HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept
{
"count": 1059,
"next": "https://surveyoflondon.org/api/v1/documents/?format=api&page=35",
"previous": "https://surveyoflondon.org/api/v1/documents/?format=api&page=33",
"results": [
{
"id": 1112,
"title": "Café Spice Namasté (former Whitechapel County Court), 16 Prescot Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1291,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.070839769786207,
51.511534824904025
],
[
-0.070585471149656,
51.51157481222347
],
[
-0.07051545384739,
51.51139090854125
],
[
-0.070759436998916,
51.511351044073685
],
[
-0.070839769786207,
51.511534824904025
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "16",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Prescot Street",
"address": "16 Prescot Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 4,
"search_str": "16 Prescot Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>Three houses stood on this site until the late 1850s. Following Thomas Quarrill’s rebuilding of a row of twelve houses in 1746–9, No. 16 was the address from 1749 of John Bailey, a silk factor, who was joined by William Glazbrook around 1775. The nineteenth century saw use by Jewish glass dealers, tailors, and manufacturers. No. 17 housed Matthew John Rippingham, a solicitor, by 1826, in partnership with William Rose in the 1840s. No. 18, which adjoined Magdalen Passage from 1778, was occupied by John Murray, a carpenter, from the 1770s to the 1790s, He had a long workshop building to the rear alongside the passage, and the upper storeys of the house were divided into multiple small bedrooms. Murray also held further houses to the east, and others on The Highway. No. 18 was tenanted by a cigar-maker in the 1840s, and by 1851 was home to two custom-house officers and Charles Steinhairt, a German merchant, among others.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The freeholds of Nos 16 and 17 were advertised for sale in 1856, No. 18 was also acquired and the striking Ruskinian palazzo that was Whitechapel County Court was built in 1858–9. The County Courts Act of 1846 divided England into sixty districts for a new network of courts to deal with small debts and civil claims, London beyond the City being covered by ten new courts. A Whitechapel district was initially overseen from the building on Osborn Street where the abolished Court of Requests had sat. A decade on it proved too small to cope with demand and the Middlesex magistrates selected the site on Prescot Street for a new building. Charles Reeves (1815–1866), architect to the Metropolitan Police from 1843, had been appointed Surveyor of County Courts in 1847. By 1857 when designs for the Prescot Street building were prepared, he was working in partnership with Lewis G. Butcher. Reeves and his partners were responsible for sixty-four court buildings, and while Reeves settled on no standard formula, his designs were underpinned by a focus on architectural dignity and the economic use of space, particularly attending to circulation patterns. The Whitechapel County Court was, like other London courts, a storey taller than provincial counterparts. Holland & Hannen were the builders.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>The Prescot Street façade departed from Reeves’s usual Italianate and strictly symmetrical practice. This was one of only a handful of his courts to play with elaborate detailing. His tendency was to suppress extravagance in favour of understated domesticity, but here, possibly at the hands of Butcher, Ruskinian influences found expression through rich brick polychromy, Kentish red, Suffolk white and Staffordshire black, along with York stone dressings and cast-iron colonnettes, that all combines to lift the heaviness of the palazzo façade. The west bay was given greater width and prominence, projecting forward to emphasise what was the public entrance under a tripartite window. The judge’s entrance to the east led to discreetly separated spaces with their own staircase. There were administrative offices on the ground floor, and judicial offices on the first floor in front of the spacious top-lit courtroom. Residential accommodation for office-holders was on the second floor and in the basement. In keeping with civil procedures, no provision was made for cells on site.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>From around 1883 to 1904 the court gave up some of its upper spaces to serve as a convent for the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, a branch of the Holy Family of Bordeaux, associated with English Martyrs’ Roman Catholic Church further west on Prescot Street. Whitechapel County Court was consolidated with Shoreditch and Bow county courts and in 1943 use of the Prescot Street building transferred to the Ministry of Social Security, followed from 1968 by the Department of Health and Social Security, and then from 1988 the Department of the Environment. By 1969 area railings had been lost and the west door converted into a window with the front steps removed. The building was listed in 1973 and repairs were undertaken in 1989 and in 1993 through Property Holdings (Central London).[^4] </p>\n\n<p>Two years later, Brian Temple Associates oversaw a conversion for restaurant use with basement kitchens, first-floor stores and offices, and a second-floor flat for workers. With financial backing from Michael Gottlieb, Cyrus Todiwala, a chef of Parsee descent and high reputation, established the premises as Café Spice Namaste. A conversion back to office use has been proposed in 2020, the lease being set to expire.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax Returns (LT); LMA/4673/D/01/004/002; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/398/624017; /319/488182: Ancestry: Post Office Directories (POD): Census: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 4 July 1826, p.1: Richard Horwood's maps of London, 1792–1819</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The Builder</em>, 3 May 1856, p.254: <em>Building News</em>, 28 Jan and 1 July 1859, pp.82,596: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em>: <em>Dictionary of British Architects, 1834–1914</em>, vol.2, p.450: Clare Graham, <em>Ordering Law: The Architectural and Social History of the English Law Court to 1914</em>, 2003, pp.216–19: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 12 Aug 1858, p.6: <em>Globe</em>, 28 June 1859, p.2</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Globe</em>, 28 June 1859, p.2: The National Archives (TNA), WORK/30/769–777</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: P. Polden, <em>A History of the County Court, 1846–1971</em>, 2004, p.332: POD: LMA, Collage 119455: <a href=\"http://www.stgitehistory.org.uk/media/policing.html\">www.stgitehistory.org.uk/media/policing.html</a>: historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1065071: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: THP: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control files 23253–4: www.cafespice.co.uk: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Todiwala</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-03",
"last_edited": "2020-08-03"
},
{
"id": 330,
"title": "30 Osborn Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 130,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.07019784588536,
51.51698832752765
],
[
-0.070197838529848,
51.51698833046723
],
[
-0.069843373692386,
51.51707890602016
],
[
-0.069813034602637,
51.517039973271565
],
[
-0.070171978472279,
51.51694802453727
],
[
-0.070171986429884,
51.516948022498795
],
[
-0.07019784588536,
51.51698832752765
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "30",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Osborn Street",
"address": "30 Osborn Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 1,
"search_str": "30 Osborn Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>A nine-storey sugarhouse was built on the site of 30–34 Osborn Street around 1799 for Josiah Lucas and Henry Martin (d. 1817). It was soon fire-damaged, then when run by Lucas and Son all but destroyed by fire in 1824. The premises and stock were insured to the sum of £28,8828, so were perhaps rebuilt, with Bulmer & Co. as successors in the 1830s.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets Savings Bank, formed as the Tower Hamlets Savings Bank in 1819, was based at what became No. 30 by 1841 around when Nos 28 and 30 appear to have been rebuilt in part on the site of the sugarhouse. It continued as the Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets Savings Bank until 1892 when the premises were adapted to be a Mikveh<em> </em>(Jewish ritual bath), which use lasted into the 1930s. Nos 28–30 were substantially reconstructed and converted to form flats in 1949–50.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Bryan Mawer's sugar database: Richard Horwood's maps, 1792–1819: The National Archives, PROB11/1590/43: <em>Bells Weekly Messenger</em>, 9 May 1824, p.150</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives, P93/MRY1/090; MR/S/BS/008: Post Office Directories: Ordnance Survey maps: District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 14722: <em>Jewish Year Book</em>: Tower Hamlets planning applications</p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-30",
"last_edited": "2020-08-26"
},
{
"id": 708,
"title": "84 Whitechapel High Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 387,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.070475783512312,
51.515965252954345
],
[
-0.070402371388889,
51.515878232440954
],
[
-0.070475956297756,
51.515858494589594
],
[
-0.070552282447026,
51.515942411742934
],
[
-0.07053940658453,
51.51594729160466
],
[
-0.070520828029962,
51.51595250341339
],
[
-0.070475783512312,
51.515965252954345
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "84",
"b_name": "84 Whitechapel High Street",
"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
"address": "84 Whitechapel High Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 1,
"search_str": "84 Whitechapel High Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>Another austere red-brick-faced war-damage replacement, built in 1957 as a near-pair with No 83, though retaining its original windows, triplets within thin concrete frames and thick flat mullions, and the fifth-floor setback. The predecessor shop-house’s history also aped <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/316/detail/\">No 83</a>, a timber-framed three-storey (this one with a simple gable-fronted attic) replaced in 1900 by a workmanlike four-storey building, more rugged in style than 83, though also with a wide display window lighting the first-floor showroom. It was designed by the City architect C.H. Shoppee, for the publisher W.S. Sonnenschein and A. Ridley Bax, father of the composer Arnold Bax and brother of the socialist Ernest Belfort Bax. [^1] All three iterations of No 84 included access to Angel Alley. In 1869 the copyhold of the old building, with a dwelling house to the rear, was offered for sale, during the occupancy c. 1840-81 of various members of the Wallis family, hosiers, though it was not enfranchised till 1893. [^2] The shop switched to rag-trade use throughout the twentieth century, ladies’ gowns before the war, men’s shirts after the 1950s’ rebuilding, with various food outlets since the late 1960s, currently a branch of KFC. [^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): Census: The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84796/1371</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Census: POD: Daily Telegraph, 24 July 1869, p. 10</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-10",
"last_edited": "2018-07-10"
},
{
"id": 762,
"title": "Signwriting at New Road Synagogue",
"author": {
"id": 251,
"username": "Alicia"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1463,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.063134492360364,
51.51782738505861
],
[
-0.063025709537606,
51.51764418006528
],
[
-0.062931156135412,
51.51766686232899
],
[
-0.062954889604093,
51.51770900962472
],
[
-0.062726482458675,
51.517765079903484
],
[
-0.062748999276863,
51.51780173726752
],
[
-0.062973174374441,
51.51774578529897
],
[
-0.063032903202825,
51.51784972503275
],
[
-0.063134492360364,
51.51782738505861
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "115",
"b_name": "",
"street": "New Road",
"address": "115 New Road and the former New Road Synagogue",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 9,
"search_str": "115 New Road and the former New Road Synagogue"
},
"tags": [
"Lewis Solomon",
"Samuel Montagu"
]
},
"body": "<p>My parents, who had an ironmongery shop at 183 Whitechapel Road from 1930 to 1970 originally lived a couple of doors away from the New Road Synagogue.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/10/31/newroad.jpg\"><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/10/31/newroadsm.jpg\"><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/10/31/1980-new-road.jpg\"><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/10/31/1980-new-road_yTPrfdb.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>My grandfather actually was a signwriter who created all the signs for the synagogue, seen <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1463/detail/#images\">here</a>. He was a warden of the synagogue. The Hebrew lettering in this picture was written in gold by my grandfather, Marks Manowitz.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-31",
"last_edited": "2018-10-31"
},
{
"id": 757,
"title": "Living at the Star and Garter",
"author": {
"id": 253,
"username": "Gigi"
},
"feature": {
"id": 485,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.061365118513418,
51.51891874229795
],
[
-0.061404358254135,
51.51895895630941
],
[
-0.061435612237689,
51.51900570177657
],
[
-0.061392257041454,
51.5190165901459
],
[
-0.061404457489239,
51.519035498536006
],
[
-0.061349166998327,
51.51904938434486
],
[
-0.061282448596402,
51.51894598302278
],
[
-0.061290293757333,
51.51893376109225
],
[
-0.061365118513418,
51.51891874229795
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "233",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "233 Whitechapel Road with 1 Court Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 5,
"search_str": "233 Whitechapel Road with 1 Court Street"
},
"tags": [
"Star and Garter public house"
]
},
"body": "<p>I returned to the Star and Garter in 1945 at the end of the Second World War after being evacuated to Slough to avoid the bombing. I was 18 months old when I left and 7 years old when I returned.</p><p>I lived with my maternal grandparents, Nathaniel (Jack) Joel and Rebecca Joel, her widowed sister, Leah Abrahams, and my paternal grandmother, Rachel Isaacs. Next door was a large menswear shop called Sabel Brothers. I attended Deal Street School until I was eleven years old and then went to Davenant Foundation School. </p>",
"created": "2018-10-28",
"last_edited": "2018-10-31"
},
{
"id": 918,
"title": "141 Leman Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1280,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.06853233892788,
51.511294270529675
],
[
-0.06831779901845,
51.51132677289194
],
[
-0.068287135103738,
51.51127470378602
],
[
-0.068485635339,
51.51124398813024
],
[
-0.06853233892788,
51.511294270529675
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "141",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Leman Street",
"address": "The Empress, 141 Leman Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 3,
"search_str": "The Empress, 141 Leman Street"
},
"tags": [
"John Bridgeman"
]
},
"body": "<p>On the south side of Mill Yard Passage, 141 Leman Street is a much-altered eighteenth-century house, two bays wide and two rooms deep with a central staircase lit from the passage, rising three storeys under a gambrel attic; chimneys were on the south side. It appears to have been built around 1785 for John and William Bridgeman, tallow merchants. They had been preceded at this site by other tallow chandlers, James Langfer, who had the property by 1750, and Joseph Langfer, who died in 1780 holding leases of the house at No. 141 and the adjacent house to the south, along with two other houses on Mill Yard, one of which was the Keppel’s Head public house, presumably then recently so named. His widow Mary Langfer died in 1783 and her considerable property was sold off in 1784, the Bridgemans being the purchasers. John Bridgeman was succeeded around 1823 by John Christian Schultz and Otto Uhlendorff, who continued the site’s use for tallow chandlery. That had stopped by 1840 when George Ward, a musical instrument seller, had the shophouse. Thomas Young followed with coffee rooms from 1850. Shop use returned and a post office was accommodated later in the century. Tobacconist occupancy by Isaac Rosenberg then Hyman Hoffman and successors continued into the 1950s during which decade Saif Salek took the premises to be dining rooms. These later became A. Hassan’s Arabian Club and Tabet Said’s café, the East Restaurant. The Empress Restaurant was established in 1993.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, SC/GL/PR/S3/WHI: Land Tax returns: Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; Collage 118751: Post Office Directories: The National Archives, PROB11/1061/242; PROB11/1108/315: Old Bailey Online, t17730626-22: <em>Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser</em>, 26 April and 7 and 14 June 1784: <em>London Gazette</em>, 11 Jan 1828, p. 81: Richard Horwood's maps, 1799 to 1819</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2019-05-10",
"last_edited": "2019-05-10"
},
{
"id": 822,
"title": "Toynbee Hall",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 379,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.072397829403071,
51.51669736298538
],
[
-0.072397829775652,
51.51669737370259
],
[
-0.072432640663459,
51.51673265247548
],
[
-0.072358283763003,
51.51675511998594
],
[
-0.072392345089312,
51.51679900052574
],
[
-0.072279169019407,
51.51681120129116
],
[
-0.072260832658385,
51.516791637982884
],
[
-0.07220017871295,
51.51681376750612
],
[
-0.07215893969634,
51.516769768915125
],
[
-0.072119241451839,
51.51677664825232
],
[
-0.071934651446851,
51.5165549241745
],
[
-0.071985260710591,
51.51653955484268
],
[
-0.072028895096668,
51.51652682786407
],
[
-0.072014842692988,
51.516508073517755
],
[
-0.072098254454469,
51.51648373796318
],
[
-0.072052675375786,
51.51643004607134
],
[
-0.072144607110911,
51.516401673048335
],
[
-0.072314904588685,
51.51634652520951
],
[
-0.072358068161013,
51.516398410711595
],
[
-0.072522445522427,
51.51634491903885
],
[
-0.072499976579174,
51.51631804154615
],
[
-0.072499959446261,
51.51631804712155
],
[
-0.072499965346341,
51.51631803831239
],
[
-0.072579515746657,
51.51629075531372
],
[
-0.072667639265209,
51.516403182536045
],
[
-0.072427304765486,
51.5164813923298
],
[
-0.072385415219988,
51.51643128370629
],
[
-0.072387162242999,
51.516433383744854
],
[
-0.072107982084202,
51.516523791132904
],
[
-0.072157544605501,
51.51658336890495
],
[
-0.072272128891629,
51.51654626302576
],
[
-0.072397829403071,
51.51669736298538
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "28 ",
"b_name": "Toynbee Hall",
"street": "Commercial Street",
"address": "Toynbee Hall, 28 Commercial Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 21,
"search_str": "Toynbee Hall"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>The Boys' Refuge provided a literal foundation for the building of Toynbee Hall, the first university settlement, which opened in 1884. Samuel Barnett, the incumbent since 1873 of the neighbouring <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/376/detail/#st-judes-church\">St Jude’s</a>, had since his appointment been pursuing his mission to enable his parishioners to realise their ‘best selves’ through various pastoral and educational initiatives. From before his arrival in Whitechapel, Barnett had been involved in social reform initiatives, as a founder with Octavia Hill of the Charity Organisation Society, which sought to make sense of the hundreds of diverse charitable and philanthropic organisations, and to fight against ‘doles’, that to give ‘indiscriminant charity’ without a means test was further to pauperize the poor.[^1] In Whitechapel he had involved himself in civic as well as church activities, as a Poor Law Guardian, a campaigner for the adoption of the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/396/detail/#former-whitechapel-free-library-later-passmore-edwards-library\">Public Libraries Act</a>, and a founder of the East End Dwellings Company.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>All these activities stemmed from Barnett’s mission to break down class barriers, and belief in the duty of the fortunate, educated middle classes to share the benefits of their education with the less fortunate, to enable them to realise their ‘ best selves’, and as a lubricant to mutual understanding between the classes. For Barnett’s friend Matthew Arnold, it had a particular cultural flavour, that class consciousness had impeded the goal of ‘sweetness and light’ and ‘[t]he humanising, the bringing in to one harmonious and truly humane life, of the whole body of English society’.[^3] These ideas had been maturing among Barnett’s associates since the 1860s, particularly in Oxford, promoted there by the philosopher T. H. Green, who, although he had abandoned orthodox Christianity, believed in God’s immanence within the self, that the discovery of that was the path not just to individual enlightenment but, pursued, as was the duty of the affluent and educated, by one-on-one personal connection with the less fortunate, demonstrating by their leadership how others could realise their better selves as part of a larger community.[^4] One of Green’s pupils and another friend of Samuel Barnett, the historian Arnold Toynbee, believed in the need for a disinterested elite to ‘give up the life with the books and those we love’ to help the poor, who must be prepared to pledge themselves to ‘lead a better life’, as framed by their educated betters.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>Although Barnett’s pursuit of these ideas was to be the best known attempt to realise these ideas, East London had already attracted others with similar ambitions. The social historian, the Rev. John Richard Green (1837-83) had been the incumbent at <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1063/detail/\">St Philip, Stepney</a> in 1865-9, with similar aims in mind, and the reformer and some-time MP Edward Denison (1840-70) had gone to live in Philpot Street in 1867 in the belief that only by living among the working class would a genuine community be created, of men and women of all classes devoted to a common purpose of social improvement: ‘Build school-houses, pay teachers, give prizes, frame workmen’s clubs, help them to help themselves; lend them your brains’.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>It was in this spirit that from the late 1870s Barnett, chafing ‘against the constrictions imposed by parish concerns’, began to put these ideas into practice, encouraging undergraduates and others, among them Arnold Toynbee, to come and give of their time and education in Whitechapel and, as Henrietta Barnett put it: ‘we put them to such work as was possible during the vacations’.[^7] In November 1883 Barnett gave a paper in Oxford on ‘University Settlements in East London’, which set out a more ambitious plan for the establishment of a settlement house in a poor area of London, which would become ‘a common ground for all classes’, with lectures, conversations and receptions which would afford ‘all sorts and conditions of men’ the chance to come to know each other. ‘[T]houghts and feelings which are now often spent in vain talks at debating societies will go up to town to refresh those who are spent by labour, or to find an outlet in action… by sympathy and service to the lives of the people, settlers would ‘bring the light and strength of intelligence to bear on their government’.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>In December 1883 a committee of Oxford men and London supporters, including the Liberal MP James Bryce had been set up to realise these aims, funds were raised, and by February 1884 the decision had been made to set up a settlement in London, on condition that Barnett be its warden.] That month the Boys’ Refuge building next to St Jude’s was bought for £6,350, the new building to accommodate ‘rooms for 16 men, classroom for 100, large drawing or conversation room, billiard room and drawing room’.[^9] The Universities Settlement Association was formally registered in July 1884 as a joint stock undertaking, its objects being ‘education and the means of recreation and enjoyment for the people in the poorer districts of London and other great cities’ and the wider ‘inquiry into the condition of the poor and to consider and advance plans to promote their welfare’.[^10]</p>\n\n<p>It was Henrietta Barnett who offered the name Toynbee Hall for this first settlement in Whitechapel, a memorial to Arnold Toynbee who had died, aged 31, in 1883.[^11]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/30/1885-b-14-feb-illus-chk-pg-no.JPG\"></p>\n\n<p>The building of Toynbee Hall was essentially a recasting of the Boys’ Refuge rather than a completely new building: when the site was acquired, the buildings were described by Barnett as already ‘half-demolished’. Elijah Hoole (1838-1912), the Nonconformist London School Board architect, was tasked with the ‘object of using them as far as possible’ and with producing plans ‘with the utmost regard to economy’, though the overall cost of the site, buildings and furnishing and fitting was estimated at £8,000.[^12] The workmen started work on 29 June and, according to Barnett, were to ‘give us a habitable place by 13 Sept’.[^13] Certainly, the work was recorded only as ‘alterations to Boys’ Refuge’, and the new building followed the footprint, and presumably used the foundations, of the Refuge, with the settlers’ sitting rooms occupying the site of the governors’ house, and the lecture hall of Toynbee Hall occupying the site of the Refuge’s workshops and dormitory, and the new dining hall on the site of the old schoolroom and offices; the kitchen wing on the north side was virtually unchanged.[^14] Billiards had to wait until the conversion in 1887 of a workshop into clubroom etc adjoining <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/380/detail/#college-buildings-wadham-house-and-college-east\">College Buildings</a> in Wentworth Street, but a short wing was built west from the former Boys' Refuge governor’s house site along the side of St Jude’s with a second entrance and a large drawing room in its own pitched-roof building.</p>\n\n<p>On the first floor, above the lecture room and dining room, were the rest of the settlers’ rooms, some two-room sets, others bedsitters, surrounding a central common room lit from dormers in its pitched roof.</p>\n\n<p>The hall also followed, probably coincidentally, the general disposition of the Refuge, with steeply pitched gabled fronts to the main building, but its Tudoresque architectural expression in warm red brick with Box-stone dressings, stone-mullioned and transomed leaded-light windows and assertively tall ribbed chimneys, was more aspirational: Barnett called it ‘a manorial residence in Whitechapel’, but what it resembled more, especially with the sense of enclosure provided by the gatehouse and the warehouses fronting Commercial Street, was an Oxford college.[^15] Barnett had been in correspondence with Hoole for some years before this, on the subject of industrial dwellings, which was soon to bear fruit in Whitechapel in <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/380/detail/\">College Buildings</a>.[^16] The style fitted with commonly held romantic ideas of an ideal communitarian but hierarchical society existing in the middle ages, and Hoole was himself, at heart, a Goth.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/30/th-drrm.jpg\">The drawing room at Toynbee Hall (now the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/363/detail/#toynbee-theatre\">Toynbee Studios café</a>), c. 1890.</p>\n\n<p>The interior of Toynbee Hall reflected the tastes and ambitions of its founders. The drawing room was furnished in a mix of Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts styles, with improving prints and sculpture, the leaded windows draped incongruously in rich curtaining: ‘we … decided to make it exactly like a West End drawing room, erring, if at all, on the side of gorgeousness’.[^17] The students’ rooms were more simply furnished but ‘in all rooms neutral drabs were abolished: Whitechapel needed lovely colours’.[^18]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/30/dk-stcse_zTVXGdp.jpg\">Toynbee Hall staircase, 2018. Photograph © Derek Kendall.</p>\n\n<p>The staircase at the south-east corner was an especial tour de force, the balusters composed of circular fretwork discs of twining leaves.[^19]</p>\n\n<p>The hall’s opening was ‘cruelly delayed’ in Barnett’s view, and the first two Oxford settlers C.H. Grinling and H.D. Leigh, stayed in Toynbee Hall on Christmas Eve 1884. The building was not ready to be opened – by the Prince of Wales - till the end of January 1885, though the settlers’ rooms were soon filled.[^20]</p>\n\n<p>Soon a wide array of classes in history, economics, literature, chemistry, botany and languages were being offered, along with reading groups and ‘conversaziones’, entertainments, sports clubs and social events where settlers could invite four ‘pals’ each into the collegiate dining room.[^21] Though the fees – from one shilling – did not preclude anyone but the very poorest, and evening classes were held for those who had work to attend to during the day, the level of the teaching, which soon included university extension classes, was aspirational. </p>\n\n<p>These aims were especially evident in the dining room, decorated by the young Charles Robert Ashbee, who had arrived at Toynbee Hall in 1886 to teach classes on Ruskin, despite his reservations that the venture might represent ‘top hatty philanthropy’. At Cambridge in the early 1880s he had come under the spell of ideas similar to those that had energised Barnett in Oxford. His was an avowedly non-Christian world view, but in a similar vein to that of Barnett and T.H, Green; he came, in Alan Crawford’s words, ‘to look on all material things and the manifold details of experience as the revelation of a deeper spiritual reality’.[^22] </p>\n\n<p>But Ruskin meant also, to Ashbee as to so many idealistic architects of his generation, a veneration for the materials of building and the free will of the workman in working them, as well as a horror for the industrial system and its dehumanising division of labour.</p>\n\n<p>Soon Ashbee and his Ruskin students were putting what they read in to practice in the dining room, in 1887 adding plaster medallions of a stylised tree and T, for Toynbee Hall, designed by Ashbee; around these discs were painted sunflower leaves. Painted plaster coats of arms of Oxford and Cambridge colleges ran in a frieze around the tops of the walls.</p>\n\n<p>Ashbee had developed, too, from discussions with Edward Carpenter, a notion of manly comradeship, the common humanity beneath the differences of class. It was in this spirit that he founded the Guild and School of Handicraft, its first premises on the top floor of a converted warehouse at 34 Commercial Street, beside the entrance to Toynbee Hall.</p>\n\n<p>The idea was for the Guild to operate as a commercial concern, making ‘simple but high-class work in wood and metal’, the workmen also to teach their skills to apprentices. Ashbee had consulted William Morris, whose firm Morris Marshall Faulkner & Co, founded nearly thirty years earlier, can be seen as a model at least in artistic terms, and whose romantic ruralist vision of medieval England as a civilised communitarian utopia had enraptured a generation of idealistic young architects and designers. But Morris was discouraging. By the time Ashbee called, Morris was convinced that only the overthrow of society by revolution could sweep away its ills; art schools, even on comradely terms, were pointless. Ashbee never reached that point, believing in an evolutionary not a revolutionary path.</p>\n\n<p>But Ashbee was tiring of Toynbee Hall, as some others had, because of its cloistered unreal atmosphere. The success of the Guild also meant he needed bigger premises, and in 1891 he moved to Essex House in Mile End Road, and in 1902 on to Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds, to begin another chapter in the Arts and Crafts story.</p>\n\n<p>Toynbee Hall continued to evolve. By 1886 one of the worst slums locally, New Court, adjoining east to Toynbee Hall, had been pulled down as part of the Flower and Dean Street Improvement and on it its site were built an extension to <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/376/detail/#st-judes-church\">St Jude’s National Schools</a>, <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/380/detail/#college-buildings-wadham-house-and-college-east\">College Buildings</a> and a tennis court.[^23] In 1886-7 a three-storey library wing, including a laboratory, with spiral staircase in a corner tourelle and an open cloistered ground floor, was added by Lathey Bros, builders, at the hall’s northwest corner.[^24]</p>\n\n<p>In 1892 a cloister-like brick colonnade between the gatehouse and the drawing room was added, with a picturesque tile-hung clock tower atop it, paid for by Bolton King, a long-term Toynbee resident, financial supporter and Secretary of Toynbee Hall. Barnett, having resigned as incumbent of St Jude’s, moved next door to the gatehouse building, converted into a Warden’s Lodge by Elijah Hoole, with an imposing oriel window added on the first floor overlooking Commercial Street.[^25]</p>\n\n<p>By the early twentieth century the Barnetts were less involved with day-to-day life at Toynbee Hall, preoccupied, among other matters, with the creation of Hampstead Garden Suburb, and Samuel resigned as Warden in 1906.[^26] There was already a shift in the tone at Toynbee, a recognition of the greater role other organisations had to play in social reform, and Barnett promoted the participation of trade unions, encouraging them to hold their meetings there. Even Barnett came to accept, as Arnold Toynbee had before him, the essential role of the state in achieving social reform. By the time William Beveridge arrived as sub-warden in 1903 the tone was shifting further. Beveridge disliked ‘soup kitchens and genial smiles for the proletariat’, and wished to make it a centre ‘for the development of authoritative opinion on the problems of city life’.[^27] This echoed one of the founding tenets of Toynbee Hall, that of ‘inquiry into the condition of the poor’, one that had been pursued in the form of Charles Booth’s magisterial surveys of London labour and the poor, and of religious life, many of whose assistants, notably Ernest Aves, were based at Toynbee Hall.[^28] Another assistant on and off for around ten years from the early 20th century was Clement Attlee, the future prime minister who was to bring Beveridge’s plan for the welfare state into existence after the Second World War, the most ample realisation of Barnett’s hope that Toynbee should act as the crucible for the country’s future leaders.[^29]</p>\n\n<p>The settlement model had found traction elsewhere, however. By the First World War there were twenty-seven residential settlements in London, thirty-nine throughout the country, and the movement was represented internationally notably in the United States (where there were 400 settlements alone by 1913), France, Japan and the Netherlands.[^30]</p>\n\n<p>Times were changing and Toynbee Hall changed with them, notably under the successful wardenship in 1919-54 of ‘the most popular man east of Aldgate Pump’, James Joseph Mallon, a trade unionist and some-time would-be Labour MP from an Irish working class background in Ancoats in Manchester.[^31] Mallon’s success was due perhaps to his congenial character and a background that enabled him to relate more easily to the local population. His initiatives on sweated labour, public order, education and hire purchase while he was at Toynbee Hall influenced several Acts of Parliament. But it was his cultural interests, reflected in increased music, dance and drama activities in Toynbee Hall that drove the alterations and extensions to the buildings which were showing their age by the 1930s.[^32]</p>\n\n<p>In 1931 a young artist, Archibald Ziegler, heard that J. J. Mallon was seeking designs for mural paintings to occupy the frieze above the oak panelling in the lecture hall. Ziegler (1903-71) was an East Ender who studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and won a L.C.C. scholarship to the Royal College of Art after a spell at sea as a cook. He was given the job at Toynbee Hall on ‘house painter’s wages’, and the panels, on the theme of the arts and sciences in a pastoralist manner reminiscent of Stanley Spencer, were completed in December 1932.[^33]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/30/1932-iln.JPG\"></p>\n\n<p>The Ziegler murals in Toynbee Hall from the <em>Illustrated London News</em>, 24 Dec 1932</p>\n\n<p>They depicted, clockwise from the south (entrance) wall: drama, folk dancing; west wall: bathers, lute from part of the music panel; north wall: music, painting, sculpture, literature; and the east wall: locomotion, astronomy, zoology and, native industries’ (which turned the corner ending on the south wall).[^34]</p>\n\n<p>The war saw a curtailment of normal activity as Toynbee became a centre for distribution of food donated from Petticoat Lane, blankets and clothing, organising rehousing for those made homeless in the Blitz, and from 1941, opening the Toynbee Restaurant supplying 600 meals a day. On 10 March 1941 incendiary and high-explosive bombs gutted the library at Toynbee Hall, and the whole of the Commercial Street frontage enclosing Toynbee Hall, including the 1840s former St Jude’s vicarage at 26 Commercial Street, and the Warden’s Lodge, destroying a lifetime’s papers and possession of J.J. Mallon, and four of the five 1860s warehouses at 30-36 Commercial Street. Despite this, even in 1940-1, the student enrolment at Toynbee Hall never fell below 500 during the war.[^35] The buildings were cleared after the war, except for the surviving ground floor of the library, used variously as cinema room and offices in the 1950s and rehearsal rooms in the 1960s. With the land gifted by the L.C.C., a simple garden, partly sunken, reflecting the basement level of the former street-side buildings and known from the mid 1950s following Mallon’s retirement, as Mallon Garden, later Mallon Gardens, was created, opening up Toynbee Hall to the bustle of Commercial Street.[^36]</p>\n\n<p>Mallon finally retired at the age of 80 in 1954 and the new Warden, A.E. Eustace, was appointed largely to report on Toynbee’s future role. The war had accelerated the shift at Toynbee from academic education, by then largely seen as the province of the London County Council, to recreational classes (languages, music and dance, and drama, notably) and social work, in the context of the new welfare state, that aimed to refocus on the local population, and the increasing number of paid administrative staff to run the activities brought into question the residential character of the enterprise, with many of the small number of residents who had come since the war seen as regarding it as ‘a friendly “boarding house”, conveniently near to the City’.[^37] After much soul searching it was decided that it was still valuable to have residents (not least because they could take on some tasks then undertaken by paid staff, thereby reducing the substantial debt) but that they should be more carefully picked (not necessarily from Oxford and Cambridge) for their commitment to Toynbee’s values, and that there should be renewed efforts to encourage social contact among older and younger users of Toynbee’s services.[^38] Some could perhaps reside in the four blocks of flats surrounding Toynbee Hall that the association still owned, and help run the Neighbours’ Club which had come into being for tenants. A likely new use as a centre for the training of social workers foundered, partly on account of the dilapidated buildings, and the Mary Ward Settlement in Bloomsbury was chosen for this instead.[^39]</p>\n\n<p>A new Warden with international links, Walter Birmingham, arrived in 1963 just as Whitechapel’s demographic was once again shifting. Where Barnett had been at pains to stress the openness of Toynbee Hall to its Jewish neighbours, Birmingham now launched a booklet <em>Our East London</em> designed to counter ‘racial and religious’ intolerance.[^40] In 1965 a Workers’ Education centre was set up at Toynbee Hall to assist new arrivals, mainly from the Indian subcontinent, East Africa and the Caribbean, and the Campaign against Racial Discrimination found accommodation at Toynbee Hall ‘on a generous basis’.[^41]</p>\n\n<p>An important event in the stabilisation of Toynbee Hall as an institution was the arrival as a volunteer in 1964 of John Profumo, the former Secretary of State for War, who had resigned the previous year over a sexual scandal. Profumo energised fundraising and secured Toynbee Hall’s future, with promises of £150,000 by 1967. In 1965-7 a new building to the designs of Martin and Bayley, architects, incorporating offices and a Warden’s flat, and accommodation for ‘junior residents’, adolescents recently arrived in London, and known as The Gatehouse, was finally built on the site of its bombed predecessor.[^42] It was a utilitarian three-storey-over-basement concrete-framed block faced in reddish-brown brick, the ground floor recessed along its north side to create a covered walkway like its predecessor, and a separate entrance along the south side to the Theatre; in 2006 it was renamed Profumo House in recognition of Profumo’s 40-year contribution to Toynbee Hall.[^43]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Henrietta Barnett, <em>Canon Barnett: His Life, Work and Friends (Canon Barnett)</em>, London 1918, vol i, pp. 27-8: Deborah E.B. Weiner (Weiner), ‘The architecture of Victorian philanthropy: the settlement house as manorial residence’, <em>Art History</em>, June 1990, pp. 212-27 (p. 216)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>East London Observer</em>, 14 Dec 1878, p. 6: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, pp. 129-40: 201-08; ii, 4-8, 274-7, 280-1</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Matthew Arnold, <em>Mixed Essays, Irish and Others</em>, London 1894, p. 246</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Standish Meacham (Meacham), <em>Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880-1914</em>, New Haven and London, 1987, pp. 11-16 </p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Meacham, p. 17</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Meacham, pp. 4-5: Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney (Briggs and Macartney), <em>Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years</em>, London, 1984, pp. 4, 6 and 8: Baldwin Leighton, <em>Letters and Other Writings of Edward Denison</em>, London 1872, p. 37: Henry Walker, <em>East London. I : Whitechapel, Sketches of Christian Work and Workers</em>, London 1896</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, p. 306</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Meacham, p. 33: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i. pp. 308-10</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), F/BAR/4: Meacham, pp. 34-5: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 8-9: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, p. 314: <em>First Annual Report of the Universities’ Settlement in East London</em>, London 1885, p. 39</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: Meacham, p. 34: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, p. 311</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, p. 313</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: <em>First Annual Report of the Universities’ Settlement in East London</em>, London 1885, p. 8</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: LMA, F/BAR/12: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, p. 313</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: LMA, District Surveyors' Returns (DSR): <em>B</em>, 14 Feb 1885, p. 713</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, p. 314: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 22-3: LMA, F/BAR/6</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: Weiner, p. 212: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, p. 130</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, ii, p. 42</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: ibid</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: LMA, F/BAR/15: John Nelson Tarn, <em>Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas</em>, Cambridge 1973, pp. 87, 94, 96</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, p. 313: LMA, F/BAR/15; F/BAR/22</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: <em>Toynbee Record</em> and <em>Toynbee Journal</em>, <em>passim</em>: LMA, F/BAR/20; A/TOY/26/11</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: Alan Crawford, <em>C.R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist</em>, 2nd edn 2005, pp. 32-41</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: DSR: LMA, Land Tax returns</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: DSR: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, pp. 129-40</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: LMA,GLC/AR/BR/17/004168: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, ii, 310: DSR: Goad</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 59-60</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: Briggs and Macartney, p. 61: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, ii, p. 381</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: Meacham, p. 34: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 9, 17-19</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 50, 89, 94</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: Werner Picht, <em>Toynbee Hall and the English Settlement Movement</em>, trans. Lilian A. Cowell, London, 1914, quoted in Weiner, p. 214: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 19-20: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, ii, pp. 31, 49-51</p>\n\n<p>[^31]: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 91-139: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)</p>\n\n<p>[^32]: LMA, A/TOY/26/11/67</p>\n\n<p>[^33]: <em>llustrated London News (ILN)</em>, 24 Dec 1932, p. 1025: <em>The Studio</em>, Oct 1950, pp. 112-15: <em>Birmingham Post</em>, 14 July 1971, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^34]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): Alan Baxter Associates, <em>The Ziegler Murals: Significance and Options</em>, London 2016</p>\n\n<p>[^35]: Briggs and Macartney, p. 129</p>\n\n<p>[^36]: THP: Briggs and Macartney, p. 138: LMA, A/TOY/025/028</p>\n\n<p>[^37]: ‘A future for Toynbee Hall’, report, 1954: LMA, GLC/RA/D6/02/024</p>\n\n<p>[^38]: ibid</p>\n\n<p>[^39]: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 145-50</p>\n\n<p>[^40]: Briggs and Macartney, p. 153</p>\n\n<p>[^41]: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 166-7</p>\n\n<p>[^42]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/13/111025; GLC/AR/BR/17/004168</p>\n\n<p>[^43]: THP: LMA, ACC/2486/244; ACC/2486/276; GLC/AR/BR/13/111025; GLC/AR/BR/17/004168: <a href=\"http://toynbeehall.brix.fatbeehive.com/news/207/demolition-work-begins-as-we-rebuild-profumo-house\">http://toynbeehall.brix.fatbeehive.com/news/207/demolition-work-begins-as-we-rebuild-profumo-house</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-24",
"last_edited": "2021-05-04"
},
{
"id": 820,
"title": "College Buildings, Wadham House and College East",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 380,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.072206019676478,
51.51693680017776
],
[
-0.07196249597772,
51.51695746576063
],
[
-0.071942669522335,
51.51691176033737
],
[
-0.07193864174443,
51.51687683260662
],
[
-0.0719558598767,
51.51687195131619
],
[
-0.071940018682487,
51.516849661344565
],
[
-0.071948572675229,
51.51684695053907
],
[
-0.071928740996398,
51.51681739256845
],
[
-0.072016766264098,
51.51679133268639
],
[
-0.072069141958081,
51.51685492594651
],
[
-0.072148483627081,
51.51684727546371
],
[
-0.072142511287946,
51.51682066806651
],
[
-0.072177857813757,
51.51681788202521
],
[
-0.072183448760406,
51.51684444436341
],
[
-0.072206188136717,
51.5169328110988
],
[
-0.072206015279985,
51.5169367972863
],
[
-0.072206019676478,
51.51693680017776
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "",
"b_name": "College East",
"street": "Gunthorpe Street",
"address": "College East, Gunthorpe Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 5,
"search_str": "College East"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>For a hundred years between the 1880s and 1980s, College Buildings, a block of 'industrial dwellings', stood on this site and that of <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/377/detail/\">Attlee House</a>. In 1883-4, as a consequence of the Flower and Dean Street Improvement, a slum-clearance and road-widening scheme of the Metropolitan Board of Works, one of the worst slums locally, New Court and the old frontage of Wentworth Street were pulled down. On the site, on the south side of the newly widened Wentworth Street and its hinterland adjoining Toynbee Hall, were built an extension to <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/376/detail/#st-judes-church\">St Jude’s National Schools</a>, College Buildings and a tennis court.[^1] </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/23/new-court.jpg\">A Whitechapel slum, probably New Court, in the 1870s or 1880s, from Henrietta Barnett, <em>Canon Barnett: His Life, Work and Friends</em>, London 1918</p>\n\n<p>College Buildings was aimed at a wider range of tenants than for example, <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/382/detail/\">George Yard Buildings</a>, built the previous decade. It was built in 1886 by Williams & Son, builders of Thornhill Square, Islington, for a consortium which included Samuel Barnett of Toynbee Hall, and headed by Harry Levy-Lawson, later Viscount Burnham, a recent Balliol graduate and Liberal MP involved at this time in causes such as the Free Land League, and one of Barnett’s regular supporters.[^2] The block had a 150ft frontage on the newly widened Wentworth Street on the site of the rear portions of the old 94-100 Wentworth Street and the condemned Crown Court – the first development on land sold for the Flower and Dean Street Improvement.[^3] </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/23/cb-elev.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>The elevation of College Buildings, Elijah Hoole, architect, from <em>The Builder</em>, 13 Nov 1886, p. 713</p>\n\n<p>In mixing its type of tenant it was prescient of the development of the East End Dwellings Company, which was to find it more effective to mix single-room accommodation for the very poor with flats aimed at the skilled artisan – easier for the lady rent collectors to administer, and, perhaps, more likely to yield a five per cent profit.[^4] The 77 flats were one- , two- and three-roomed, with drying-grounds on the flat portion of the roofs. The building, in red brick with red-tiled roofs and, like Toynbee Hall, designed by Elijah Hoole, had considerably more architectural presence than those in George Yard, with a wide variety of Gothic windows and applied terracotta decoration. It was ‘built with some regard to beauty’, a conscious attempt to avoid the ‘barrack-like appearance too often characteristic of this class of dwelling’, because in Barnett’s view, ‘it is false… benevolence which provides for fellow-creatures things acknowledged to be ugly’, and ‘there is evidence that repulsive-looking buildings repel tenants’. Every living room had a sideboard, coal locker and range, though WCs were shared.[^5] </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/23/cb-plan.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>The plan of College Buildings, Elijah Hoole, architect, from <em>The Builder</em>, 13 Nov 1886, p. 713</p>\n\n<p>College Buildings was unusual in having a co-operative element in its early days, when there was a tenants’ committee, ‘parties to the management of the buildings’, and after the landlord had cleared four per cent on the investment, the surplus was divided annually among the tenants in proportion to the rent paid. By 1889 that dividend averaged at £2 10s, and Barnett’s only regret was that if the tenants had allowed the dividends to accumulate, they might gradually have become owners of the building. It was the principle of the Tenant Co-operators and one pursued, at least for artisans’ cottages, at Brentham and Hampstead Garden Suburbs after 1900, where identical aims also went unfulfilled as tenants never owned ‘enough’ of their properties.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>In 1887 a further experiment foreshadowing Hampstead Garden Suburb, this time in mixing the social classes, came when the eighteen rooms in the western section of College Buildings opened as Wadham House, named after Barnett’s Oxford college, a collegiate hostel providing rooms and 7s or 7s 6d per week for the ‘schoolmasters, clerks and artisans’ studying at Toynbee Hall in the evenings, which Barnett hoped would introduce ‘into the heart of East London the elements of a residential university, and it promises to form a centre of social experience and of energetic practical citizenship’. A clubroom, billiard room and reading room were created by Hoole within a workshop adjoining the west side of Wadham House.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>Some of Barnett’s aims never came to be fulfilled. The occupancy of Balliol House (in Gunthorpe Street) and Wadham House was increasingly middle-class and the commitment to ‘the goal of connection’ was limited to fewer and fewer, as students preferred to commute from more congenial areas of London. Balliol House closed in 1913 and Wadham House a few years later.[^8] </p>\n\n<p>By 1970, although improvements had been made to the surrounding blocks now run by the Toynbee Housing Association for the Greater London Council - selective renovations and addition of bathrooms, to the designs of David Maney, architect, at College Buildings in 1967, for example – all the buildings were showing their age, and the GLC began rehousing tenants c. 1968 into the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1454/detail/#denning-point-and-the-new-holland-estate\">New Holland Estate</a>.[^9] All but the eastern, renovated, section of College Buildings, now renamed College East, was demolished in 1970, the whole ‘proposed for eventual demolition’ by the GLC.[^10] </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/30/p1150166.JPG\">The 1984 buildings of College East and the retained frontage of 1886 of College Buildings, seen in 2015, shortly before the demolition of the 1980s buildings.</p>\n\n<p>In 1980 permission was given to demolish the remaining College East (the scheme not carried out until 1984), the surviving part of College Buildings, all except for one bay of the frontage which was retained in the central six-storey portion of a new College East building, housing eighteen flats, that went up on the site, High Victorian red brick Gothic incongruously flanked by four-storey brown brick frontages with square oriels rising through three floors and semi-circular-headed windows.[^11] </p>\n\n<p>The 1984 building was in turn demolished in 2017, as part of the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/379/detail/#the-regeneration-of-toynbee-hall-and-its-estate-2013-19\">Toynbee Hall regeneration</a>, though the 1886 retained frontage was retained once again as part of the new flats (named 'Billingsgate') currently (December 2018) under construction.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's returns (DSR); Land Tax returns (LT)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB): R.H. Mair, ed., <em>Debrett’s House of Commons and the Judicial Bench</em>, London 1886, p. 93: LT: DSR: <em>Builder</em> (<em>B</em>), 13 Nov 1886, p. 713</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: John Nelson Tarn, <em>Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas</em>, Cambridge 1973, p. 85</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Tarn, op. cit, p. 103</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>B</em>, 13 Nov 1886, p. 713: Henrietta Barnett, <em>Canon Barnett: His Life, Work and Friends </em>(<em>Canon Barnett</em>), London 1918, vol i, p. 139: Tarn, op. cit., pp. 87-8: <em>Report from the Select Committee on Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings</em>, London 1882, pp. 161-8</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, i, pp. 139-40: Aileen Reid, <em>Brentham: A History of the Pioneer Garden Suburb</em>, 2nd edn London 2006, pp. 24-6, 77-89</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>Canon Barnett</em>, ii, pp. 14-17: Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, <em>Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years</em>, London 1984 (Briggs and Macartney), p. 30: Standish Meacham<em>, Toynbee Hall and Social Reform, 1880-1914</em>, New Haven and London, 1987 (Meacham), pp. 48-9: LMA, A/TOY/005: <em>Third Annual Report of the Universities’ Settlement in East London</em>, London 1887, p. 11: <em>Fifth Annual Report of the Universities’ Settlement in East London</em>, London 1889, p. 21-2: LMA, A/TOY/025/01</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Meacham, pp. 122-3: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 49-50</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: LMA, GLC/AR/PL/43/031; GLC/AR/BR/13/111025: Briggs and Macartney, pp. 163-4: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): LMA, GLC/MA/SC/02/327: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/THL/D/1/3/1</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/3/1</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: THP: THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/3/1</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-23",
"last_edited": "2021-05-04"
},
{
"id": 301,
"title": "Shoplifting",
"author": {
"id": 111,
"username": "martin2"
},
"feature": {
"id": 373,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.071785562876674,
51.51561898838919
],
[
-0.071609813826001,
51.515448044408686
],
[
-0.071745221521512,
51.51539771226144
],
[
-0.071809442057674,
51.51540773110793
],
[
-0.071952630416972,
51.515556297762615
],
[
-0.071785562876674,
51.51561898838919
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "102-05",
"b_name": "102 to 105 Whitechapel High Street and 2 Commercial Street",
"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
"address": "102 to 105 Whitechapel High Street and 2 Commercial Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 8,
"search_str": "102 to 105 Whitechapel High Street and 2 Commercial Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>This site was a Woolworth store when I returned from evacuation after World War 2, and I was led into minor crime by local lads. On Saturdays we would visit this Woolworth and steal every kind of item just for the hell of it, but later the visits served a purpose as we became cycle owners - old second-hand bikes that needed maintenance. Not having money we stole anything we required like \"Japanese Lacquer\" small tins of quality paint, oil, brake blocks, cables and many other items. On one forever memorable day, as we were stupidly checking we had all we required outside the store, suddenly an adult asked if we had paid for our ill-gotten gains? We, of course, responded we had. He then stated we would return to the store to check if the young lady remembered us paying, and with that being a gent he walked to the doors and as he opened them we ran, and I mean ran & ran until my legs could no longer move. We knew all the back doubles and alleys so were home and free, but I think it was the end to our visits. I admit I would have followed him into the store had Boy Boy not shouted RUN RUN ! </p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-24",
"last_edited": "2021-04-27"
},
{
"id": 722,
"title": "The sites of 102-105 High Street from 1700 till the advent of Venables",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 373,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.071785562876674,
51.51561898838919
],
[
-0.071609813826001,
51.515448044408686
],
[
-0.071745221521512,
51.51539771226144
],
[
-0.071809442057674,
51.51540773110793
],
[
-0.071952630416972,
51.515556297762615
],
[
-0.071785562876674,
51.51561898838919
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "102-05",
"b_name": "102 to 105 Whitechapel High Street and 2 Commercial Street",
"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
"address": "102 to 105 Whitechapel High Street and 2 Commercial Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 8,
"search_str": "102 to 105 Whitechapel High Street and 2 Commercial Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>While No. 102 had been rebuilt around 1702 and, hemmed in by the foundry site, occupied in the eighteenth century as in the seventeenth, by a cordwainer (Henry Pedley), The Bolt and Tun and Pomegranate houses were still separate in 1737. In 1709 William Chadsey, by 1712 apparently the landlord of the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/356/detail/#earlier-history-of-the-site-of-the-relay-building\">Seven Stars</a> on the High Street west of Catherine Wheel Alley, was described as living ‘by Bolt & Tun Alley’, so one or other of the Bolt and Tun and the Pomegranate, probably the Bolt & Tun as the named persisted longer, was still an inn.[^1] Both houses were, from 1737, in the occupation of Nicholas Miller (d. 1765), a grocer and tea dealer, who appears to have rebuilt them as a single building in 1749; ‘premises behind’ may have been the vestiges of the Bolt and Tun Alley houses, or storage built on their site.[^2] Miller’s daughter Sarah and her husband, George Pindar, sold the building and the ‘premises’ in 1784, by then occupied by another grocer, Thomas Henry, and known by the sign of the Tea Canister. The buyer was a pawnbroker and silversmith, William Windsor (d. 1817). He probably refronted No. 103 as, at the same time, he acquired the house next west that Anthony Bartlett had sold to James Best in 1638, which from a description in 1764 appears to have changed little since the sixteenth century, both houses of three storeys, that to the street also with garrets, and presumably of timber-frame construction.</p>\n\n<p>Windsor rebuilt these old houses and the neighbour at the corner, No. 105, as substantial premises and house for himself, with coachhouse behind, and had added four new houses on the old twisting ground, on Catherine Wheel Alley, by the time of his death.[^3] No. 103 remained a wholesale grocers, Joshua and David Hill (later Joshua and John Hill), till the Venableses took over the building around 1827 (though the Hills appear to have retained premises to the rear fronting Essex Street for a few more years), and Nos 104-05 also remained a pawnbrokers (Thomas and James Fleming, associates of Windsor, later George Bonham, who then moved to No. 88) till swallowed up by the Venables empire (see below) in 1846.[^4] Windsor had been building his own empire, having also, in 1806, acquired the tiny No. 102, from the daughter of the hosier James Backhouse, who had occupied it since c. 1749. Already presumably brick-built, it was not rebuilt again till 1847, remaining as a hosier and shirtmaker’s till the 1860s when it was a milliners, then from the early 1870s another branch of Asher Cruley, bootmaker, till Venables took it over in 1885.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax returns (LT:) The National Archives (TNA), PROB 11/090/438: Ancestry: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Uncatalogued deeds, TH/8770</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 7 May 1817, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: LT: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: POD</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-13",
"last_edited": "2021-04-27"
},
{
"id": 712,
"title": "The White Hart, 89 Whitechapel High Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 321,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.070851482033923,
51.51583890438921
],
[
-0.070769983901351,
51.515756150681995
],
[
-0.070826096590134,
51.51573168194945
],
[
-0.070910018893456,
51.51581372858656
],
[
-0.070987330377172,
51.51589641332654
],
[
-0.071038807895081,
51.515953523899796
],
[
-0.070962773338145,
51.515980152176006
],
[
-0.070839633171055,
51.51584349573393
],
[
-0.070851482033923,
51.51583890438921
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "89",
"b_name": "White Hart, 89 Whitechapel High Street",
"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
"address": "White Hart, 89 Whitechapel High Street, London E1",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 9,
"search_str": "White Hart, 89 Whitechapel High Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>The White Hart is the only long-standing pub left on the north side of the High Street. It claims on its front signage to have been founded in 1721, a date of uncertain provenance, but it was certainly known by 1723, when the Custom House men confiscated sixteen bushels of coffee ‘concealed in a Load of Faggots’ at the White Hart Inn.[^1] It was likely rebuilt in 1774 when a 61-year lease was granted.[^2] It was known as the Grapes in the early 1830s but had reverted to the White Hart by 1839, when it was described as ‘recently repaired, the front is modern glazed with plate glass’; the frontage’s appearance, with giant-order Corinthian pilasters (the capitals destroyed since 2006), probably dates from this work following the expiry of the old lease in 1835.[^3] A stint with a music licence in the 1880s was brief, presumably because of the pub’s diminutive size, and perhaps also its structural condition: alterations were made in 1894 by Hood, builders, of Bethnal Green Road, apparently the reduction of the rear portion from three storeys to one. This was a sign, perhaps, of incipient instability as the internal floors also had to be reconstructed in the 1930s, by which time it was a Taylor, Walker pub, with public bar to the front and saloon bar to the rear.[^4]. Its Brewers’ Tudor interior today, with dark-stained three-quarter-height panelling around the walls, and the suburban-deco leaded-glass roof-light to the rear bar, probably date from these reconstructions of the 1920s and 1930s. The tiny yard to the rear in Gunthorpe Street was covered in with a plastic roof and designated for smokers in 2013.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>London Journal (1720)</em>, 2 Feb 1723</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 23 Feb, 1833</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 28 Oct 1839, p. 3</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Builder (B)</em>, 7 April 1894, p. 279: Goad insurance maps</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Tower Hamlets Planning applications online</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-11",
"last_edited": "2018-10-10"
},
{
"id": 59,
"title": "Naylor Building West, 14-24 White Church Lane and 1 Assam Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 100,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.068968833472809,
51.515616059521406
],
[
-0.068737704294811,
51.515680956092304
],
[
-0.068527540402549,
51.515346704146836
],
[
-0.068562611770617,
51.51533710360096
],
[
-0.068539450238496,
51.51530618760308
],
[
-0.068739635718426,
51.51524968774128
],
[
-0.068968833472809,
51.515616059521406
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "1",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Assam Street",
"address": "Naylor Building West, 1 Assam Street (and 14-24 White Church Lane)",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 4,
"search_str": "Naylor Building West, 1 Assam Street (and 14-24 White Church Lane)"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>There was a sugarhouse on Church Lane’s east side opposite Colchester Street (later Manningtree Street) by 1769, when it pertained to James Greenhow. It passed to Davey & Hounsom, John Doorman and Thomas Hodgson up to 1831. North of where John Street (later Assam Street) was formed in the early nineteenth century, there were livery stables, possibly built around 1772 with six houses when the manor of Stepney ceded freehold possession of two acres on Church Lane’s east side to Samuel Bull and John Thompson Bull. The Fir Tree public house was at the south end of the east side by 1760, adjacent to a site later taken for John Furze’s brewery.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Plain three-storey brick mid nineteenth-century buildings replaced the eighteenth-century sugarhouse. Dining rooms at No. 12, run by Alfonso Pappalardo in the 1930s, were held by Narian Singh from the early 1940s to the early 1950s; this was among Whitechapel’s earliest Asian-run restaurants. Next door, No. 14 was the Hindustani Markaz (Indian Centre) in 1944. John Perkins, a cork merchant and manufacturer, had preceded at No. 14 from about 1840 into the twentieth century. He was building in 1848 and again in 1880 when a two-storey warehouse was reconstructed after a fire, with R. L. Curtis & Sons as architects. At No. 16, two second-floor rooms above Alice Romanoff’s tobacconist's shop were taken in 1900 for the Russian Free Library, moving from 29 Whitechapel Road. These heavily used premises, run by Alexei Teplov here up to 1904 with extensive holdings of Russian books and journals, were described in police reports as a rallying centre for Russian revolutionaries in London. In the mid twentieth century Bonn & Co. Ltd had a large biscuit warehouse behind Nos 16–32.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>To the east of these buildings and immediately south of the churchyard there was a timber yard by the 1790s, opening off newly formed Union Street. Here Mountford Street was formed in 1846–51, laid out as a dogleg cul-de-sac with twenty-two two-storey houses. On the north side of the Union Street corner (south of the rectory garden) a warehouse of 1855 was rebuilt in 1883 as G. Page & Son’s boot factory and warehouse, J. W. Brooker, architect. After the Second World War Buck & Hickman took this site and the Mountford Street houses that had survived bombing were cleared.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>The present building was part of a residential and retail development for Ballymore Properties. A first scheme of 1997 by CZWG Architects and seen as an extension of the Aldgate Triangle scheme to the east was superseded. The block was built in 2000-2 to plans prepared by Michael Squire and Partners, architects, with Robert Bochel as job architect. The White Church Lane site took one of two long five-storey blocks of flats with balconies to the rear. There is grey facing with projecting half-dormers that step up, a colourless echo of Ralph Erskine’s higher-profile and contemporary Millennium Village on the Greenwich Peninsula. [^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MDR/1772/5/160–1; THCS/432; Land Tax returns: Ancestry: Bryan Mawer's sugar refiners' website, www.mawer.clara.net</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The Builder</em>, 6 March 1880, p. 300: LMA, District Surveyors Returns (DSR): The National Archives, HO207/860: Post Office Directories: Ancestry: George R. Sims, <em>Living London: Its Work and its Play, etc</em>, vol.1, 1901, pp.25–7: Robert Henderson, ‘“For the Cause of Education”, A History of the Free Russian Library in Whitechapel, 1898–1917’, in Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (eds), <em>Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From Melodrama to Modernism</em>, 2013, pp.71–86 (75–81)</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: DSR: Ordnance Survey maps: <em>The Builder</em>, 24 April 1883, p.556: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 2 Feb 1883, p.242</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, TH/9360/C/THL/G/2; Building Control file 42693</p>\n",
"created": "2016-06-22",
"last_edited": "2021-01-04"
},
{
"id": 257,
"title": "The Brown Bear, c. 1970",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1279,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.068607151788316,
51.511390427340054
],
[
-0.068400693495523,
51.51142780330215
],
[
-0.068389016275717,
51.511404167902676
],
[
-0.068368044928817,
51.511407578266905
],
[
-0.068328932977181,
51.51135215233573
],
[
-0.068468004764801,
51.51132778218799
],
[
-0.068463650698236,
51.511304676705464
],
[
-0.06853233892788,
51.511294270529675
],
[
-0.068607151788316,
51.511390427340054
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "139",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Leman Street",
"address": "The Brown Bear, 139 Leman Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 6,
"search_str": "The Brown Bear, 139 Leman Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>From an undated colour slide in the collection of the Tower Hamlets Archives:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/812307584321339393\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/812307584321339393</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2017-01-10",
"last_edited": "2019-05-10"
},
{
"id": 467,
"title": "George Hadley, gunsmith of Bull Court",
"author": {
"id": 187,
"username": "oldblackfener"
},
"feature": {
"id": 315,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.070001262506134,
51.51611420182703
],
[
-0.069925683789541,
51.516033038765876
],
[
-0.069976822772036,
51.516012970027454
],
[
-0.070049788081591,
51.51609931840464
],
[
-0.070001262506134,
51.51611420182703
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "76",
"b_name": "76 Whitechapel High Street",
"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
"address": "76 Whitechapel High Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 9,
"search_str": "76 Whitechapel High Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>George Hadley, my three times great grandfather, was a gunsmith who lived in Osborn Street around 1800 and at Bull Court (off Whitechapel High Street) in the 1820s and 1830s. He died before the 1837 registration so information is a bit thin about him. His wife was born in Barnstaple in 1773 and died in York Street, Stepney in 1857. His wife and family were living in Rupert Street (east of Leman Street, running south from Alie Street) at the time of the 1841 and 1851 censuses. I visited Rupert Street before it was ‘developed’ out of existence. They had eight (so far known) children all born in Whitechapel between 1794 and 1813.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-30",
"last_edited": "2019-06-13"
},
{
"id": 821,
"title": "The Boys’ Refuge and Industrial School",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 379,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.072397829403071,
51.51669736298538
],
[
-0.072397829775652,
51.51669737370259
],
[
-0.072432640663459,
51.51673265247548
],
[
-0.072358283763003,
51.51675511998594
],
[
-0.072392345089312,
51.51679900052574
],
[
-0.072279169019407,
51.51681120129116
],
[
-0.072260832658385,
51.516791637982884
],
[
-0.07220017871295,
51.51681376750612
],
[
-0.07215893969634,
51.516769768915125
],
[
-0.072119241451839,
51.51677664825232
],
[
-0.071934651446851,
51.5165549241745
],
[
-0.071985260710591,
51.51653955484268
],
[
-0.072028895096668,
51.51652682786407
],
[
-0.072014842692988,
51.516508073517755
],
[
-0.072098254454469,
51.51648373796318
],
[
-0.072052675375786,
51.51643004607134
],
[
-0.072144607110911,
51.516401673048335
],
[
-0.072314904588685,
51.51634652520951
],
[
-0.072358068161013,
51.516398410711595
],
[
-0.072522445522427,
51.51634491903885
],
[
-0.072499976579174,
51.51631804154615
],
[
-0.072499959446261,
51.51631804712155
],
[
-0.072499965346341,
51.51631803831239
],
[
-0.072579515746657,
51.51629075531372
],
[
-0.072667639265209,
51.516403182536045
],
[
-0.072427304765486,
51.5164813923298
],
[
-0.072385415219988,
51.51643128370629
],
[
-0.072387162242999,
51.516433383744854
],
[
-0.072107982084202,
51.516523791132904
],
[
-0.072157544605501,
51.51658336890495
],
[
-0.072272128891629,
51.51654626302576
],
[
-0.072397829403071,
51.51669736298538
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "28 ",
"b_name": "Toynbee Hall",
"street": "Commercial Street",
"address": "Toynbee Hall, 28 Commercial Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 21,
"search_str": "Toynbee Hall"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>Before the opening of Toynbee Hall in 1884, there stood on its site a Boys’ Refuge and Industrial School, built in 1852-3 on the recently completed Commercial Street. The site was originally planned for a ragged school (perhaps that which did open a year later in George Yard), but it was acquired by the brewers Truman, Hanbury & Co., probably in 1852 when fundraising began for the Boys’ Refuge. The site appears to have been acquired through Truman, Hanbury & Co., the bulk of the funds coming from the Hanbury and Buxton families, which owned the brewery, with Robert Hanbury jun (1823-67), MP for Middlesex, as treasurer, and Charles Buxton (1822-71) as Hon. Secretary. The Refuge, to the designs of Frederick William Porter (1821-1901), architect, was a utilitarian brick building of two steep double-pitched roofs with clerestory glazing. It housed a dormitory, workshops and schoolroom, with a small governor’s house adjoining.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/24/1854-boys-refuge.JPG\"></p>\n\n<p>Opened by the Earl of Shaftesbury in July 1853 it admitted its first boys in November. It was ‘intended for the prevention of crime. The boys who are admitted are either friendless orphans, or the children of parents so depraved as to make it absolutely essential that they should be removed from them. The mere fact of a boy having been convicted does not necessarily exclude him’.[^1] </p>\n\n<p>During a probationary period, boys slept at a dormitory in Colchester Street and were trained during the day in carpentry, tailoring or shoemaking, according to their aptitudes. Having passed probation they resided at the Refuge and the day had time allocated for spiritual instruction from Hugh Allen, vicar of St Jude’s, schoolwork, and play. A school band and military drill were instituted, and boys had an annual outing to Poles, the Hertfordshire home of Robert Hanbury senior. By 1856 around 100 boys were accommodated, a number that remained steady into the 1870s; the school closed in 1883 or 1884, following a fire that partially destroyed the workshops. The site was put up for sale, possibly following the death of the elder Robert Hanbury in January 1884, and acquired for Toynbee Hall.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: ‘<a href=\"http://www.jstor.org/stable/60101581\">Statement of the Boys’ Refuge</a> for the Prevention of Crime, Commercial Street, Whitechapel’, London 1854, Knowsley Pamphlet Collection, University of Liverpool: <a href=\"https://www.dia.ie/architects/view/4384/PORTER-FREDERICKWILLIAM\">Dictionary of Irish Architects, 1720-1940</a></p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Builder</em> (<em>B</em>), 24 Jan 1857, p. 55: <em>Illustrated London News</em>, 6 Aug 1857, p 121: <em>Penny Illustrated Paper</em>, 9 July 1864, p. 3: <em>Eighteenth Report on… Reformatory and Industrial Schools</em>, London 1875, p. 157: <em>Globe</em>, 7 March 1883, p. 2: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-24",
"last_edited": "2021-05-04"
},
{
"id": 280,
"title": "German church at the Old Pump House",
"author": {
"id": 72,
"username": "eric"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1010,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.068555698048877,
51.51204452198014
],
[
-0.068555326202895,
51.51204485879359
],
[
-0.068554770831345,
51.512045081502
],
[
-0.068497504981719,
51.512052919430616
],
[
-0.068502175463734,
51.51206547578974
],
[
-0.068502752988489,
51.51206703010359
],
[
-0.06850288398942,
51.51206798740001
],
[
-0.068502971173769,
51.51206916405696
],
[
-0.068502347255853,
51.51206991451387
],
[
-0.068499993050397,
51.5120710221773
],
[
-0.068242392564589,
51.51210964685258
],
[
-0.0682410644557,
51.51210973399245
],
[
-0.068239642322559,
51.51210952007609
],
[
-0.068238714527799,
51.51210890352617
],
[
-0.068238207947228,
51.512107700217044
],
[
-0.068188144824087,
51.51197782828397
],
[
-0.068453135501772,
51.51193815405404
],
[
-0.068515159282885,
51.51192814155626
],
[
-0.068530310562288,
51.51197703749692
],
[
-0.06855299134469,
51.51203601813206
],
[
-0.068553831126054,
51.51203820195318
],
[
-0.068555912716636,
51.51204390119794
],
[
-0.068555889466022,
51.51204424727518
],
[
-0.068555698048877,
51.51204452198014
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "19",
"b_name": "Old Pump House, 19-20 Hooper Street",
"street": "Hooper Street",
"address": "Old Pump House, 19–20 Hooper Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 6,
"search_str": "Old Pump House, 19-20 Hooper Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>I knew the Pump House site well as a child, but not was there before it was constructed. I have a paper from Germany about a particular church organisation (the St Paul's German Reformed Church) which I believe had a church on the site of the Pump House, but which was ousted from it when the Tilbury Warehouse etc. was built. I have no interest in religious matters, but at the end of WWII I trod the bombed premises of the church on its new site at Sydenham (I shared my time between living at Aldgate and at Forest Hill, both of which had German communities.)</p>\n",
"created": "2017-02-19",
"last_edited": "2021-05-10"
},
{
"id": 412,
"title": "Like the rich grown-ups....",
"author": {
"id": 172,
"username": "patricia"
},
"feature": {
"id": 322,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.070826085356955,
51.515731678715305
],
[
-0.070926036876346,
51.51568963184868
],
[
-0.070975568878107,
51.51573563457872
],
[
-0.070938498759621,
51.51574884259805
],
[
-0.071053600330032,
51.515872108514294
],
[
-0.070987330377168,
51.51589641332655
],
[
-0.070910007660269,
51.515813725352466
],
[
-0.070826085356955,
51.515731678715305
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "90",
"b_name": "90 Whitechapel High Street",
"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
"address": "90 Whitechapel High Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 5,
"search_str": "90 Whitechapel High Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>Once in a while my mother picked up a roasted chicken from Blooms as a special treat for us. We would go there occasionally for a salt beef sandwich and ate at the bar. Mostly we went to Strongwaters, in Black Lion Yard, as it was a bit cheaper and closer to home. When my future husband and I started going out together (I was about 17 or 18, so about 1966/7), he would take me to Blooms and we sat in the restaurant like the rich grown ups, as it was quite posh. There was often line ups there. My husband had a cousin who worked at a little handbag shop next to Blooms. </p>\n",
"created": "2017-07-05",
"last_edited": "2018-11-09"
},
{
"id": 759,
"title": "Brunswick Buildings",
"author": {
"id": 255,
"username": "maxim"
},
"feature": {
"id": 349,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.07549087613009,
51.51590295136144
],
[
-0.07502299617121,
51.51603917568331
],
[
-0.074915271092403,
51.51602099175728
],
[
-0.074754155828092,
51.51584590180572
],
[
-0.07484947509694,
51.51581175767231
],
[
-0.074967573458452,
51.515769633985315
],
[
-0.074994022372458,
51.51577416215241
],
[
-0.07505958401552,
51.515841103660144
],
[
-0.075285930468452,
51.515766638267785
],
[
-0.07549087613009,
51.51590295136144
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "",
"b_name": "Brunswick House",
"street": "New Goulston Street",
"address": "1 to 20 Brunswick House, 4-14 New Goulston Street and 15-19 New Goulston Street ",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 7,
"search_str": "Brunswick House"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>My maternal grandmother Eva Galgut, formerly Sacof, was born at 48 Brunswick Buildings in 1896. The family name was Sacowski at this time and my great grandparents were from Odessa. They came to London around 1892 and moved to Bristol around 1900. Great grandpa Pineas Sacof was a cabinet maker.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-29",
"last_edited": "2019-08-01"
},
{
"id": 342,
"title": "site - or not - of the Red Lion Shakespearean Theatre",
"author": {
"id": 118,
"username": "david2"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1603,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.056406617269612,
51.51770062291906
],
[
-0.056859738664825,
51.51885309308438
],
[
-0.056859509133731,
51.51885848495126
],
[
-0.056258134977201,
51.518950137484076
],
[
-0.056117713763634,
51.51859196551085
],
[
-0.055763497548593,
51.51864751430689
],
[
-0.055391575964745,
51.51769081022941
],
[
-0.055571286015296,
51.51766447356726
],
[
-0.055642716982368,
51.517848661110975
],
[
-0.056028459866271,
51.51779390510267
],
[
-0.055988285893891,
51.517688023551756
],
[
-0.056096237324859,
51.517691611564935
],
[
-0.056102597283258,
51.51771150111668
],
[
-0.056191696869146,
51.517700837734324
],
[
-0.056192022136416,
51.517693199257735
],
[
-0.056406617269612,
51.51770062291906
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "85",
"b_name": "85 Stepney Way",
"street": "Stepney Way",
"address": "85 Stepney Way",
"feature_type": "GREATER_WHITECHAPEL",
"count": 2,
"search_str": "85 Stepney Way"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>This building, formerly used as a storage facility, was identified as the site of the Red Lion Shakespearean Theatre during assessment of the route of Crossrail, allowing Crossrail to take the route it did. The site is scheduled for redevelopment and an archaeological evaluation found a row of post holes, potentially part of the theatre. Alas, further evaluation found they continued as a property boundary. So the Red Lion theatre is still 'missing'. My flat, on the opposite side of the road, overlooks it. Maybe the archaeological evaluation just wasn't in the right place and it is still out there? </p>\n\n<p>Sources: <br>\n<a href=\"http://74f85f59f39b887b696f-ab656259048fb93837ecc0ecbcf0c557.r23.cf3.rackcdn.com/assets/library/document/0/original/0004-r-redliontheatre.pdf\">http://74f85f59f39b887b696f-ab656259048fb93837ecc0ecbcf0c557.r23.cf3.rackcdn.com/assets/library/document/0/original/0004-r-redliontheatre.pdf</a> Crossrail report by the late Dr Phillpotts, locating the Red Lion Theatre<br>\n<br>\n<a href=\"https://democracy.towerhamlets.gov.uk/documents/s90544/PA-15-01789%20-%20Committee%20Report%20Final.pdf\">https://democracy.towerhamlets.gov.uk/documents/s90544/PA-15-01789%20-%20Committee%20Report%20Final.pdf</a> Council committee report saying that they hadn't found the theatre after all</p>\n",
"created": "2017-04-01",
"last_edited": "2021-01-07"
},
{
"id": 1160,
"title": "Red Lion Farm and playhouse",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1603,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.056406617269612,
51.51770062291906
],
[
-0.056859738664825,
51.51885309308438
],
[
-0.056859509133731,
51.51885848495126
],
[
-0.056258134977201,
51.518950137484076
],
[
-0.056117713763634,
51.51859196551085
],
[
-0.055763497548593,
51.51864751430689
],
[
-0.055391575964745,
51.51769081022941
],
[
-0.055571286015296,
51.51766447356726
],
[
-0.055642716982368,
51.517848661110975
],
[
-0.056028459866271,
51.51779390510267
],
[
-0.055988285893891,
51.517688023551756
],
[
-0.056096237324859,
51.517691611564935
],
[
-0.056102597283258,
51.51771150111668
],
[
-0.056191696869146,
51.517700837734324
],
[
-0.056192022136416,
51.517693199257735
],
[
-0.056406617269612,
51.51770062291906
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "85",
"b_name": "85 Stepney Way",
"street": "Stepney Way",
"address": "85 Stepney Way",
"feature_type": "GREATER_WHITECHAPEL",
"count": 2,
"search_str": "85 Stepney Way"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>From the sixteenth century a manor on Whitechapel's parish boundary south of Whitechapel Road at the settlement called Mile End Green was known as the Red Lion Farm, a name that seems to reflect the presence of a tavern. An important episode in the history of Mile End Green was the construction at the Red Lion Farm of galleries, a stage and a turret in 1567, financed by John Brayne, a citizen Grocer and the brother-in-law and partner of James Burbage. This timber structure was erected to put on a play called ‘the story of Sampson’. The only known documentation of this early instance of a purpose-built playhouse, which antedates Brayne and Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, lies in a complaint against one carpenter, William Sylvester, adjudicated by the Carpenters’ Company in 1567, and a suit against another, John Reynolds, at the Court of King’s Bench in 1569. Sylvester, the more experienced craftsman, assembled the galleries while Reynolds constructed the stage and turret. In the later suit, the location of the theatre was described as ‘within the court or yard lying on the south side of the garden belonging to the messuage or farm house called and known by the name of the sign of the Red Lion … situate and being at Mile End in the Parish of St Mary Matfelon otherwise called Whitechapel without Aldgate of London’.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The longevity, appearance and precise location of the theatre at the Red Lion Farm have been points of contention. Archaeological investigations in 2018–19 appear to have clarified matters to some extent, revealing a rectangular timber structure south of Raven Row just outside Whitechapel, that is to the east of the parish boundary. This has been interpreted as the perimeter base of the playhouse stage itself. There is evidence of reuse as a bear garden or baiting pit in the early seventeenth century and of repairs around 1680, and the associated tavern or inn is understood as having grown and thrived alongside.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>In 1709 a dispute over tithes of milk and pigs confirmed the location of the Red Lion farmhouse itself as in the parish of St Mary Whitechapel. Three maps, Joel Gascoyne’s of 1703, John Rocque’s of the 1740s and John Robinson’s of 1783 for the London Hospital, show that there were one or more bowling greens south of the property through that period, and further delineate the farm on the south side of Mile End Green (now Raven Row), at the eastern boundary of the parish. In 1753 Bailey Heath and Henry Knight agreed to demise to Joseph Taylor ‘all that new built brick messuage or tenement with the cow houses, stables and twenty-one acres of pasture ground … commonly called or known by the name of Red Lion Farm’.[^3] Rebuilding had perhaps taken place not long before Rocque delineated semi-quadrangular ranges north-west of a bowling green. By the 1780s the farm comprised a yard lined with buildings and tenements on three sides, bordered west by a skittle ground and a garden adjoining a public house known as the White Raven. The farm buildings were cleared in phases around 1800.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives, KB27/1229, m.30, as transcribed by Herbert Berry, ‘The First Public Playhouses, especially the Red Lion’, <em>Shakespeare Quarterly</em>, vol.40/2, 1989, pp.133–148: William Ingram, <em>The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Adult Professional Theater in Elizabethan </em>England, 1992, pp.102–13: Janet S. Loengard, ‘An Elizabethan Lawsuit: John Brayne, his Carpenter, and the Building of the Red Lion Theatre’, <em>Shakespeare Quarterly</em>, vol.34/3, 1983, pp.298–310</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Julian Bowsher, ‘Boozing, bear-baiting and treading the boards – the history of London’s first playhouse, <em>Apollo</em>, 29 June 2020: <a href=\"https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsoundcloud.com%2Fuclarchaeologysouth-east%2Fepisode-1-the-red-lion-playhouse&data=02%7C01%7C%7C28e826da287541a8285608d82e23ffe1%7C1faf88fea9984c5b93c9210a11d9a5c2%7C0%7C0%7C637310079730179557&sdata=gv9ItY0G2QWm0cbs%2Bds%2BfIMUFK%2BT8J%2B4%2FX%2BrLMFNGiI%3D&reserved=0\">soundcloud.com/uclarchaeologysouth-east/episode-1-the-red-lion-playhouse</a></p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Barts Health Archives (BHA), RLHLH/A/5/4, p.299</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: BHA, RLHLH/A/5/9, p.194; RLHLH/A/5/14, p.149: <em>Daily Courant</em>, 5 August 1709; 5 May 1718: Henry Gwillim, <em>A Collection of Acts and Records of </em>Parliament, vol.2, 1801, p.607: Richard Horwood’s map of London, 1799 </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2021-01-07",
"last_edited": "2021-01-07"
}
]
}