id": 87,
"title": "Elizabeth Stride's Last Drink?",
"author": {
"id": 33,
"username": "Charno"
},
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"street": "Settles Street",
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"body": "<p>The former Bricklayers' Arms. Until some time in the 1880s the address was given as 20 Gloucester Street. As it was not marked on Ordnance Survey maps it may well have been a beer-shop at that time, rather than a public house. It had ceased to be a pub by 1923. Recently the premises was Hussain Grocers; at time of writing the building is being gutted for redevelopment. The landlord in 1888 was William Cook.</p>\n\n<p>At 11.00pm on Saturday 29 September 1888, labourers John Gardner and J. Best saw prostitute Elizabeth Stride at the entrance to the pub, leaving with a man, presumably a client. This was the first of a number of sightings of Stride with a man before her dead body was found two hours later in the gateway to Dutfield's Yard on Berner Street (now Henriques Street), to the south of Commercial Road.</p>\n",
"created": "2016-07-14",
"last_edited": "2018-07-02"
},
{
"id": 261,
"title": "Some Notes on the Bricklayers Arms",
"author": {
"id": 85,
"username": "stephen.r.harris"
},
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"body": "<p>This pub was present here as the Bricklayers Arms at least by 1802 when Samuel Barnard was victualler and took out an insurance policy with the Sun Fire Office.</p>\n\n<p>The pub is mentioned in an 1829 Old Bailey court case (the proceedings of which can be read on the Old Bailey website). John Cousins, who lived opposite the pub in what was then called Gloucester Street, apprehended William Tucker (described as 'appearing to be a bone gatherer') in the street and found in his basket two pewter pots, worth two shillings and bearing the name and mark of Bricklayers Arms guv'nor Evan Price. Price testified that he had lost five dozen pewter pots between Christmas and the case coming to court on 9 April. Tucker was found guilty of theft and sentenced to transportation for seven years.[1]</p>\n\n<p>The Bricklayers Arms remained a pub until at least 1911, when Arthur Phillips was listed in the Post Office Directory as being the licensee.</p>\n\n<p>[1:] <a href=\"https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18290409-4&div=t18290409-4&terms=bricklayers#highlight\">https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t18290409-4&div=t18290409-4&terms=bricklayers#highlight</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2017-01-17",
"last_edited": "2018-07-02"
},
{
"id": 288,
"title": "William Forster's house of c.1750 and subsequent developments at 25 Whitechapel Road",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
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"b_number": "25",
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"body": "<p>In a section of Whitechapel Road that had many inns, taverns and beer-houses in the early eighteenth century, the Angel and Still was on the site of No. 25, next door to the Green Dragon Inn (on the site of Nos 21 and 23, under which is an entrance to Green Dragon Yard). William Forster, a distiller, had this property by the 1740s and appears to have redeveloped it c.1750. Forster’s substantial four-storey double-pile house seemingly survives, retaining a brick front with a plat band, later rendered white. It was raised with a mansard attic c.2003. Plans of that time indicate a central-staircase plan with a semi-circular top-lit open-well staircase between the chimneystacks on the house’s east side, possibly stemming from early nineteenth-century alterations.</p>\n\n<p>Forster’s distillery to the rear was taken over by Samuel Davy Liptrap in 1767, initially a starch maker who diversified into great prosperity. Forster was followed in the house in the 1780s by Thomas Ceal (1758–1846), a manufacturing tobacconist, who rebuilt to the rear aroudn 1820 and was succeeded by Ceal & Huxley, then by 1850 by Thomas Huxley, who as Huxley & Co. continued into the 1890s, extending to No. 23 by 1880, behind which a new workshop was built in 1892, with that at No. 25 enlarged in 1897. Workshops behind No. 25 were converted in 1901, by J. Silverman with Herbert Winstanley as architect, to be Russian Vapour Baths, also accessible from 18 Old Montague Street. There was a cooling room over the Whitechapel Road shop, which was now selling furniture, and behind there were shampooing rooms, slipper baths and a club-room. By 1911 the shop and house were occupied by Louis Suss, a funeral photographer. No. 25 was raised with a mansard attic c.2003.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, THCS/202–464; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/400/639857; GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/020992: Ancestry: Land Tax: District Surveyors Returns: London County Council Minutes, 31 July 1900, p.1143: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: Derek Morris, 'Whitechapel', p.52: The National Archives, IR58/84805/2220–1: Census</p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-01",
"last_edited": "2020-12-07"
},
{
"id": 676,
"title": "101–103 Fieldgate Street",
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"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>This pair of shophouses of 1906 was built by Samuel Lissner to plans by J. F. Parker, and leased to Abraham Solomon Cohen, chandler, and Harris Sterling, who sublet to a butcher. Around 2013 Barakaat, Islamic Books, Perfumes, Garments and Accessories, and Hussain Halal Meat & Groceries moved out, giving way at No. 103 to The Crêpe Shop and Art Café.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Royal London Hospital Archives, RLHLH/S/1/4: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's Returns: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-02",
"last_edited": "2018-07-02"
},
{
"id": 683,
"title": "London Action Resource Centre, 62 Fieldgate Street",
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"body": "<p>This building has a remarkable chequered, yet consistent, history. It was erected in 1866–7 as a mission house and infants’ school for the parish of St Mary Matfelon Whitechapel. First plans were to extend on the garden of an existing house, but in July 1866 the Rev. James Cohen gained the London Hospital’s approval for complete rebuilding displacing two houses – the top end of Nottingham Place (Parfett Street) was narrowly opened up at the same time. The establishment was known variously as St Mary’s Mission House and the Charlotte Street Infants’ School, the building’s purpose signalled through the use of simple Gothic Revival forms. The originally single-storey rear range had high-silled, segment-headed windows and a glazed roof to a room for mothers’ meetings, evening readings and mission work. It communicated with the main block through a wide pointed-arched opening. Double-iron handrails on the main block’s stairs seem designed to provide for young children. Mission use continued up to about 1918.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The building was next used for a few years by Jewish anarchists to be an International Modern School, following the inspiration of libertarian and non-coercive ‘modern’ schools established in Barcelona by Francesc Ferrer I Guàrdia. Attendance rose to more than 100, but funding difficulties prevented longevity. 'Arbeter Fraynd (Worker’s Friend)', a Yiddish radical weekly paper, and its Jubilee Street anarchists’ club premises had been shut down in 1915. For a time 62 Fieldgate Street was also used as the New Worker’s Friend Club, and by the East London Anarchist Group.</p>\n\n<p>In 1925 the building was converted into a synagogue. The Linus Hazedek and Bikur Cholim congregation, founded with a mission to help the sick, moved here from Burslem Street on the other side of Commercial Road. A new door was formed in the Parfett Street elevation in 1934, but the synagogue did not survive beyond the 1940s. Abraham Spitalowitch, a tailor, was in occupation by 1951, and other garment-makers passed through. Conversion works for continued rag-trade use that included raising of the former classroom to the rear were intended from 1978, but not carried out, though a shopfront for a showroom was inserted in 1981 for Sophia Fashions.Thereafter the building fell into dereliction. </p>\n\n<p>In 1999 a group arising from that decade’s Reclaim The Streets movement conceived the need for a base or action resource centre for direct-action and anarchist groups. Without awareness of the building’s history, 62 Fieldgate Street was purchased, largely through a single supporter with inherited wealth. Refurbishment works for office, workshop and library use as what was initially the Fieldgate Action Resource Centre were carried out in 2001–2 to plans by Anne Thorne Architects Partnership. These involved rebuilding and raising the rear section, which was given a roof garden. Figural graffiti on the shutters is by Stik.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Royal London Hospital Archive, RLHLH, House Committee Minutes, 29 May, 4 and 24 July 1866, pp. 12, 34, 49: Ordnance Survey map 1873: Post Office Directories (POD): Census returns: Goad insurance map 1890: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 18 Nov. 1977, p. 41</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 12 June 1925, p. 20: John Shotton, <em>No Master High or Low: Libertarian Education and Schooling 1890–1940</em>, 1993, pp. 57–71: <a href=\"https://libcom.org/history/echoes-ferrer-east-end-back-street\">https://libcom.org/history/echoes-ferrer-east-end-back-street</a>: Mark Kauri, ‘62 Fieldgate Street: Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow’, <em>Occupied Times</em>, 24 Aug. 2014: POD: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 40669: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: information kindly supplied by Laura Oldfield Ford, Tina Papanikolaou and Aikaterina Karadima</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-02",
"last_edited": "2018-07-02"
},
{
"id": 804,
"title": "Ladbroke Court and Ladbroke House",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>Ladbroke Court, part of the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1454/detail/#redevelopment-of-denning-point-and-the-new-holland-estate\">New Holland estate redevelopment</a>, stands on the site of the 1960s Ladbroke House, part of the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1454/detail/#denning-point-and-the-new-holland-estate\">New Holland Estate</a>, and froms a single rhomboid building with <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1453/detail/\">Sloane Apartments</a> abutting the new <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/416/detail/\">Community Centre</a>. With Sloane Apartments, the five-storey building contains 37 private, affordable-rent and shared-ownership flats, with recessed balconies, and a café on the ground floor. </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-16",
"last_edited": "2018-12-22"
},
{
"id": 907,
"title": "47 Royal Mint Street (formerly the Crown and Seven Stars public house, now the Artful Dodger)",
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"properties": {
"b_number": "47",
"b_name": "The Artful Dodger (formerly the Crown and Seven Stars)",
"street": "Royal Mint Street",
"address": "The Artful Dodger (formerly the Crown and Seven Stars) public house, 47 Royal Mint Street",
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"body": "<p>By 1730 there was a public house called the Half Moon and Seven Stars on Rosemary Lane in Whitechapel, perhaps on this site,the Rosemary Lane corner of Blue Anchor Yard. Confusingly, there was another pub called the Seven Stars a short distance to the west on the same side of Rosemary Lane but outside Whitechapel; Seven Stars Alley or Court lay west of Cartwright Street. The name doubtless refers to the seven-starred constellation known as the Plough. In 1715 Ned Ward had written of the Seven Stars, ‘Near to the Place where Frippery-Women stand/with Stays, Coats, Suits, and Breeches second hand,/Where rags of every sort and size are sold and/Thieves their daily correspondence hold,/There stands a House, Wherein if fame not lies/The Stars at Noon-day to Men’s sight arise’.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The Crown and Seven Stars was firmly established at this site by 1790. It was rebuilt in 1825–6 when proprietorship passed from Catherine Collins to Diederich Menke, a German victualler who ran a pub in Norton Folgate. Menke died within months of being imprisoned for debt in 1828. These ‘wine-vaults’ were advertised in 1829 as ‘recently built, in a most substantial manner, with superior elevation, . . . spacious lofty liquor shop, warehouse, kitchens, ample cellarage and vaults’.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The front of the four-storey pub was partially rebuilt in 1881 for George Frederick Buckingham, with J. & H. Cocks of the Mile End Road as builders. Buckingham was much exercised at this time about the loss of business caused by Metropolitan Board of Works clearances and delays over housing redevelopment. This is probably when the façade gained its bravura display, prominently visible from the nearby railway, and so presumably hoping to draw custom. A giant order of Ionic pilasters supports a sub-Corinthian attic in which there sits a central crown haloed by seven stars. Inscribed friezes advertise ‘WAREHOUSE.’ above ‘WHOLESALE & RETAIL.’. Despite this, Buckingham’s losses obliged him to close the pub. Further alterations in 1888 included a bar and shopfront for Frederick John Vinall and the Cannon Brewery Company, to designs by J. C. Reynolds, a pub architect with links to that brewery who had long been the surveyor to Camberwell vestry; J. & H. Cocks were again the builders. The ornamental ground-floor cast-iron columns, enriched with bunch-of-grape and pineapple capitals, an ornate frieze, the largely glass ground-floor front with canted recesses and the first-floor balcony appear to be from this date. A ground-floor dining room and WCs followed in 1892–4, now with Richard E. Small of Clerkenwell as builder.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The pub was incorporated into the Greater London Council’s plans for building the Royal Mint Estate and listed in 1974, but with its environs cleared it closed in 1981. In 1985, when the completed Royal Mint Estate at last promised new business, it reopened, renamed the Artful Dodger as if to cling to Cockney identity.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Edward Ward, <em>A vade mecum for malt-worms: or, A guide to good fellows</em>, 1715, p. 16: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MR/LV/05/026</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 29 Dec 1827, p. 4; 14 April 1829, p. 4: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 12 May 1828, p. 3: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 27 Jan. 1829, p .3: LMA, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/366/567713;/377/582472 Land Tax returns </p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 4 March 1881, p. 382; 23 June 1882, p. 1032; 22 June 1888, p. 1093: LMA, District Surveyors Returns: <em>The Builder</em>, 1 Dec 1888, p. 403: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/THL/D/2/30/129: LMA, LMA/4433/D/03/024: Historic England Archives, London Region Historians’ file TH23</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: https://pubshistory.com/LondonPubs/Whitechapel/CrownSevenStars.shtml: Stephen R. Harris, https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1340/detail/#note]</p>\n",
"created": "2019-05-01",
"last_edited": "2019-05-16"
}
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}