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"id": 810,
"title": "Kensington Apartments and Bradbury House",
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"b_name": "Kensington Apartments, 11 Commercial Street",
"street": "11 Commercial Street",
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"body": "<p>Kensington Apartments on the corner of Commercial Street and Pomell Way was built as part of the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1454/detail/#redevelopment-of-denning-point-and-the-new-holland-estate\">regeneration of the New Holland estate</a> centred around Denning Point tower. Of twelve storeys, dropping to seven storeys along Commercial Street, it consists entirely of private flats, with a large and luxurious entrance foyer and reception area. The wall finish to Kensington Apartments is ivory rainscreen cladding, with projecting balconies with coloured glazing on the south, Pomell Way frontage, and continuous balconies on the east and west frontages. The taller portion of Kensington Apartments has a communal roof garden.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The name ‘Kensington’, as with Sloane Apartments, with its desirable West End associations, was presumably chosen in order to boost sales to overseas buyers unfamiliar with the East End. It was built on the site of Bradbury House, a four-storey block of flats built over ground-floor parking garages, a rectilinear concrete-framed block faced in dark-grey brick, with strips of expressed concrete floorplates, part of the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1454/detail/#denning-point-and-the-new-holland-estate\">New Holland estate</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-16",
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"id": 862,
"title": "The Co-operative Wholesale Society around Leman Street and its beginnings in London",
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"body": "<p>The Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) opened its first warehouse in Whitechapel in 1881, on a plot on the north side of the present Hooper Street, just to the east of Leman Street. Very quickly, as CWS business expanded, the organisation bought up and built on neighbouring plots and by the 1930s this corner of Whitechapel was home to a series of impressive warehouses, offices, factories, showrooms and a bank, which flanked Leman Street and surrounding roads. Designed by CWS architects and engineers, many of the buildings in what became a Co-operative Wholesale colony have now gone and what remains has mostly been converted to apartments. Of the original warehouse built in 1879–1881, only the stair tower survives, a yellow-brick column to the rear of the CWS London Branch headquarters building at 99 Leman Street, which opened in 1887. That and some of its CWS successors still dominate the vicinity, not without a degree of architectural spectacle.</p>\n\n<p>The Co-operative Wholesale Society – now The Co-operative Group – was founded in Manchester in 1863, to supply basic foodstuffs and daily necessities wholesale to Co-operative retailers. The wholesale society was a federal organisation, owned by the retail societies it traded with, and sought to integrate production and distribution in order to lower costs. As is well known, the co-operative principle of mutual benefit was established in 1844 by the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers’ Society, many of whose members had backgrounds in earlier co-operative, communitarian and socialist ventures.[^1] From around the mid-century, efforts were made to set up a central wholesale agency, culminating in what became the CWS.[^2] It began as the North of England Co-operative & Wholesale Industrial Society Ltd and expanded rapidly to serve the growing number of retail societies in England and Wales. When it became impossible to serve these from Manchester alone, subsidiary wholesale branches were set up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1871 and in London in 1874. [^3] London was considered difficult terrain, a ‘co-operative desert’ in need of irrigation and the story of the struggle to gain a foothold in the capital was characterised in 1913 as ‘the attack on London’.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The CWS aimed to procure unadulterated goods at low prices, by ‘eliminating the middle-man and his profits’ rather than economising on labour.[^5] Beginning with butter, which accounted for a third of sales in the first decade, the CWS built a network of buyers, suppliers and, crucially, depots, which facilitated bulk purchasing and centralised processing in order to secure the best prices and quality.[^6] The co-operative principle of avoiding middlemen also underlay the Society’s policy in London of, wherever possible, purchasing the freeholds of its premises, ‘for co-operators, being prudent men, have a righteous horror of the short leasehold system’.[^7] Thus the CWS and a little later the English & Scottish Joint CWS (E&SCWS) became significant landowners in Whitechapel.</p>\n\n<p>The first London Branch premises opened in 1874 at 118 Minories, a warehouse backing onto America Square on the eastern edge of the City of London. This was convenient for the docks and for markets, in particular Mincing Lane in the City, which was the centre of the international tea trade from the 1830s. The London Public Tea Auction, held in the London Commercial Sale Rooms at Mincing Lane, was established in 1834 after the dismantling of the East India Company monopoly.[^8] Tea fit with the temperance beliefs of many early co-operators and from the foundation of the Wholesale Society formed an important CWS commodity; it remained so as consumption of tea increased nationally, only levelling off in the 1940s.[^9] Within a few years of opening in London the business had outgrown the space available and the CWS began to look for larger premises. ‘Great difficulty was found in selecting a freehold site which would be at once convenient for the various markets and the railways’ but by the end of the 1870s a site in Whitechapel had been decided upon and in 1881 new London Branch premises were opened near Leman Street, less than half a mile east of the Minories.[^10] As the Society consistently pointed out to its members, Leman Street was both the highway to the docks and ‘conveniently adjacent’ to bonded tea warehouses.[^11] The premises were also keenly positioned within the railway network and bordered on the site of the future London, Tilbury & Southend Railway (Commercial Road) goods depot and its vast warehouses, which, when it opened in 1886, provided a link to the East & West India Dock Company’s new dock at Tilbury.[^12]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Lynn Pearson, <em>Architecture of the Co-operative Movement</em>, draft Chapter 1: Laying the Foundations: Retail Societies, 1844–1890, 2018, p. 2. We are grateful to Lynn Pearson for help with this account.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Pearson, <em>Architecture of the Co-operative Movement</em>, draft Chapter 2: Pioneering Production: CWS Depots and Factories, 1863–1897, p. 2.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Anthony Webster, ‘Building the Wholesale: The Development of the English CWS and British Co-operative Business 1863–90’, <em>Business History</em>, 54(6), 2012, pp. 883–904, p. 894.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Co-operative Wholesale Society Limited, London Branch, <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p.54; Percy Redfern, <em>The Story of the C.W.S. The Jubilee History of the Co-operative Wholesale Society Limited</em>, 1913, p.83; Webster, ‘Building the Wholesale’, p. 885.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: A. D. Harrison, ‘Review of The Story of the C.W.S. by Percy Redfern’, <em>Charity Organisation Review</em>, New Series, Vol. 35, No. 205 (January 1914), pp. 46–8, p. 46.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Pearson, draft Chapter 2, p.1.</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, p. 70.</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Markman Ellis, Richard Coulton and Matthew Mauger, <em>Empire of Tea: The Asian Leaf that Conquered the World</em>, 2015, p.249.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘The History of the International Tea Market, 1850–1945’, <em>EH.Net Encyclopedia</em>, ed. Robert Whaples, 16 March 2008: <a href=\"https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-history-of-the-international-tea-market-1850-1945/\">https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-history-of-the-international-tea-market-1850-1945/</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p. 9</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: ‘CWS: Tea Growers, Blenders, and Packers II’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, February 1908, p. 120.</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: Tim Smith,‘Commercial Road Goods Depot, Whitechapel’, <em>Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society</em>, 1979,re-typed with annotations, January 2000: <a href=\"http://www.glias.org.uk/journals/2-a.html\">http://www.glias.org.uk/journals/2-a.html</a>.</p>\n",
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"b_name": "Swanlea Secondary School",
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"body": "<p>Two trenches were excavated to evaluate the site for a new building, in 2010, supervised by me. They showed the area had been comprehensively dug over for a 'brickfield', or brickearth quarry, in the late 17th century. The coal-ashy quarry fills were subsequently reworked by 19th-century brick culverts which presumably drained into the common sewer (aka 'The Black Ditch'). Noteworthy among the finds was a raspberry prunt (a raspberry-shaped applied glass decoration) from the hollow stem of a clear crystal glass rummer (<em>roemer</em>) similar to ones made by George Ravenscroft in the 17th century.</p>\n\n<p>References and illustrations</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O5164/drinking-glass-ravenscroft-george/\">http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O5164/drinking-glass-ravenscroft-george/</a> </p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O2883/roemer-unknown/\">http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O2883/roemer-unknown/</a></p>\n\n<p><a href=\"http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-457-1/dissemination/pdf/vol13/vol13_supp01/RU1.pdf\">http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archiveDS/archiveDownload?t=arch-457-1/dissemination/pdf/vol13/vol13_supp01/RU1.pdf</a> (London Archaeologist 'Round-up' for 2010. Search the pdf for 'Swanlea')<br>\n </p>\n",
"created": "2018-03-05",
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{
"id": 797,
"title": "6 and 6a Commercial Street, Commercial Place and Sugar Loaf Court",
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"body": "<p>Nos 6 and 6a Commercial Street incorporate an entry to the car park on the site of Commercial Place (formerly Sugar Loaf Court) and <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/384/detail/\">Spread Eagle Yard</a>. The first court to be developed off Catherine Wheel Alley, the predecessor Street to Commercial Street, Sugar Loaf Alley or Court was a long narrow court of fourteen houses in existence by the 1670s.[^1] In the early eighteenth century these were held by Richard Arters ‘clothworker and Citizen of London’ (d. 1736).[^2]: The court became Commercial Place after the creation of Commercial Street in the 1840s and the old houses fronting Commercial Street and most of Commercial Place, by then condemned, were acquired in the 1870s by George Gardner straw and hay dealers based in Spread Eagle Yard.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/12/13/2018.jpg\">Nos 6 and 6a Commercial Street looking through to Gunthorpe Street, 2018. Photograph © Derek Kendall</p>\n\n<p>Gardners demolished Commercial Place c. 1880 to create hay-cart storage and rebuilt the Commercial Street frontage in 1895-6 as the current red-brick shop-house, five windows wide, with an entry for their hay carts. The builders were Ashby Bros of Old Broad Street, the architect John Mackenzie Knight (1844-1912) of Mile End.[^3] Gardners departed in 1931 and the building was badly damaged during the Second World War and repaired in the 1950s. The hay-cart yard became part of the car park on the site of the former Spread Eagle Yard.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <a href=\"https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/london-map-ogilby-morgan/1676\"><em>Ogilby and Morgan's Large Scale Map of the City As Rebuilt By 1676</em>, British History Online</a></p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's Returns: The National Archives, IR58/84809/2681: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-13",
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{
"id": 764,
"title": "Spotting Lulu in Osborn Street",
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"body": "<p>I worked in Osborn Street in 1963 before emigrating to Los Angeles. I was a pattern cutter and grader for a garment company called Mary Harnes. Opposite the company I worked for I think was a <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/392/detail/\">recording studio</a>. I saw a very young Lulu get out of a cab and go into the building opposite.</p>\n",
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"title": "The Co-operative Wholesale Society's London Branch Headquarters at 99 Leman Street, now partially incorporated by Sugar House",
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"body": "<p>The Co-operative Wholesale Society's London Branch headquarters were built to designs by J. F. Goodey of 1885. At the formal opening on 2 November 1887, the CWS announced that it should ‘be their aim to make this beautiful building a common home for all the various movements having for their object the interest and advancement of the working people. They had with them their friend, the Rev. S. A. Barnett, and they hoped to work hand in hand with him and the residents of Toynbee Hall, in giving a message of hope to the people of the neighbourhood’.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>With impressive frontages on Leman Street and Hooper Square, the building wrapped around the site to meet the earlier warehouses on Rupert Street to their rear. The latter were now refurbished or rebuilt as the tea department and incorporated bacon stoves (where the green bacon, preferably Irish, was ‘smoked in wood and sawdust for about forty hours to acquire that peculiar flavour so popular in London and southern England',[^2] and tailoring and stationery departments. A drive-through yard for vans ran between the two phases, leading from Leman Street to Hooper Square. In addition to the demands placed on the new building by having frontages on three uneven sides and the need to incorporate the rebuilt tea department, alterations were made to the plans in consultation with the borough council for a corner of the building at the ‘back of Leman Street’, in order to avoid rights to light litigation.[^3] This referred, presumably, to the narrow canted south-eastern corner and the return to Goodman Street, where the building joined the entrance and stair tower of the earliest CWS warehouse. The designs for later CWS buildings on Leman Street were also modified as a result of claims and threatened injunctions over obstructions to ancient lights.</p>\n\n<p>The total area of the building was now 18,000ft, with frontages of 150ft to Leman Street, 110ft to Hooper Street, and 160ft to Hooper Street and Rupert Street. The ground and first floors are of Portland stone with blue Pennant stone pilasters, the upper storeys in red brick with Portland stone dressings. The words ‘Co-operative Wholesale Society Limited’ in the recessed arch heads on the right-hand return to Hooper Street most probably also appeared in the windowless left-hand return.[^4] The wheatsheaf, symbolising the power of standing together, which is carved into the bay above the main entrance in Leman Street is ‘perhaps the first use of a co-operative symbol on a CWS building’.[^5] The accompanying motto, ‘Labor and Wait’, was the first registered trademark of the CWS, and is thought to derive from the last line of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, <em>Psalm of Life</em> (published 1838); it is also said that the American spelling of Labor, used by the CWS from 1863, was in support of the anti-slavery north in the American Civil war.[^6] On either side are the crests and mottos of the City of London, ‘<em>Domine Dirige Nos</em>’ and the City of Manchester, ‘<em>Concilio et Labore</em>’. To the left or north of the central bay, which held the main staircase and a corridor to the tea department at the rear, lay the buyers’ offices, committee and sale rooms, and grocery and drapery departments, with a double-height assembly or lecture hall on the fifth and sixth floors.[^7] This was panelled in walnut, mahogany, pitch pine and sycamore, the joinery executed by W. H. Lascelles and Co.[^8] A richly ornamented plaster ceiling, designed by ‘veteran co-operator, Mr Newton’, was topped with a ventilated dome of stained glass. Notwithstanding the impressive front, the octagonal oriel at the Hooper Street corner was designed as ‘the principal and most striking feature’, carried from the first floor upwards to a square clock tower.[^9] On the ground floor this window lit the chief accountant’s office, surrounded by glazed partitions so that he could see into the clerks’ office;[^10] upstairs this space was incorporated into the drapery department, boot and shoe department, furnishing department and, on the fifth floor, the board or committee room and dining rooms. Memorials of ‘Co-operative Congresses and other appropriate scenes’ hung on the walnut panelling and rich flock paper of the board room and an enamel tile portrait of CWS Chairman, J. T. W. Mitchell, was set above the oval mantelpiece.[^11] The dining room was said to be so high that diners could see the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, while from the promenade on the roof, to which Co-operative members and other visitors were taken at special events, there ‘was almost as good a view of London and the Surrey hills as from the Monument itself’.[^12] Above the sixth floor, on which the kitchen and stores were located, rose the clock tower where the clock chimed the quarters and the hour ‘on a harmonious peal of five bells’. The clock faces were designed by Thwaites & Reed, makers of those for the clock at the Palace of Westminster. High above the Italianate roof, a flagstaff reached 150 feet from street level ensuring that the building could be seen as well as heard ‘for a considerable distance’. The building contractors were Martin, Wells & Co of Aldershot and London, overseen by Mr Boyce, CWS clerk of works, who was ‘visited often by the architect’.[^13] CWS buildings were illustrated in the <em>CWS Annual</em>, although, as Lynn Pearson notes, these illustrations were often somewhat fanciful.[^14] The erection of an additional storey indicated by district surveyors’ returns of 1896 probably represents no more than the insertion of clerestorey lighting in the roof, visible in photographs of 1933 but altered in the recent conversion.[^15]</p>\n\n<p>As a consequence of the Hooper Street fire in 1885, the CWS paid even closer attention to designing warehouses that were fireproof and providing additional checks. These included, from 1887, sprinklers in all new or adapted buildings fed from tanks on the roof and, from about 1912 until at least the 1950s, its own fire brigade based at 99 Leman Street.[^16] Alongside regular fire drills, annual drill competitions took place between the branches, and in the 1920s these were held at the Crystal Palace.</p>\n\n<p>By 1880 the ‘Co-operative Quarter’ centred on Corporation Street in Manchester was promoting the CWS ‘in spectacular architectural fashion’ and within the decade the Society was on the way to achieving a similar presence in Whitechapel.[^17] The CWS initially gave its London Branch headquarters’ address as Hooper Square, Leman Street, but by about 1890, the warehouses and assembly rooms were more usually known as 99 Leman Street, an address which the present Sugar House conversion retains. This was doubtless to draw attention to the Society’s growing presence in Leman Street, since works would shortly commence on the large new tea department building opposite at 100 Leman Street, and because 99 and 100 Leman Street was deemed to be a suitably impressive pair of addresses for the CWS’s flagship buildings. The impact made by the Co-operative Wholesale locally was not solely architectural. As its warehousing expanded, many buildings were demolished, including clusters of tenements and public houses to the east and west of Leman Street, and, except at the fringes of the CWS’s growing estate locally where a handful of dark-blue and black spots remained, Booth maps and surveys of the 1880s and ’90s show an ‘improvement’ in social conditions as tenants shifted elsewhere.[^18] The Rev. T. Gardiner, President of Tower Hamlets Industrial Co-operative Society and sub-warden of Toynbee Hall said in 1887 that, as a former inhabitant, he remembered ‘Hooper Square a centre for squalid poverty’ and that it was now ‘the London centre of industrial distribution’.[^19] Leman Street was itself changing and in 1898 it was observed that ‘the whole of the SE side … below Johnson’s court is taken up by ware houses’.[^20]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p. 42.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p. 21.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: National Co-operative Archive (NCA), CWS minutes, 16 April 1886.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: ‘The Co-operative Wholesale Society’s Building, Leman Street, London’, <em>Harper’s Weekly</em>, 9 January 1897, p. 36.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Lynn Pearson, <em>Architecture of the Co-operative Movement</em>, draft Chapter 1, p. 5 and draft Chapter 2, p. 4.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Nick Matthews, ‘The past informs the present: The co-operative movement and anti-slavery’: <a href=\"https://www.thenews.coop/131764/sector/community/past-informs-present-co-operative-movement-anti-slavery/\">https://www.thenews.coop/131764/sector/community/past-informs-present-co-operative-movement-anti-slavery/</a>. </p>\n\n<p>[^7]: ‘London Branch of the Co-operative Wholesale Society (Limited)’, <em>Building News</em>, 28 October 1887, p. 6</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>Ibid</em>.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, pp. 9–11.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>Ibid.</em>, p. 14.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>Ibid.</em>, p. 212.</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: <em>Ibid.</em>, p.70: ‘Opening of New Co-operative premises in Whitechapel’, <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 5 November 1887, p. 7.</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p. 22; ‘Opening of New Co-operative premises in Whitechapel’, <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 5 November 1887, p. 7.</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: Pearson, draft Chapter 2, p.2.</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyors Returns serial no. 1896.0548.</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p. 71; Co-operative Wholesale Societies Limited, England and Scotland, <em>Annual</em>(hereafter <em>CWS Annual</em>), 1912, n.p.; Goad insurance plan, <em>c</em>.1951.</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: Anthony Webster, ‘Building the Wholesale’, <em>Business History</em>, 54(6), 2012, pp. 890, 894.</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: Charles Booth, <em>Descriptive Map of London Poverty</em>, 1889, section 28, MoL, 27.120/1ab; Charles Booth, <em>Life and Labour of the People in London</em>, 1891, Appendix II; Map Descriptive of London Poverty, 1898–9, Sheet 5, London School of Economics Archive; Walk with Inspector Reid, District 8, Aldgate, St George’s in the East, Shadwell], 9 March 1898, LSE, BOOTH/B/351.</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p.47.</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: Walk with Inspector Reid, LSE BOOTH/B/351.</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-29",
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{
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"title": "Kirstein's Mansions, 34-40 White Church Lane",
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"body": "<p>A house and shop at 34 Church Lane were the premises of Henry Bear, a tobacco manufacturer, from the 1840s to the 1880s. He evidently acquired the freehold of three buildings on the site that now comprehends Nos 34–40 and an empty site at 29–31a Commercial Road. His heir, Adam Bear, granted John Furze & Co., brewers, a 90-year lease in 1899 subject to a building agreement. The brewery was taken over by Taylor Walker & Co., and in 1901 the agreement and lease were transferred to Solomon Kirstein, a printer based at No. 38. By 1902 Kirstein had built 29-31a Commercial Road. There was then a long interval before in 1911 he redeveloped his Church Lane frontage as Kirstein's Mansions, with John Hamilton & Son, architects, and Bewley and Lissner, builders. In three storeys and attics, these shops, tenements and upper-storey workrooms linked to 29 Commercial Road.</p>\n\n<p>Around 1970 David Abraham began selling knitwear at No. 34. His firm continues to trade here in 2016 when painted-shutter street art from 2012, works by Ador at No. 34 and Milo Tschais at No. 40, survived. In 2015 the David Abraham Partnership put forward a redevelopment scheme for the whole site proposing a seventeen-storey tower designed by Stock Woolstencroft. The site was cleared in 2020.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: District Surveyors Returns: Goad maps: London County Council Minutes, 16 May 1911, p. 1226: London Metropolitan Archives, O/064/034 and 037: The National Archives, IR58/84809/2606–8: Post Office Directories: <a href=\"http://blog.globalstreetart.com/walls\">http://blog.globalstreetart.com/walls</a>: Tower Hamlets Planning</p>\n",
"created": "2016-06-22",
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{
"id": 724,
"title": "Calcutta House Annexe of London Metropolitan University and Brooke Bond welfare centre",
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"body": "<p>The Calcutta House Annexe has been part of London Metropolitan University since it came into being through the merger of Guildhall University and the University of North London in 2002; the Annexe building had been occupied by Guildhall University’s predecessor institution, City of London Polytechnic, in 1973.[^1] Like most of LMU’s buildings in Old Castle Street and Goulston Street it was part of the Brooke Bond Tea company’s administration and storage buildings, which had grown apace in Whitechapel since the 1870s. The Annexe was built in 1931-2, on the site of the buiders yard of Amos Eaton & Co. Ltd and the former Green Man (see above) for Brooke Bond as a staff welfare centre, to the designs of Albert Leigh Abbott (1890-1952).[^2] It was a five-storey, including basement, steel-framed building faced in brick and patent stone, with large steel-framed windows by Crittall Ltd, all erected by local builders Walter Gladding & Co. Ltd. There were entrances at either end leading to stone staircases and a lift at the north end. A bridge connected the top-floor directors’ dining room floor to the main building opposite. </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/07/15/1932-workers.JPG\">Workers' lounge, ground floor, 1932, from <em>The Builder</em>, 28 Oct 1932, p. 730</p>\n\n<p>The ground floor included a lounge and dance room for ‘the workers’ with sprung maple floor, the first floor the workers’ dining room, the second the office staff dining room and kitchens. </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/07/15/1932-office.JPG\">Office staff dining room, second floor, from <em>The Builder</em>, 28 Oct 1932, p. 730</p>\n\n<p>It was both well specified, with maple flooring and teak joinery throughout, and technologically advanced – there were water softening and refrigerator plants, and a radio-gramophone on the ground floor piped to loud speakers in all other rooms.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Brooke Bond Liebig it was by then sold all their Goulston Street and Old Castle Street properties in March 1973 and, following a period of disuse and decay, the building was refurbished for LMU in 2015-17 to the designs of ArchitecturePLB and Willmott Dixon Interiors. The project enlarged the ground-floor windows and created a new entrance and space for a metal and wood workshops, film and animation studio in the basement and a rapid prototyping and digital print workshop.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Ancestry: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyors's Returns (DSR): Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>The Builder</em>, 28 Oct 1932, pp. 722, 729-30: DSR</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THP: <a href=\"https://www.willmottdixon.co.uk/projects/calcutta-house-phase-1-2\">https://www.willmottdixon.co.uk/projects/calcutta-house-phase-1-2</a>: <em>Birmingham Daily Post</em>, 27 March 1973, p. 5</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-15",
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{
"id": 595,
"title": "Sugar & Tea",
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"body": "<p>In the early 1830s John Hodgson moved into a new sugarhouse at the bottom end of Dock Street.[^1] As the biggest danger in the trade was fire, this was built to the fire-proof pattern of brick walls surrounding a cast iron frame and pillars. 9 storeys, 5 bays to front, 6 bays to side, small windows with segmented heads and iron glazing bars, thicker walls for the lower storeys.[^2] - [^3] John Harrison took over c1856 in partnership with Wilson for a short time, and then continued by himself through to the 1870s.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The building was taken over by the Monastery Bonded Tea Warehouse in 1889.[^4] A fire in 1972 caused serious damage [^5], and the building was eventually demolished in 1980-1.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Mawer, Sugar Refiners & Sugarbakers: www.mawer.clara.net</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Historic England: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1065212</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Images - Collage: https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/search-results?key=WnsiUCI6eyJrZXl3b3JkcyI6Ik1vbmFzdGVyeSB0ZWEgd2FyZWhvdXNlIiwia2V5d29yZHNNb2RlIjoxfX0&WINID=1521059457106</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: St George-in-the-East Church: http://www.stgitehistory.org.uk/stpauldockst.html</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Lewis, Frank: Sugar & Essex (Appendix p.130)</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Image by Mrs C Ely at Tower Hamlets Local History Library</p>\n",
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"title": "From three to a bed to a BSc",
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"body": "<p>My grandfather Samuel Rubein had a tailor's shop at 41 Hanbury Street and lived with his wife and five children above the shop. The three boys could not go to bed until their father had finished playing cards; they shared a bed. My father used to garden on the flat roof; how this came about we do not know. He did a part-time degree and graduated with a BSc going on to become a science teacher a various schools in the area. In particular he taught at Robert Montefiore. He and my mother also took a hundred Jewish children, evacuees, to Constantine in Cornwall, where he worked at the local school and then volunteered for the RAF. We have no details as to how he took the children but his parents and in-laws also went. We would love to know more about his involvement and how it came about.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-31",
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"id": 802,
"title": "Attlee House",
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"body": "<p>On 18 November 1971 the Queen opened a new building as part of the Toynbee Hall estate. Attlee House was an L-shaped building with an east-west range on the site of part of <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/380/detail/\">College Buildings</a>, including the former Wadham House. The new building linked by first and second-floor walkways at its west end to a north-south wing running from Wentworth Street on to the site of the old library that had adjoined Toynbee Hall.[^1] It was a plain red/orange brick building, four storeys high, erected to the designs of David Maney & Partners, architects.[^2] It mixed offices (for the Attlee Memorial Foundation) and residential (42 residents including six elderly single people, housed in studio flats, with one-room flatlets), with the St Leonard’s Housing Association for ex-prisoners on the top floor.[^3] Attlee House was demolished in 2016 in preparation for the joint <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/379/detail/#the-regeneration-of-toynbee-hall-and-its-estate-2013-19\">Toynbee Hall</a> and London Square redevelopment, with a block of flats named 'Leadenhall' currently (December 2018) being built on the site.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets plannng applications online (THP): London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/2486/225: Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, T<em>oynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years</em>, London 1984, pp. 170-1</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: THP: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), GLC/AR/BR/13/1110025</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Briggs and Macartney, op. cit., pp. 159, 162, 170-1</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THP</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>A number of Wellclose Square’s late seventeenth-century houses survived into the 1960s. There had been rebuildings and refrontings, but records suffice to permit characterisation of the original development. The first-phase houses were entirely brick built, but of varying heights and on plots of diverse widths, though three-bay fronts were general as were rear-staircase layouts. Back rooms typically had corner fireplaces. There appear not to have been closet wings. On the west, east and probably also the north sides, the houses were of three full storeys, exceptionally four. The south side was different, being largely of two storeys with garrets in steeply pitched roofs, lower height here perhaps enforced to prevent too much shadow falling onto the square. No. 33, probably built in the 1690s, was exceptional with a five-bay front and a swagger turned-baluster staircase. There were similar balusters to less grand staircases elsewhere, as at Nos 36 and 43.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Two houses, it is unclear which, had to be rebuilt after a fire in 1701. Nos 6–8 on the north side were late infill, the result of building leases sold in 1722. No. 6 was a three-storey and attic survivor in the 1960s. Nos 7 and 8 came down in 1903. No. 8 was entered from Little Cable Street and had a double-fronted, single-pile, centre-staircase plan.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>No. 26 on the west side, an entirely timber-built and clad house, was further infill of around 1730, and seemingly contemporary with another timber house (No. 27), double-fronted and single pile, at the back of a stable yard or mews (later sometimes called The Ride) that extended northwards. All this may have been built with a large cooperage south of the yard’s entrance from the square that was first occupied by Thomas Banbury. Timber construction was illegal, but London’s building acts were not well enforced, and this development was evidently commercially led. Yet the Venetian window or Serliana on No. 26 and the pedimented doorcase on No. 27 indicate that the square retained fashionable associations.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>There were late-Georgian refrontings, plain brick parapets replacing moulded timber cornices, and Coade-stone door surround ornament was introduced at Nos 24 and 25. No. 51 appears to have been wholly rebuilt around the 1820s with a Greek Revival façade and giant-order Ionic pilasters.</p>\n\n<p><strong>No. 33 (The Court House).</strong>From an early date Sir John Parsons lived on the square, possibly in No. 33, the large double-fronted house on the south side, part of his take and close to his riverside business interests. Humphry Parsons, inherited in 1717, followed from 1741 by his widow, Sarah Parsons, who paid land tax for the property into the 1760s. </p>\n\n<p>The house had been developed on a lease to Richard Reading. A Francis Reading, possibly a son of the eponymous governor of the House of Correction in Tothill Fields, Westminster, lived at the west end of the north side of the square (No. 17) and was prominent in the administration of justice in the Tower Liberties in the 1720s. This might be relevant because the house at No. 33 was adapted around 1755 to be the Court House of the Tower Liberty of Well Close, sometimes referred to as a Sessions House.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The Governor of the Tower and appointed magistrates administered justice here, dealing with all manner of charges, increasingly debts. Alterations in 1824–5 that were overseen by the Board of Works perhaps included rendering of the façade and a severe porch. A second entrance was formed for private use by magistrates. The courtroom, also used for other public meetings, was on the ground floor, two rooms knocked into one. </p>\n\n<p>There was a small prison to the rear, on the first floor of a range beyond an original service-staircase wing, blind to Neptune Street and above ground-floor rooms that were the King’s Arms tavern. The Cock and Neptune public house was further south on the Parsons Street corner. The landlord of the King’s Arms was also the court-keeper in the 1880s when the court moved briefly to St Paul’s Mission Room on the square's north side. It returned and continued at No. 33 until the jurisdiction of the Tower Liberty was wound up in 1894. Demolition of the house was intended, but it fell to use as lodgings and as Germania (a German Harmonic Club or German Oak Club and Institute), a short-lived presence in 1908 to 1911. Charles Reed Peers, England’s second Inspector of Ancient Monuments from 1910, unsuccessfully proposed using the building as his inspectorate’s offices in 1911, noting its ‘unusually fine staircase’ and the prisoners’ inscriptions, ‘a curiosity to be taken care of’.[^5] Two oak-lined prison cells retained iron fetters and eighteenth-century graffiti; marks said to be earlier than the 1750s are likely to be inauthentic. The premises were photographically recorded before the cells were dismantled and given to the new London Museum. Elements were reconstructed as a single cell that at the time of writing is displayed at the Museum of London. The pub was demolished in 1912. Latterly known as the Old Court House, No. 33 was lodged in by tailors, then used for a range of commercial purposes from around 1920 into the 1960s.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Historic England Archives (HEA), RCHM inventory cards, 1928; London Region photographs: Collage, passim: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/THL/D/2/30/165; P/FAR/1/3/1</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>London Post</em>, 21 Nov. 1701: <em>Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post</em>, 14 April 1722: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/022390</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: John Rocque's map of London, 1746: HEA, MD96/01390–3: LMA, Land Tax returns (LT):<em>Sunday Times</em>, 18 Feb 1934: THLHLA, P/FAR/1/3/3/1</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THLHLA, P/SAS/3/2/3–4: Sims: LT: Ancestry: The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/499/80: <em>London Gazette</em>, 22 Oct 1728</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: TNA, WORK14/50</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: THLHLA, P/GOF/1: TNA, WORK14/3/3: LMA, MBO/Plans/139; GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/045443; Collage 121632: <em>The Builder</em>, 16 Oct 1897, p. 302: <em>Manchester Guardian</em>, 30 Oct 1897: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-09",
"last_edited": "2021-02-02"
},
{
"id": 990,
"title": "Research Laboratories, 56–78 Ashfield Street",
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"body": "<p>This three-storey block on the south side of Ashfield Street opened in 1957. It was designed on reduced lines by N. H. Oatley in 1952, yet plans were produced for a six-bay east extension in 1954–6. Internally, the narrow rectangular plan was divided into an assortment of workshops, laboratories and offices, including a mechanical and engineering workshop that produced instruments for the hospital and its research departments. At its completion the block contained several research units, including physics, dentistry, experimental surgery, industrial medicine, social medicine, venereal disease and oncology. The building currently contains hospital laboratories and offices for the clinical physics department and ICT department.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Royal London Hospital Archives, RLHLH/P/2/60; RLHTH/S/10/5: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: <em>British Medical Journal</em>, 11 May 1957, pp. 1116–7</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2020-02-17",
"last_edited": "2020-02-17"
},
{
"id": 833,
"title": "Former Berner Street Combined Special School with Cookery and Laundry Centres, Henriques Street",
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>Tom Ridge has written a pamphlet about this listed building, titled:</p>\n\n<p>'Special architectural and historic interest of surviving special schools for mentally defective boys and girls combined with associated centres for practical instruction (in LCC operation during 1910-11); Special architectural and historic interest of the Berner Street combined manual training centre with housewifery and laundry centres.' (2009)</p>\n\n<p>This is deposited with Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives. Full details can be found on their catalogue (<a href=\"http://www.thcatalogue.org.uk/\">www.THcatalogue.org.uk</a>) by searching the reference: LC2049.</p>\n",
"created": "2019-02-27",
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{
"id": 406,
"title": "Working at Netties in Black Lion Yard in the early 1960s",
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"username": "patricia"
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"body": "<p>When I was 13 or 14, in the early 1960s, someone got me a Saturday job as a shampoo girl in a little salon called Netties in Black Lion Yard. I remember the shops in Black Lion Yard, mostly jewellery shops and silverware shops and a couple of Indian food shops. Most of Nettie's clientele were old, and I found it difficult to wash their hair. I had to sweep the floors also. After a few weeks, I was fired as I think most of the customers complained I didn't do a good job shampooing. </p>\n",
"created": "2017-07-05",
"last_edited": "2019-09-03"
},
{
"id": 1108,
"title": "Petticoat Lane Market",
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>The origins of Petticoat Lane’s street market are obscure, and its antiquity has been much exaggerated. John Strype, Stow’s successor as a London historian who was born on Petticoat Lane, did not mention a market in the early eighteenth century, nor is there any evidence to indicate a significant presence of market trading in the street before about 1760. While the origins of the street name do not lie in the clothing trade, for reasons already given, there were clothing markets not far away by the time the name Petticoat Lane came into use. This has contributed to historical conflations since the nineteenth century. As ‘Petticoat Lane’ was a shorthand for prostitution around 1600, so Houndsditch, to the west, was for clothing. Ben Jonson refers to it in <em>Every Man in His Humour</em>, first performed in 1598: ‘Where got’st thou this coat? … Of a Hounsditch man, Sir, one of the devil’s near kinsman, a broker.’[^1] By the mid eighteenth century a City triangle bounded by Houndsditch, St Mary Axe and Leadenhall Street hosted a thriving market in new and secondhand clothes, another Rag Fair, as on Rosemary Lane.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>A feature of these markets was the ‘old clothes man’, a recognised type of itinerant street hawker, always on the move, selling and soliciting stock, and almost invariably Jewish. While there is no evidence of an established street market in Petticoat Lane, there are hints that street trading of some sort might have been taking place there by the 1760s, and that the traders were Jewish. Whitechapel’s Paving Commissioners ordered the setting up of pitching places or porters’ stands at the Whitechapel High Street end of Petticoat Lane in late 1771. The stories that made it into the press were bleak. A man called Levi, ‘a dealer of old cloaths’, hanged himself in his lodgings in Petticoat Lane, Whitechapel, in 1766; Solomon Porter, ‘an old Cloathes-man’ who also lodged in Petticoat Lane, was hanged for his part in a burglary in 1771; and a gang of thieves conveyed their ‘Plunder to a noted Jew (a Receiver of stolen Goods) in Petticoat Lane’ in 1778.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Reports of Petticoat Lane as thick with pickpockets suggest crowds if not markets. In 1789 a public meeting called on magistrates to assist in ‘extirpating a notorious gang of thieves and pickpockets, who have long been suffered to annoy and plunder the peaceable inhabitants of that neighbourhood … Petticoat Lane is a very considerable thoroughfare … and certainly would become more so were it rendered safe for the public to pass and repass.’[^4] </p>\n\n<p>The mutable and mobile character of the area’s street markets is evident from accounts of prosecutions of traders in Cutler Street, leading east out of Houndsditch towards Petticoat Lane. In 1820 ‘Four old cloathsmen were charged … with obstructing the highway, and establishing an old cloaths market in Cutler Street, Houndsditch … from two o’clock until four each day, the street was blocked with Jews and old cloaths … as soon as [the dealers] were moved from one end of the street they were seen crowding together at the other, and their baggage was all spread upon the pavement with the greatest speed.’[^5] The market in what was already becoming Middlesex Street may have arisen as a further spilling eastwards of the Houndsditch clothes market.</p>\n\n<p>Laxness in use of the name ‘Petticoat Lane’ does not help clarification. In 1839 it was reported that: ‘The origin of the term “Rag Fair”, held in Petticoat Lane, as Cutler Street is called, can easily be traced to the commodities exhibited for sale.’[^6] Cutler Street and Harrow Alley were perhaps the conduits by which the clothes market did become established in Middlesex Street, but quite when is hard to say. In 1830, a report of a court case (written entirely for comic effect) related the theft in ‘the Market in Petticoat Lane’ of ‘a pair of inexpressibles, value 2<em>s</em>’. The wife of the accuser, Moses Levi, described the market: ‘Petticoat Lane Exchange is conducted with the greatest regularity – five or six hundred people jostle one another about all day – that she considered quite regular – (Laughter.)’[^7] After this date reports of the market in Petticoat Lane increase, featuring stolen goods and general sharp practice, usually couched in comic terms that rely on Jewish and, sometimes, Irish stereotypes. </p>\n\n<p>Henry Mayhew supplied much greater definition in 1849. His colourful description, widely quoted, explains the topography of Petticoat Lane, indicating that it did, <em>inter alia</em>, occupy ‘Petticoat-lane proper’ (Middlesex Street): ‘Petticoat-lane is essentially the old clothes district. Embracing the streets and alleys adjacent to Petticoat-lane, and including the rows of old boots and shoes on the ground, there is perhaps between two and three miles of old clothes. Petticoat-lane proper is long and narrow, and to look down it is to look down a vista of many-coloured garments, alike on the sides and on the ground.’[^8] </p>\n\n<p>Mayhew’s full account goes on to illustrate the difficulty in distinguishing between the expanding street display of shops and a market with fixed hours of operation, stall-holders operating from barrows independently of shops. Hierarchical distinctions were made between shops, street traders with fixed stalls, and itinerant vendors, pedlars and hawkers, who traded on the hoof. While there had been some increase in the numbers of poor Irish immigrants in the old-clothes trade, the itinerant vendors remained predominantly Jewish.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>Petticoat Lane’s status as a ‘Sunday market’, arising from its Jewishness, became a focus of attention in the 1850s. Henry Ker Seymer MP reported that in Petticoat Lane there was a ‘regular fair’ on Sundays between eleven and one o’clock. He argued that ‘the violation of order and decency which there prevailed’ meant that it should be suppressed. A fellow Tory MP, Robert Carden, agreed, having visited on a Sunday morning and found ‘an assemblage of some 10,000 or 12,000 people’. A difficulty was that half of the street was in the City, half in Middlesex. It became apparent that for the City, the market had become ‘almost a legalised nuisance’, tolerated ‘in order that they might get rid of a similar nuisance which at that time existed in more important thoroughfares’.[^10] It was also pointed out that it was invidious (and implicitly anti-Semitic) to single out Petticoat Lane for condemnation when trading was going on elsewhere on Sundays. Daniel Samuel of 32 Middlesex Street (on the City side) explained: ‘if you would please come into Petticoat Lane on Saturdays you would see the Sabbath kept, – the closing of all shops, a cessation of all business.’[^11] Further, for the poor, who mostly worked six days a week, Sunday was often the only day for food shopping. George Gordon of the National Sunday League wrote in support of the Petticoat Lane traders and against the anti-Semitic grain, though perhaps as idealising as others were scornful: ‘I saw nothing objectionable in this poor man’s bazaar not the least violation of the peace … This unassuming locality is free from the fashionable vices of adulteries, murders, and robberies … In certain parts I have seen jewellers, &c, expose their valuables for sale, which at first made me tremble for their safety; but such is their confidence in the sterling honesty of the unwashed multitude that the religious and moral characters of Duke-street, Houndsditch, and Middlesex Street are beyond reproach.’[^12]</p>\n\n<p>Petticoat Lane market continued, with occasional increased police presence, and by 1871 not just on a Sunday. A reporter then estimated vendors to number around 700 and the press of customers, ‘from all parts of London’, at 10,000. For a non-Jewish readership, the repeated tropes were the cheapness of goods, the presence of criminals and the ‘foreignness’ of vendors and customers: ‘This Sunday morning spectacle … is one of the most sickening of all the unadvertised sights of London. … the behaviour of those who congregate here is a ruffianly swagger, while the constant din serves only to remind you of a Jew’s quarter in a continental town’.[^13]</p>\n\n<p>In 1880, a visitor detected that Petticoat Lane was not as busy as it once had been, and that more of the clientele was not Jewish.[^14] But the market was about to receive substantial boosts. Road widening at the south end made an immediate difference to available space and then there was the impact of mass Jewish immigration from the Pale of Settlement following the pogroms of the early 1880s. When Charles Booth embarked on his exhaustive study of the <em>Life and Labour of the People</em> in London in 1889, he began in the East End, just as the Whitechapel murders (Jack the Ripper) generated wider fascination. The descriptive tone is little different from that of the previous forty years – ‘a medley of strange sights, strange sounds, and strange smells’, but this account provides a clearer sense of the street topography, ‘lined with a double or treble row of hand-barrows, set fast with empty cases, so as to assume the guise of market stalls. Here and there a cart may have been drawn in, but the horse has gone and the tilt is used as a rostrum when the salesmen with stentorian voices cry their wares’, and the goods on offer, the ‘cheap garments, smart braces, sham jewellery, or patent medicines. ... Other stalls supply daily wants – fish is sold in large quantities – vegetables and fruit – queer cakes and outlandish bread.’ It also suggests again that the demography was changing: ‘In nearly all cases the Jew is the seller, and the gentile the buyer; Petticoat Lane is the exchange of the Jew, but the lounge of the Christian.’ Booth testifies as well to a further eastwards shift, with mention made of market stalls in Brick Lane, and the animal market in Sclater Street.[^15] </p>\n\n<p>The renewal of the 1880s is also evident in a report on London markets from 1893, which stated that Petticoat Lane ‘is probably the largest street market in London’, but also that in ‘its present condition the market is not more than about 10 years old: before that time there were not more than a few stalls in the streets: but of late years since the great influx of Polish and Russian Jews it has greatly increased. The market is continuous, but most business is done on Sunday mornings, Friday afternoons, and the days preceding Jewish festivals.’ The report makes clear the move away from clothing to food. Of 335 stalls, only 52 dealt in apparel, broadly interpreted – boots, clothing, haberdashery and hosiery. Vegetables and fruit (59 stalls), poultry (30), fish (55) and fruit only (61) were by far the most numerous. Shopkeepers occupied thirty-five stalls.[^16] </p>\n\n<p>Subsequent accounts of the market augment emphasis on brightly coloured exoticism with a sense that many in the market were recent arrivals who did not speak English. An unusually sympathetic reporter for <em>The Queen</em> in 1895 found that she could ‘converse freely’ in German with the Yiddish-speaking traders. She took a particular interest in the food stalls, the ‘enormous gherkins, in tubs of salt and water … Dutch herrings in tubs’, the ‘Jewish cakes, including the thin Passover cakes; enormous brown and white loaves … or a hot dish of dried peas and cabbage’, and the perennial East End favourite, ‘stewed eels in jelly’. Hebrew books attracted her attention, as did a kosher butcher. Of the people, she concluded: ‘They were in many cases the poorest of the poor, yet were orderly and even deferential as we passed, answering our questions politely, and rather pleased than otherwise at our interest in their wares … Petticoat-lane on a Sunday morning is intensely interesting. … these people, with their own tongue, their own religion, their own manners, and their own customs, are a living, breathing part of this great metropolis.’[^17] </p>\n\n<p>By this time, the appearance of Middlesex Street had greatly altered, following the clearances of the 1880s and the building of Wentworth Dwellings, Brunswick Buildings and shophouses and warehouses fronting Middlesex Street. Houndsditch had become wholesale, Petticoat Lane retail. Occupancy of the shops lining the streets had changed. Where clothing had predominated, by 1902 it was ‘now only a secondary business, there being only six clothes shop in the Lane. … the beginning of it is occupied by dealers in light refreshments, consisting of hokey pokey, wally wallies, hot peas, whelks, cakes of various kind, hot drinks and cold drinks, stewed eels, sweetstuff, fruit, fried fish, apple fritters, trotters, and many other cheap luxuries. Next is an exhibition of moving pictures!’[^18] <br>\nThe first decade of the twentieth century saw a number of threats to the market’s future. The developer Abraham Davis built a ‘Jewish Bazaar’ complete with kosher slaughtering facilities at what became Hessel Street market in Stepney, then in 1906 tried unsuccessfully to create a new market for Petticoat Lane traders on the south side of Fashion Street in Spitalfields.[^19] </p>\n\n<p>The Aliens Immigration Act of 1905, a reaction to recent Jewish immigration, passed despite opposition. But even some of its opponents wanted Petticoat Lane’s Sunday market closed. A bill to limit Sunday trading, others argued, would mean ruin to the market’s ‘2,000’ traders and ‘10,000’ shoppers, many of whom, paid on a Saturday evening, were reliant on Sunday shopping. The bill failed repeatedly in 1906 to 1908 and clauses limiting Sunday trading were dropped from the Shops Act of 1911. Petticoat Lane carried on.[^20] </p>\n\n<p>Redevelopment on the City side of Middlesex Street in the 1920s and 1930s still did not dislodge the market. It was said to have had, ‘a great fillip since the war’, and the old stories of colour and crime persisted: ‘It used to be jokingly said … that if you missed your purse or handkerchief at one end of the Lane, you would find it for sale at the other!’ Food continued to fascinate: ‘You can get fritters done to a turn – you see them emerge from a tank of boiling fat in a compact little kitchen on wheels. All the improvised “eat shops” do a roaring trade, and eels, winkles and every form of mollusc are greatly relished.’[^21] </p>\n\n<p>One enduring presence in Petticoat Lane market was Tubby Isaac’s jellied-eel stall. This stood at the bottom of Middlesex Street from 1919 and later in Goulston Street until it closed in 2013. Tubby Isaac was the nickname of Isaac Brenner (1893–1942), Whitechapel born. He ran his stall in Petticoat Lane for twenty-one years then emigrated to the United States in 1940, working his passage as a ship’s cook. Tubby Isaac’s or Isaacs, as the stall came generally to be known, was taken over by Soloman Gritzman (1908–1982), said to have worked on the stall since it opened when he was aged eleven. Gritzman ‘became’ Tubby Isaacs, in Goulston Street, certainly by 1957, where the stall remained, and for some years in the 1960s at the south end of Middlesex Street.[^22] </p>\n\n<p>In 1928 Petticoat Lane market achieved official status when Stepney Borough Council brought in licensing, and in 1936 it received further protection under the Shops (Sunday Trading Restriction) Act, whereby Jewish shopkeepers and stallholders who did not trade on a Saturday were permitted to trade on a Sunday till 2pm. But that same year stallholders had to fight off an attack by youths, ‘said to be Fascists’.[^23] The market still does not trade on Saturdays, though the religious rationale has long since lapsed. </p>\n\n<p>Substantial Blitz damage in 1941 destroyed buildings at the south end of Goulston Street and Middlesex Street, and parts of Wentworth Dwellings. As a consequence, a large extra trading area opened up in the cleared site between Goulston Street and Middlesex Street. A sign of the extent to which the market was thriving in the 1950s was the expansion of the Tubby Isaacs business. By 1957 there was an additional stall on Goulston Street, outside 133–137 Whitechapel High Street. The Middlesex Street pitch was used until road widening in the late 1960s made it less salubrious.[^24] Soloman Gritzman continued the jellied-eel business until around 1976 when Ted Simpson took over, in turn replaced by his son Paul (b. 1964) in 1989. The stall also served typical East End delicacies of winkles, cockles, prawns and mussels, augmented by hamburgers by 1965, latterly even oysters, which attracted professionals from the City. The business used an open-sided stall that could be rolled into storage. By the early twenty-first century there was a more compact towable fast-food trailer, with a counter along one long side and boards that fold up in transit. ‘Branch’ seafood stalls operated in Walthamstow from the 1980s until 2012 and in Ilford and Clacton in the early twenty-first century. By 2008 another food van had pitched up opposite Tubby Isaacs, selling halal burgers and hotdogs.[^25] </p>\n\n<p>There were reports in 1964 that ‘the Lane will soon be under cover’, with redevelopment of the bomb site underway. Cromlech House (see below) did provide an open covered area, mainly for the storage of barrows and stalls, and Mike Stern, long-standing President of the Federation of Street Traders’ Unions, was quick to point out that the covered section would provide space only for ‘a limited number of unlicensed traders’ on the east side of Middlesex Street and that the ‘building will not remove the colour or attractions from the market’.[^26] </p>\n\n<p>By this time the rhetoric of journalist visitors to Petticoat Lane tended to centre not on ‘foreignness’ but on bargains and lively Cockney patter – ‘Most stall-holders are quick-witted cockneys, with an entertaining spiel whether the product interests or not.’[^27] The imputation that goods were of dubious provenance endured, and was not wholly imagined. Stolen goods – bicycles seem to have been particularly popular – did turn up in Petticoat Lane. A mark of the nostalgia around the idea of ‘the Lane’, the commodification and mythologizing, was the opening in 1968 of ‘Cockneyland’, an indoor market-cum-museum of ‘East End Life’ at 88 Middlesex Street, just north of Wentworth Street in Spitalfields, run by traders Jo and Jack Josephs.[^28] </p>\n\n<p>An <em>Illustrated London News</em> correspondent noted the changing demography of Petticoat Lane in 1968: ‘The salesmen’s faces betray a variety of origins, French, Jewish and Asian’, reflecting, at least as regards ‘Asian’, immigration from Pakistan, especially East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), that had been going on since the late 1950s. Cockneyland, however, had fallen by the wayside by 1974.[^29] The pace of changing demography accelerated from the 1970s with the departure of most of the Jewish stall-holders and their clientele, mostly to London’s Essex edges.</p>\n\n<p>The process of transformation was gradual. Bilal Haq, who has worked in the textile trade on Wentworth Street since 1983, has recalled how, ‘This whole area was populated by Jewish people, they know the business and I [was] … partnered with them [for] ten-fifteen years. I learned my way with them.’ It is no longer evident, but the connection persists. His ‘suit shop was opened in 1972. Jewish-owned, yes. They still own the building. It’s a corner building. I mean I’m just paying the rent, basically’.[^30] </p>\n\n<p>The market, for more than a century the target of official disapprobation, received encouragement from the 1960s. Storage space at Cromlech House was supplemented in the renovated Wentworth Dwellings (Arcadia Court) in the early 1990s and then in a building conversion for London Metropolitan University in Goulston Street. In 2005 concertina gates, with mandorla shapes composed of stainless-steel tubing and a panel announcing ‘Petticoat Lane’, were installed at the east end of Wentworth Street to close the road to vehicle traffic during trading hours.[^31] </p>\n\n<p>However, there is a suspicion among local traders with a long connection to the area that gentrification and the financial rewards it offers to local authorities may soon finish off Petticoat Lane. Paul Simpson, the owner of Tubby Isaacs, closed the stall in June 2013. ‘I’m the last one ever to do this … The business isn’t what it was years ago … All the East End eel stalls along Brick Lane and the Roman Road have closed – it’s a sign of the times.’[^32] This message was echoed in 2019 by Mark Button of Barneys Seafood, originally run by Soloman Gritzman’s brother, Barney Gritzman. His premises in Chamber Street were sold in that year for development as an apart-hotel, the stall in Petticoat Lane having closed years earlier: ‘Sadly, with the red routes, no parking, double lines, no taxi drivers allowed to stop, changing it all back to a two-way system from one way, the Congestion Charge, all the things which put people off of coming … it slowly killed the trade.’ He will continue making jellied eels, probably further out in East London.[^33]</p>\n\n<p>Bilal Haq dates decline of the market to the mid 1990s, blaming some of the same factors as well as poor facilities (especially the closure, as is typical, of the public lavatory) and Tower Hamlets Council’s enthusiasm for subcontracting social housing to allow lucrative private developments. Like many Jewish traders before him, he has moved out to Newham.</p>\n\n<p>‘Nobody is here … Five, six o’clock, nobody … only a few bars privately owned ... Apart from that, nobody. It is scary. If you even come about seven, eight o’clock, it’s scary. [In] ten years time, it will be untouchable, this area. Even to get a property in terms of lease, it will be untouchable. … This area is going to go up, that’s what I believe … I’ve seen the way the whole area is getting changed. It’s happening for good but some of our small businesses are getting hit.</p>\n\n<p>… I hope somebody comes out and says, “Look, we want to keep some of the heritage”.’[^34]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Ben Jonson, <em>Every Man in his Humour</em>, W. MacNeile Dixon (ed.), 1901, p.68</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: James Lackington, <em>Memoirs of the Forty Five First Years of the Life of James Lackington</em>, 1792, p.208: <a href=\"https://globalurbanhistory.com/2019/04/17/multireligiosity-as-a-rallying-call-the-petticoat-lane-street-market-in-the-1850s/\">globalurbanhistory.com/2019/04/17/multireligiosity-as-a-rallying-call-the-petticoat-lane-street-market-in-the-1850s/</a></p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Oxford Journal</em>, 18 Jan 1766, p.3: <em>Caledonian Mercury</em>, 16 Dec 1771, p.2: <em>Derby Mercury</em>, 9 Jan 1778, p.1: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/SMG/G/4/3/4: Todd M. Endelman, <em>The Jews of Georgian England, 1714–1830</em>, 1979, pp.180–1: V. D. Lipman, <em>Social History of the Jews in England</em>, 1954, pp.29–30</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Times</em>, 27 Nov 1789, p.2</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 28 July 1820, p.3</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Shipping and Mercantile Gazette</em>, 28 June 1839, p.4</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 14 July 1830, p.4</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Henry Mayhew, <em>London Labour and the London Poor: The Street Folk</em>, vol.2, 1861, p.38</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Lipman, <em>Jews in England</em>, pp.29–33</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>Jewish Chronicle (JC)</em>, 9 July 1858, p.240; 2 July 1858, p.230: George Binns, ‘Shops (Sunday Trading Restriction) Act, 1936’, <em>Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute</em>, vol.58/7, 1 July 1937, pp.436–47 (p. 436)</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>JC</em>, 23 July 1858, p.253</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: <em>JC</em>, 30 July 1858, p.259</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: <em>City Press</em>, 4 Feb 1871, p.3</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 12 Aug 1880, p.2</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: Charles Booth (ed.), <em>Life and Labour of the People in London</em>, vol.1:<em> East London</em>, 1889, pp.66–8</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: London Metropoliatn Archives (LMA), LCC/PC/SHO/03/008</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: <em>The Queen: The Lady’s Newspaper</em>, 29 April 1895, p.674</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: <em>East London Observer (ELO)</em>, 22 March 1902, p.3</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: <em>Coventry Herald</em>, 23 Oct 1903, p.3: <em>ELO</em>, 12 Dec 1903, p.3: Isobel Watson, ‘Rebuilding London: Abraham Davis and his Brothers, 1881–1924’, <em>London Journal</em>, vol.29/1, 2004, pp.62–84 (pp.68–9)</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: <em>Sunday People</em>, 28 May 1905, p.5: John Wigley, <em>The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Sunday</em>, 1980, p.163</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: <em>The Graphic</em>, 1 May 1920, p.24: <em>Daily Herald</em>, 25 March 1920, p.2</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: Ancestry.co.uk: <em>Daily Mail</em>, 2 Sept 1926, p.3: <em>The People</em>, 17 March 1974, p.2</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: <em>Daily Herald</em>, 20 July 1936, p.11: William Addison, <em>English Fairs and Markets</em>, 1953, p.80: George Binns, ‘Shops (Sunday Trading Restriction) Act, 1936’, <em>Journal of the Royal Sanitary Institute</em>, vol.58/7, 1 July 1937, pp.436–47</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: Addison, pp.78–9: www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/aldgate-street-trader-tubby-isaacs-serves-a-customer-some-news-photo/3428379</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: www.flickr.com/photos/albedo/146406195: www.geograph.org.uk/photo/895837</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: <em>JC</em>, 17 Jan 1964, p.46: Addison, p.79</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: <em>Globe and Mail (Canada)</em>, 2 Dec 1978, p.48</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: <em>Kensington Post</em>, 25 April 1957, p.6: <em>The Sphere</em>, 8 Sept 1962, p.353: <em>Daily Mirror</em>, 11 March 1968, p.68: <em>The Stage</em>, 14 March 1968, p.3</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: <em>Illustrated London News</em>, 4 Nov 1968, p.41</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/340/detail/</p>\n\n<p>[^31]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p>[^32]: spitalfieldslife.com/2013/06/13/so-long-tubby-isaacs-jellied-eel-stall/: <em>The Tatler</em>, 27 Nov 1965, p.27</p>\n\n<p>[^33]: Interview with Mark Button, 2019</p>\n\n<p>[^34]: surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/340/detail/#bilal-haq-talks-about-the-changes-on-petticoat-lane-since-the-1980s</p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-03",
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{
"id": 473,
"title": "My 28 years in Old Castle Street",
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"body": "<p>Gulam Mostafa Chowdhury interviewed by his neighbour Jil Cove, August 2017:</p>\n\n<p>\"I’ve lived in Old Castle Street with my family for about 28 years. I came to Whitechapel from Cardiff as my parents were already living here and felt very comfortable as there were so many people from Bangladesh already settled in the area. Everything here is very close by - the hospital, the shops, the market, the Mosques and the public transport is very good. I feel very safe here.</p>\n\n<p>My children have all used the local schools and so far, two of my daughters have gone onto university; I hope my third daughter and my only son will follow them into further education.\" </p>\n\n<p>Chowdhury’s married daughter also contributed saying “As I now live in Camden I find there’s less of a choice of shops to get Halal meat, I have to go further, there is less variety on offer and it’s often more expensive. I always come back to Whitechapel to buy all my spices. Though my dad says he feels safe here and I’ve lived in this area for most of my life, I’m always very careful when I’m out as sometimes it feels quite dangerous.</p>\n\n<p>I think there should be more street cleaners, and I miss the little mother tongue school that used to be on Old Castle Street. I also miss the view from our old flat as we could see Canary Wharf from the sitting room, now it’s just buildings everywhere. Even though I live somewhere else, I still call Whitechapel home”</p>\n",
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"title": "Nos 28 to 42 Old Castle Street and New Evershed House",
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"body": "<p>Nos 28 to 42 Old Castle Street, part of the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1454/detail/#redevelopment-of-denning-point-and-the-new-holland-estate\">regeneration of the New Holland estate</a>, have a frontage ‘conceived as a reinterpretation of the traditional terraced street’, with two-storey maisonettes entered at ground level, shallow private gardens (also to the rear) and two floors of flats above, the top floor set back to create west-facing terraces for the top-floor flats. Adjoining this block to the north is New Evershed House, run by One Housing which manages the housing of the Toynbee hall estate, a block of affordable-rent flats, running along Resolution Plaza to meet the glazed office plinth of <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/418/detail/\">3 Resolution Plaza</a>. It features a modest number of projecting balconies with coloured glazing, and the two blocks are finished in ivory Ibstock brick. New Evershed house takes its name from Evershed House, the Toynbee Hall estate block opened in 1970, that stood on the site of <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/420/detail/\">Bradbury Cour</a>t.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"title": "Demolished buildings on the east side of Ensign Street, 1964",
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"body": "<p>A view west to Grace's Alley in 1964, showing demolished buildings on the site of Shapla Primary school and the former Brunswick Maritime Establishment sailors' home beyond, from the Tower Hamlets Archives collection:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/768848830129401856\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/768848830129401856</a></p>\n",
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51.51075409026937
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "10",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Cable Street",
"address": "10 Cable Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 2,
"search_str": "10 Cable Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>The Horse (later Horns) and Horseshoe had been on this site for some time before 1807 when its tenant was Allrich Eden, a German immigrant sugarworker. The pub was rebuilt in 1899–1900 to designs by Henry Hyman Collins, architect, acting for the City of London Brewery Company, with F. & H. F. Higgs, builders. It closed in 1997.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns: The National Archives, IR58/84822/3960: Carole Zeidman, ‘Wilton’s, a history of the hall and houses’, 2015, p. 13: information kindly supplied by Stephen Harris</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-05",
"last_edited": "2019-04-24"
}
]
}