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"id": 741,
"title": "Shapla Primary School",
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"body": "<p>In 1983 local pressure caused the GLC to move a planned and already substantially designed school from a previously intended site south of the St George’s Estate to the west side of Wellclose Square which had been cleared in the 1960s. At first called Wellclose Primary School, this was the first ILEA primary school completed to a brief that favoured greater enclosure of teaching spaces, a return to classrooms. In responding to that brief Ann Webb, the project architect in the GLC ILEA Department of Architecture, was evidently influenced by Hampshire primary schools and Ralph Erskine. Advice from the GLC’s Historic Buildings Division helped to preserve the layout of the square east of the school. Built in 1985–6, it opened in 1987. It is a low complex of two offset rectangles, with small central courtyards linked by a corridor, stock brick under corrugated aluminium hipped roofs, bright green, offset by yellow elevational elements. The strong stock-brick wall on the south side of Graces Alley, with its broad piers articulated by gabled panels, was a late addition to the school-building project, introduced to provide a firm buffer so as not to jeopardise plans for the restoration of Wilton’s Music Hall (see below), or expose children to harassment from its customers. The wall was designed to harmonise with the façades across Graces Alley. ‘Shapla’ is Bengali for water lily, the change of name a reflection of then recent shifts in local demography.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, ILEA/DBPS/AR/01/142; ACC/3499/EH/03/034020–1; ACC/3499/EH/07/01/712: Inner London Education Authority Education Committee Minutes, 30 Oct 1984, 9 July 1985, 18 March 1986: Theatres Trust, file SG18A: Geraint Franklin <em>et al</em>, ‘England’s Schools 1962–88: A Thematic Study’, English Heritage, 2012, p.198</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-09",
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"id": 846,
"title": "3 and 5 Dock Street",
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"body": "<p>The pair of shophouses at 3 and 5 Dock Street went up in the 1860s for George Edward Rose of the Black Horse public house, then adjoining to the sout. The architect was probably Frederick Robert Beeston, who had taken a lease of the plot in 1859, undertaking to build two houses before conveying the property to Rose. No. 3 was a baker’s with a basement bakehouse, No. 5 an outfitters. Frank William Lersch, baker, had No. 3 by 1910 and the pair in the 1930s and 40s. The Battle of Cable Street of 4 October 1936 is commemorated by a red Tower Hamlets Environment Trust façade plaque. A well-known photograph from that day shows police clearing the way for a car carrying Fascists while anti-Fascists blocked the top end of Dock Street. The Sailors’ Home acquired the building around 1943 for a redevelopment that never transpired, instead No. 5’s blocked shopfront was adorned by a bas-relief panel depicting a sailor, while bakery use continued into the 1970s. Estate agency had arrived by 1992.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives, WORK6/143/5; WORK6/145/8; IR58/84823/4097–8: London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/EO/HFE/05/146: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P02641; P02635: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-04",
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"id": 850,
"title": "Florin Court, 8 Dock Street",
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"body": "<p>Behind what might be called a neo-warehouse elevation, the eleven flats that form Florin Court (8 Dock Street) were built in 1996–7 with Guinea Court (65 Royal Mint Street), three more flats, linked to the rear with a shared and roofed parking area. These four-storey blocks were developed for Weston Homes Plc (Ray Blake) with Patrick Howard Design (Charles Nash), all of Bishops Stortford. The names presumably refer to the proximity of the Royal Mint.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 25898</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-05",
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"id": 474,
"title": "What I think of the market",
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"id": 193,
"username": "Gulam_Mostofa_Chowdhury"
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"body": "<p>Gulam Mostofa Chowdhury, interviewed by his neighbour Jil Cove, August 2017</p>\n\n<p>I use Whitechapel market to buy fruit and vegetables and I know that my daughters buy their scarves there. But I do think they should make the stalls look better than they do now, they look very temporary and untidy even if they’re there everyday.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-09-11",
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"id": 870,
"title": "CWS Coffee Roasters & Cocoa Works and London Bacon Stoves, 116-118 Leman Street (demolished)",
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"body": "<p>Early in 1886, following a fire at the end of 1885, the Co-operative Wholesale Society's Tea Department was moved into a former sugar refinery at 116 Leman Street, diagonally opposite the London Branch headquarters. Prior to its use by the English &Scottish CWS, the building was occupied in 1875 by confectioner, Henry Overall, and in 1880 by Augustus William Gadesden, a sugar refiner.[^1] A seven-year lease was negotiated and approved by the tea committee in August 1886.[^2] This appears to have been arranged by John Charles Hudson, of Wigg, Oliver & Hudson, architects and surveyors of 80 Leman Street, who also acted for other landowners locally, including Henry Friedlander who owned adjoining property on Chamber Street and in Prescot Street. This was intended to be a temporary arrangement, and in 1887 the tea business returned to the rebuilt warehouses in Rupert Street. However, in August 1886 the committee announced that it proposed shortly to commence manufacturing cocoa, chocolates and essence of coffee at 116 Leman Street and in the next month to spend £2,000 on machinery.[^3] Strong objections were made to these proposals by some members, including Edward Owen Greening, who had been helping to promote a separate society for the manufacture of cocoa.[^4] The committee’s proposal was however carried and Mr Cheverall’s tender for the erection of a new chimney was accepted in June 1887 and the following month the committee resolved to buy the remainder of the 99-year lease from an unidentified party.[^5] By the end of 1887, the Tea, Coffee and Cocoa Department had supplied £312 worth of cocoa (compared with £398,275 worth of tea and £41,143 of coffee in the same year).[^6] The building had eight storeys and was six bays wide and, together with No. 118, which the CWS would shortly acquire for its bacon stoves, formed a substantial block that incorporated 93 and 94 Chamber Street, where it also had a substantial frontage. As co-operator George Holyoake observed of the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s ‘colossal premises’ in London and Manchester in 1891, at Leman Street was ‘a notable pile of buildings with a considerable cocoa manufactory on the opposite side of the street’.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>The lease of the ‘large warehouse or manufacturing premises’ at 118 Leman Street was advertised in the summer of 1884, when it appears to have been already associated with the neighbouring premises at 93 Chamber Street;[^8] during the late 1880s and early 1890s the building was occupied by E. H. Hill & Co., wholesale and export confectioners.[^9] It was converted for bacon stoves by the CWS in <em>c</em>.1896, by which time the two properties were shown as one on the Ordnance Survey.[^10] In about 1910 both 116 and 118 Leman Street, and 93–94 Chamber Street, were owned by the Duke of Marlborough, from whose agent the property was held by the CWS on 99-year leases from 1885.[^11] With the exception of a small garage on Chamber Street, this appears to have been the only site within the growing CWS and E&SCWS stronghold locally where the CWS departed from its usual practice of acquiring the freehold.</p>\n\n<p>Following the expansion into 116 Leman Street, the CWS began to look for freeholds to buy on the west side of Leman Street and in December 1886 sought possession of No. 92 for a tailoring workshop and advertised for a competent man as a cutter.[^12] This house was purchased as part of the block which also included its neighbour, 94 Leman Street, from which the CWS was threatening to evict the tenants in February 1887.[^13] Although such purchases were intended for immediate or longer-term expansion into purpose-built warehouses and showrooms, a series of successful claims against the CWS for compensation for loss of light and air were costing time and money and the acquisition of property adjacent to the Society’s taller buildings may also have been intended to reduce this burden.[^14] Some of the purchases, for example from Mrs Cohen of 98 Leman Street, were made on the understanding that previous compensation settlements were to be refunded.[^15] The houses were then let to tenants until the site was needed for expansion. Thus 94 Leman Street was let to Mr Bannerman for a tailor’s shop in 1888.[^16] Alternatively, as at 88 and 90 Leman Street, the CWS took leases on strategically placed buildings with the right of ultimate purchase if a property came on the market.[17]</p>\n\n<p>Early in 1886 members of the E&SCWS Tea Committee visited some of the largest chocolate factories in Paris, including that of Percheron & Co., to investigate the equipment required for a cocoa works. During the year, 116 Leman Street was fitted with ‘the most approved machinery’ for the purpose, necessitating ‘extensive alterations’ to the building, which opened for business in 1887;[^18] the top room was converted for coffee roasting and grinding.[^19] The cocoa processing machinery was supplied by Percheron (which had premises near City Road, Clerkenwell, as well as in Paris)[^20] at a cost of more than £900 with a further £549 for installation.[^21] Unlike coffee roasting, which had previously taken place in the tea department on Rupert Street, cocoa processing was a new departure for the E&SCWS and CWS. As noted above, it proved controversial with some CWS members and, in addition, the story of the cocoa business in Leman Street was ‘mainly one of an uphill fight against the combined advertising and competitive powers of the English and Continental cocoa makers’.[^22] As a report of a Booth interview with the CWS chocolate department noted in 1895, English chocolate had a tendency to be gritty: ‘There can be little doubt that the foremost French chocolate–cocoa makers are far ahead of us in this branch of confectionery’.[^23] Discussions about moving the chocolate works out of central London began in 1898 and, after considering several options nationally including Silvertown, new Cocoa Works were finally opened on the edge of Luton in 1902.[^24] Coffee grinding and roasting continued on site at 116 Leman Street, but these operations appear to have shifted to an extension at the back. In June 1898, ‘our architect, Mr Harris’, presumably F. E. L Harris, was consulted on the rebuilding of 93 Chamber Street, which formed the rear part of the premises recently converted for bacon stoves at 118 Leman Street.[^25] Shortly afterwards he was asked to draw up plans for extensions to the cocoa works at No. 116.[^26] By 1910, the latter was an ‘old brick built warehouse in fair repair’, the rear portion rebuilt with a skylight over, and the whole used for furnishing and leather upholstering.[^27] Plans for 92–93 (and 94) Chamber Street were certified in 1916, which may represent further adaptations.[^28]</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile the new CWS bacon stoves were opened at the rebuilt 118 Leman Street in 1895–6, on the corner of Chamber Street.[29]Bacon curing had previously been undertaken on a smaller scale within the 1887 branch headquarters building at 99 Leman Street. By 1900, some 2,000 sides of bacon and hams were smoked each week in the new premises.[^30] In 1912, when the smoking process for each batch took three days, there was capacity for 4,000 sides per week. Green bacon was imported to Leman Street from CWS suppliers in England, Ireland, Denmark and Canada and the CWS factory in Tralee.[^31] The basement, ground and first two storeys contained the stoves and stores while furnishing and bedding workshops occupied the upper floors.[^32] At some point in the early 1900s the manufacture of brushes, begun in the early 1890s at the headquarters branch, was moved to 118 Leman Street before the removal of all brushmaking to Leeds in 1904.[^33] The CWS was particularly proud of its brushmaking enterprise, since it demonstrated that this industry, notoriously associated with sweating in the East End and elsewhere, could be carried on ‘with a profit under fair conditions’.[^34] By 1912 CWS brushes from the Leeds factory were stored in the London Bacon Stoves building and there were workshops for French polishing in addition to those for upholstery and bedding manufacture.[^35] Like its neighbour, this too was described in 1910 as an ‘old brick warehouse in fair repair’ but, unlike 116 Leman Street, the central bay in the Leman Street elevation appears to have been adapted with seven loading bays prior to opening. This work is most probably the seven-storey ‘addition to the Co-operative Stores’ by builder, Charles Blake, which was approved in 1890.[^36] Blake also applied on behalf of the CWS to build a warehouse in Chamber Street in 1893, presumably at the rear.[^37] ‘Modern premises built fifteen years ago for coffee grinding &c’ were mentioned in the 1910 assessment for 116 and 118 Leman Street and these appear to have been placed across the backs of both premises, with additional access from Chamber Street.[^38] No. 118 was ‘partially rebuilt’ in 1924.[^39]</p>\n\n<p>Drainage plans indicate 116–118 to be CWS property by 1923, though perhaps still held on a long lease.[^40] The owner of these two buildings, and their neighbours at Nos 108–14 in the same block between Prescot Street and Chamber Street, was unnamed in the Borough of Stepney Valuation List of 1935, perhaps indicating that the CWS had acquired the freehold as well as being the occupier.[^41] Ultimately the whole site would be built over, in two stages in 1933 and 1958, by the new CWS Administrative Offices and Bank designed by L. G. Ekins, which is described below. But for the meantime the bacon stoves and coffee works continued in use until at least 1930.[^42] New CWS bacon stoves were in operation on the east side of Goodman Street by September 1933, suggesting that the old stoves had been abandoned, and perhaps demolished, and the operations transferred prior to the opening of the first phase of the new administrative block, just to their north, in April 1933.[^43] The old buildings appear to be standing in a CWS illustration recording the adjoining new administrative block at this time but, as noted, these illustrations are not always reliable.[^44] Nos 116 and 118 had certainly gone by 1945 and the site was temporarily walled in during 1953.[^45]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Ancestry, Post Office London Directories, 1875, 1880.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: National Co-operative Archives (NCA), CWS Minutes, 30 July 1886, 13 August 1886, 20 August 1886; the conveyance was completed the following year, NCA, CWS Minutes, 17 June 1887.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 29 February 1886, 30 July 1886, 13 August 1886, 20 August 1886, NCA.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Benjamin Jones, <em>Co-operative Production</em>, 1894, p. 237.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 20 August 1886, printed insert dated August 1886 in 3 September 1886, and 15 July 1887.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>21st Anniversary Programme</em>, 1895, pp. 13–14.</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: George Holyoake, <em>The Co-operative Movement To-day</em>, 1891, 1903 edn, p. 41.</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 10 June 1884, p. 7 and 29 July 1884, p. 8.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Goad insurance plan, 1889; Post Office London Directories, 1890, 1892.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: OS map, 1894; <em>CWS Annual</em>, 1896, n.p.; London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyors Returns, serial no. 1897.0303.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: The National Archives (TNA), IR 58/84831 plot nos 4810–11.</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 3 December 1886, 3 September 1886.</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 25 February 1887, and printed insert of the London Branch Meeting, 26 February.</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: Great Prescot Street drainage plans, 1–7 Prescot Street and 90 Chamber Street, 1923, Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/THL/D/2/30/119.</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 13 July 1888.</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 27 July 1888.</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: NCA, E&SCWS, Tea Committee Minutes, 1 August 1895, <em>c</em>.12 November (date obscured), 1895, and 21 November 1895.</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p. 31.</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 25 February 1887.</p>\n\n<p>[^20]:<em>The Chemist & Druggist</em>, 14 March 1885, p. 168.</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 25 March 1887.</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, p. 178.</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: Notebook: Confectioners, [Published in 2nd series – industry. Vol 3. Part II. Ch .3], Interview with Cooperative Wholesale, chocolate department, Leman Street, n.d., <em>c</em>.1895, London School of Economics, BOOTH/B/129, pp.35–41.</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: Percy Redfern, <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, 1913, p. 178; ‘Luton Cocoa and Chocolate Works’, <em>CWS Annual</em>, 1912, n.p.</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: NCA, E&SCWS Tea Committee Minutes, 20 June 1898.</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: NCA, E&SCWS Tea Committee Minutes, 11 July 1898.</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: TNA, IR 58/84831 plot nos 4810–11.</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: LMA, DSR Serial nos 1916.0007–8, </p>\n\n<p>[^29]: <em>21st Anniversary Programme</em>, 1895, p. 9, NCA, CSH CWS(P) Box 2; LMA, DSR serial no. 1897.0303; <em>CWS Annual</em>, 1896, illustration, n.p.</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: <em>CWS Annual</em>, 1900, p. 12.</p>\n\n<p>[^31]: <em>CWS Annual</em>, 1912, n.p.</p>\n\n<p>[^32]: TNA, IR 58/84831 plot nos 4810–11.</p>\n\n<p>[^33]: <em>21stAnniversary Programme</em>, 1895, p. 10; <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, p. 319.</p>\n\n<p>[^34]: <em>21stAnniversary Programme</em>, 1895, p. 10.</p>\n\n<p>[^35]: <em>CWS Annual</em>, 1912, n.p.</p>\n\n<p>[^36]: LMA, DSR serial no. 1890.0058.</p>\n\n<p>[^37]: LMA, DSR serial no. 1893.0236.</p>\n\n<p>[^38]: TNA, IR 58/84831 plot nos 4810–11: Great Prescot Street drainage plans, 1923, THLHLA, L/THL//D/2/30/119.</p>\n\n<p>[^39]: LMA, DSR serial no. 1924.1034.</p>\n\n<p>[^40]: Great Prescot Street drainage plans, 1923, THLHLA, L/THL/D/2/30/119.</p>\n\n<p>[^41]: Metropolitan Borough of Stepney Valuation List, 1935, THLHLA, L/SMB/C/1/3.</p>\n\n<p>[^42]: CWS property plan, 19 November 1930, LMA, GLC/AR/BR/17/45017.</p>\n\n<p>[^43]: CWS Bacon Stoves, proposed tunnel under Rupert [Goodman] Street, 18 September 1933, LMA, GLC/AR/BR/17/45017.</p>\n\n<p>[^44]: <em>London Branch of the CWS</em>, 1933, p.7.</p>\n\n<p>[^45]: Goad insurance plan, 1945; THLHLA Building Control file, 23212, 1 Prescot Street.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>I was born and grew up on the Whitechapel side of the railway, just off Vallance road, on a street called Anglesea Street (demolished, now Fakruddin Street). It was a play street, which they had in those days. The only traffic was low-level and connected to the railway but it was very rare, so we just played in the street as kids. Of course nearby there was a lot of bombed-out houses and bomb sites and we used to play on those too and had great fun. </p>\n\n<p>My father was in the Auxiliary Fire Service during the war and I'm fortunate to have some excellent <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/273/detail/#images\">photographs of him</a> in uniform. My mother was a nurse during wartime.</p>\n\n<p>The last V2 bomb that hit London was in Vallance Road, and my mother told me that she was changing my nappy when it hit and went outside into the Anderson Shelter - which probably offered less protection than the house but that's how it was.</p>\n\n<p>Our house was a two-up-two-down terraced house, toilet in the garden of course. And also the water supply was also outside, but we were fortunate in that when you walked out the back of the house it used to drop down and then there was a step up onto a small area of lawn. My dad used to block up the drain, turn on the outside tap and we had our own paddling pool. </p>\n\n<p>As I grew up I went to Deal Street School and made some good friends there. We used to go each other's house and spend time with each other's families. It was really nice.</p>\n\n<p>When I moved from Deal Street School to Robert Montefiore School, which is in Vallance Road, my friends and myself used to go walkabouts because we were too old then to play on the bombsites. That's when my father took an interest. He realised we were doing nothing other than walking the streets. So one day he just grabbed me and took me to the Brady Boys’ Club, which was near Brady Street Buildings or Mansions at that time. There I got interested in photography and concert party. That got me off the streets.</p>\n\n<p>While I was at Robert Montefiore Secondary School, one of the teachers there saw that I had a bit of a knack for metal and he got me extra metalwork lessons. He was known as Mr Hartley, and with his help I managed to get an apprenticeship at Imperial College at South Kensington and so when I was fifteen and four months I was now travelling from Whitechapel Station up to South Kensington every day. I knew that station inside out.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Much of the previously undeveloped site that now houses Swanlea School had fallen to use by the Whitechapel Distillery by the 1840s. This land was sold to George Torr in 1861 and adapted within a year to be a manure or ‘animal charcoal’ works, conveniently adjacent to the Whitechapel Coal Depot. Around the corner from his sheds, Torr built offices and a chimney on Buck’s Row (Durward Street) employing William Snooke and Henry Stock as architects. Torr died in 1867, but the manure works continued into the late 1890s having receded to its northern parts.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The Buck’s Row office that George Torr had built in the 1860s had by 1890 been adapted for club and library use. The building passed to the Brady Street Boys’ Club, established through Rothschild philanthropy in 1896 as a Jewish club, drawing boys largely from the new blocks of dwellings on Brady Street including those of the Four Percent Industrial Dwellings Society which funded extension of the club in 1905 in an Arts & Crafts style by Ernest Joseph, who had a special interest in youth work via the Jewish Lads’ Brigade. The premises were wholly rebuilt in larger and strikingly Modernist form in 1936–8 to plans by Joseph, who had been influenced by Continental refugee architects. He also designed the Brady Street Girls’ Club & Settlement of 1935 on Hanbury Street. The area’s Jewish population declined, attitudes to teenagers changed and in the 1960s the boys’ and girls’ clubs amalgamated on Hanbury Street. From the 1970s to its demolition around 1990 the former boys’ club building was used as a Tower Hamlets Council and Department of Health and Social Security training workshop called Brady House.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Further east, on Torr’s land along the north side of Buck’s Row, a long three-storey warehouse was built in 1864. Taken by Browne & Eagle for wool storage, this was the starting point of that firm’s extensive presence across Whitechapel. Divided into three sections, this warehouse with timber floors on iron columns was raised two further storeys in 1880–1. An iron boiler house adjoined to the northeast on Brady Street from 1879 to 1933. Wool storage was in decline by 1905, and the western division was used by HM Customs and Excise for a time from 1914. The other sections were used for hops storage from 1924. Browne & Eagle departed and the warehouse was auctioned off in 1936. It saw use by Stepney Council before clearance in the 1970s.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The manure works gave way to housing in stages. Brady Street Dwellings were built by the Four Per Cent Industrial Dwellings Company in 1889–90, 286 densely packed flats in twelve four-storey and attic blocks with concrete floors, designed by N. S. Joseph and Smithem, architects. By the end of the 1890s they were said to be wholly tenanted by Jewish people. This was a major location of the Stepney Tenants’ Defence League’s successful rent strike of 1938. Brady Street Mansions, adjoining to the north, was a project by Nathaniel and Ralph Davis via the Great Eastern Railway Company. A scheme of 1898 by H. H. Collins, architect, was partially seen through in 1901, for 120 flats in six blocks, again with concrete floors. Brady Street Mansions were sold off in 1933 and cleared around 1975. Brady Street Dwellings stood until about 1980.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), SC/PM/ST/01/002; District Surveyors Returns (DSR): Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 11 Oct 1861, p. 724; 21 Feb 1862, p. 156: Post Office Directories (POD): London School of Economics Library (LSE), Booth/B/351, p. 239</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: DSR: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, pamphlets 022: Post Office Directories (POD): <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 1 May 1896, p.16; 16 Feb. 1906, p.33; 11 March 1938, p.43: POD: information kindly supplied by Dr Sharman Kadish</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, CLC/B/017/MS14943/001, p. 52; /007, pp. 27, 37, 151; /008, p. 12; /020, p. 263; CLC/B/017/MS14944/019, pp. 524–5; /020, pp. 509–10; /034, p. 363; /037, p. 153: DSR: Royal London Hospital Archives, LH/5/5/21: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Builder</em>, 20 April 1889, p. 305: Goad map, 1890: DSR: LSE, Booth/B/351, p.239: London County Council Minutes, 29 March, 28 June and 26 July 1898, pp. 384,768,973; 2 July 1901, p. 899: <em>Estates Gazette</em>, 4 Feb. 1933, p. 1: Isobel Watson, ‘Rebuilding London: Abraham Davis and his Brothers, 1881–1924’, <em>London Journal</em>, vol. 29, 2004 pp. 62–84</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>I got married when I was 20, my husband was 22, at the Great Garden Street synagogue in 1969. Our family had been going there since before I was born. I remember going there for years on the holidays. It always smelled musty. My brother was barmitzvah'd there. They had a Sunday school in a room upstairs, which we went to as kids, and the way they got you to go was to give out chocolate bars. Otherwise the children weren't really interested. In the mid 1960s they built a couple of modern flats adjacent to the synagogue and my Aunt Bessie & Uncle Jack moved in there. They worked together in a little fur factory in Thrawl Street close to Brick Lane.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>It was 1968 and I wanted a cheap flat to rent. One day I wandered into Cartwright street, just behind the Royal Mint on Tower Hill. It runs north from the high brick wall of St Katharine's Dock to Royal Mint street and the old railway viaduct that now carries the DLR. Lined with bomb sites and tenement blocks it was uninviting but halfway down, next to an arch that led to a railway goods yard, was Marie's grocer's shop. I went in and the people were friendly. Yes, there were sometimes flats to rent and Royal Albert Buildings would be best for me. Marie told me where the agents were, in Houndsditch, and I went there a few times until one day they asked for references and a week or two later gave me the rent book and a key for a flat that I hadn't even seen. </p>\n\n<p>Built in the 1880s Royal Albert Buildings was five stories of sooty brick with cream paint around the windows and entrances and green ironwork. There were no doors at street level, just four arched openings between plastered pillars, each leading to a stone staircase with two flats on each floor. Mine was on the second floor and I still remember the feeling of elation and the sharp smell of new paint as I let myself in. </p>\n\n<p>Inside was a square hall with just enough space for a door in each wall. To the left was a sitting room, in front a bedroom, and to the right a kitchen, all with discoloured old floor boards. The sitting room was a good size, with a big mullioned window overlooking the street and low cupboards in alcoves either side of a chimney breast with a blocked fireplace - I would need an electric fire for the winter as there was no other heating. The windows were unusual as each had three sashes instead of two - a fixed lower one so children wouldn't fall out, and two upper ones that slid up and down. The bedroom was at the back of the building, small and rather gloomy as it looked out across a roofed balcony. The kitchen, long and thin, had an old grey enamelled cooker and a sink unit with a cold tap. From it a door led to the balcony behind the bedroom, which had a view of the goods yard, a little rubbish chute, and six feet across it the door to an old lavatory with a high cistern. </p>\n\n<p>It was all as good as I'd hoped for. The controlled rent was £3 a week plus 12 shillings for rates, perhaps a quarter of a typical pay packet then, though it went up a little when the landlord put a shower in the corner of the kitchen as I'd asked. The milkman and postman came early each morning. Electricity was billed quarterly but there was a shilling slot meter for gas and the gas man called occasionally to empty it, count out the contents on the table and hand back the surplus, perhaps a third of the total, which was always welcome. There was a long waiting list for telephones but I eventually got one, a smart Trimphone that warbled instead of ringing, rented as the GPO didn't allow you to own your phone. </p>\n\n<p>The other residents of the block were mostly quiet people, working or retired, with a few children. Marie's shop served the whole street and she was always there and beaming, often with some of her children helping or playing, while husband Frank worked as a crane driver in the docks when he wasn't in the shop. They were from Malta. Most customers were on first name terms and often had their purchases noted down for future payment in little books kept behind the counter. In Royal Mint street was a paper shop, another grocer and two pubs. Tower Hill tube was just minutes away. </p>\n\n<p>Fifty years later the sound of the goods yard stays in my memory. The tracks that led to it branched off from the main line at Leman Street and sloped downhill to the yard in a long curve. A line of wagons would be shunted there and left on the slope without an engine. Sometimes the yard worked through the night and as the bottom wagon was loaded or unloaded and moved along, the ones above would each roll down a few yards to fill the space, like a line of slowly falling dominoes, with screeches, bangs and the clank of chains, an eerie noise to hear in the small hours, especially on foggy nights when there would be more ships' sirens than usual from the river. </p>\n\n<p>I lived there for three years. Then the GLC bought the block for redevelopment together with neighbouring Katharine Buildings, which had communal toilets and some single room flats, and Royal Mint Square. Tenants were gradually rehoused or left, corrugated iron started to appear on accessible doors and windows, and after a couple of years everything was demolished.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Between 1959 and 1982 the photographer John Claridge photographed the men and women who stayed in Victoria Home and Booth House, as described by the Gentle Author in spitalfieldslife.com in 2012: </p>\n\n<p>http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/05/07/john-claridge-at-the-salvation-army/</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2016-10-19",
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{
"id": 936,
"title": "Kosher Luncheon Club",
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"username": "georgemoult"
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"street": "Greatorex Street",
"address": "13-15 Greatorex Street with 80 Old Montague Street",
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"body": "<p>The Kosher Luncheon Club was owned by my uncle, Lou Morrison, and Connie Shack, both of whom are sadly no longer with us. It became well known enough for the Sunday newspaper <em>The Observer</em> to run an article on it in their colour supplement in the 1960s. (Probably still in their archives.) Not only was the food delicious but the portions, especially the fish, were HUGE. Lou used to joke, 'We're so posh you don't choose the fish. The fish choose you.' Just round the corner from <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/322/detail/\">Blooms</a>, it never had to live in their shadow. A little gem, after the massive 'redevelopment' of Old Montague Street.</p>\n",
"created": "2019-07-28",
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{
"id": 884,
"title": "West wing and east wing extensions, 1830–42",
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"body": "<p>Plans for the first substantial enlargement to the hospital arose in 1830 in response to rising patient numbers, a by-product of rapid population growth. The establishment of the enclosed docks and the expansion of local manufacturing demanded an army of labourers. Many ended up residing in densely populated slums prone to the spread of disease, and were exposed to ‘fearful and appalling accidents’ at work.[^33] A newly assembled building committee observed that within a year, the hospital had been forced to refuse admission to more than 870 cases. A wing extension promised to provide ninety additional beds and separate wards to isolate contagious patients. These motivations coincided with low construction costs and a significant legacy from Edward Hollond, a governor with property in Cavendish Square and Suffolk. The committee anticipated that an extension to one of the rear wings would cost £8,000, which would be covered securely by Hollond’s bequest, existing funds and a fundraising campaign.[^34] </p>\n\n<p>Alfred Richardson Mason, hospital surveyor since 1821, was asked to prepare plans for a wing extension. His father, William Mason, was a local bricklayer and governor who had applied unsuccessfully for the post of surveyor during its last vacancy in 1806 and served on the hospital’s building committee. The chosen plan was reviewed by the medical staff and many of their recommendations adopted. Mason proposed extensions to the east and west wings to provide new wards. The external appearance of the extensions matched the austerity of Mainwaring’s design. On each side a three-bay projection, capped with a pediment, connected the existing wing to a new ward wing composed of six more bays. On the ground, first and second floors, Mason’s plan followed the arrangement of paired wards separated by a spine wall with a central fireplace. The new wards were connected to the earlier wards by lobbies, each containing a washing room and a bath room, along with a kitchen and a nurses’ room. In the basement of the west wing, the extension was allocated to the hospital’s medical officers: a long patients’ waiting hall was bordered by a dispensary and separate physicians’ consulting rooms. Staircases in the second-floor lobbies rose to an attic storey with rooms for special cases, including separate rooms for private patients in the east wing and a ward for contagious cases in the west wing. The hospital was surrounded by an assortment of open spaces, including a drying ground adjacent to the laundry and a burial ground to the south of the quadrangle.[^35]</p>\n\n<p>William Colebatch was employed as contractor for the west wing extension in June 1830, and construction began without delay. The new wards opened in August 1831 and were fitted up with fifty iron bedsteads, an improvement from the earlier wooden beds judged to be ‘receptacles for and filled with vermin’.[^36] Although the number of beds was considerably less than the ninety initially intended, the extension proved to be of immediate value as it opened before the first outbreak of a cholera epidemic. Sir William Blizard, eminent surgeon to the hospital, circulated a plea to the House Committee for special procedures to combat its spread, including the provision of an isolated place to receive sufferers. Although the hospital declined to admit cases of cholera, on the grounds that it was an untreatable disease, the new attic ward was used to isolate infected inpatients.[^37] </p>\n\n<p>A lack of funds delayed the construction of the east wing extension, as the hospital struggled with financial pressure caused by rising patient numbers. An appeal for donations launched during the charity’s centenary year was a success. Robert and George Webb were contracted as builders in December 1840. The extension was finished in 1842 and Mason paid a fee equal to five per cent of the building costs; by now the position was no longer honorary and this was termed the ‘usual’ surveyor’s commission.[^38] The only significant departure from Mason’s earlier plan wasthe provision of separate wards for Jewish patients, which arose from a request delivered in 1837 by a committee of Jewish gentlemen devoted to ‘the more effectual relief of the sick poor of the Jewish community requiring medical aid in and about London’. This deputation on behalf of ‘Gentlemen of the Hebrew Nation’, noted for their generosity and support towards the hospital since its inception, was made by Joel Emanuel and Abraham Levy.[^39] In addition to exclusive wards for Jewish patients, the committee requested a team of Jewish medical staff and a separate kitchen to prepare kosher food. By these measures, it was hoped that Jewish patients would ‘receive that consolation and peace of mind which would prove most consonant with their religious feelings’.[^40] Although the committee offered some financial support and predicted the initiative would encourage donations, the project was deferred until funds were secured for the hospital’s enlargement. The centenary festival attracted donations and, when the east wing extension was completed, two wards in the earlier part of the hospital were set aside for men and women.[^41]</p>\n\n<p>The effects of this improvement were not permanent due to demand for beds. By 1854 the House Committee had decided to allocate portions of wards to Jewish patients as an interim solution until a future enlargement of the hospital. Despite this failure, the wing extensions were considered an overall success. Their completion was followed by a sharp decline in mortality rates inside the hospital from ten per cent to eight per cent, and then as low as six per cent. Further alterations to the east and west wings followed in 1853–4, with the addition of fireproof staircases and water closets at the south ends to designs by Mason. This extension was carried out by George Myers, along with the formation of staff dormitories in the attics of the north end of each wing.[^42] </p>\n\n<p>[^33]: <em>General State of the London Hospital</em>(London: School Press Gower’s Walk, 1854). </p>\n\n<p>[^34]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/9/11: TNA, PROB 11/1764/221. </p>\n\n<p>[^35]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/9/11; RLHLH/A/5/14, p. 243; RLHLH/A/5/15, p. 108; RLHLH/A/5/17, pp. 51–2: LMA, COL/CHD/FR/02/1448–1453. </p>\n\n<p>[^36]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/15, pp. 130–4. </p>\n\n<p>[^37]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/9/11; RLHLH/A/5/19, p. 207; RLHLH/A/17/19: Clark-Kennedy, Vol. 1, p. 235; <em>London Pride</em>, p. 105: William Blizard, <em>An Address to the Chairman and Members of the House Committee of the London Hospital on the subject of Cholera </em>(London, 1831). </p>\n\n<p>[^38]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/4/10, p. 147–9. </p>\n\n<p>[^39]: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 18 April 1818, 18 April 1833: <em>Globe</em>, 21 March 1853: <em>General State of the London Hospital </em>(1854). </p>\n\n<p>[^40]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/4/10, pp. 42–3. </p>\n\n<p>[^41]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/4/10, p. 48. </p>\n\n<p>[^42]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/27, pp. 44, 62–3, 125, 144, 154, 159–164; RLHLH/A/5/32, p. 30: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 23 June 1905, pp. 14–15.</p>\n",
"created": "2019-04-29",
"last_edited": "2021-05-10"
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{
"id": 1079,
"title": "Chandlery House, 40 Gower's Walk, including 107 Back Church Lane",
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"properties": {
"b_number": "40",
"b_name": "Chandlery House, 40 Gower's Walk",
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"address": "Chandlery House, 40 Gower's Walk",
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"body": "<p>Chandlery House is a former wine warehouse that was built in 1894–5 for Charles Kinloch & Co. Ltd and converted to flats in 1998–9. It has frontages to both Gower’s Walk and Back Church Lane. It replaced a dozen properties along Back Church Lane, a yard, and two courts of the 1810s – Davis’s Buildings and Friendly Buildings. The southern half of the site had been part of a parochial burial ground in the late eighteenth century. The digging up of the bones of nearly 300 bodies when the ground was being prepared for Kinloch’s warehouse in 1893 gave rise to objections. Basil Holmes, Secretary of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, urged designation of the site as a public open space.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Work continued regardless, and the firm founded by Charles Kinloch (1828–1897), a member of the Scots gentry whose business started in 1861, propitiously, as tariffs on wines were lowered the following year, enjoyed vigorous growth, importing wines from Spain and Portugal, and, a rarity at the time, Australia. The warehouse was erected to the designs of Hyman Henry Collins, architect, with John Greenwood as builder. Faced in stock brick with black engineering-brick dressings, it had three storeys over basements. The original principal twelve-bay front to Back Church Lane was given a raised central parapet with the firm’s name impressed in a cement panel. Five separated (fireproof) divisions or ‘risks’ were arrayed around three light wells. On Gower’s Walk a five-storey section with a loophole bay projects at the north end. This abutted and returned behind a modest row at Nos 36–42, which Kinloch & Co. had also acquired in 1894.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>Kinlochs relocated to Wembley in 1937 and these buildings were added to the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s local empire for a variety of purposes, with Nos 36–42 rebuilt. Sold on by 1971, again around 1988, after which Nos 36–42 were demolished, and again thereafter, the property was acquired by Aitch City Lofts Ltd, part of the Aitch Group, founded in 1995 by Henry Smith, an East Londoner. The main warehouse block was converted in 1998–9 to designs by GML Architects to be Chandlery House, sometimes The Chandlery, fifty-six ‘loft’ apartments with six live/work units in the semi-basement (all but one since converted to purely residential use). Ground-floor loading bays and other openings to Back Church Lane were reconfigured with two-tier fenestration, and balconies were added to the internal light wells. The cleared site to the north-west was made a railed entrance forecourt with access to underground parking. Seven extra flats were added in 2001 in a two-storey fully glazed stepped-back roof extension.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/6254: <em>Morning Post</em>, 26 Sept 1893, p. 2</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The Edinburgh Academy Register</em><em>, 1824–1914</em>, 1914, p. 99: LMA, District Surveyors' Returns: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): <em>Pall Mall Gazette</em>, 22 March 1906, p. 4: <em>Financial Times</em>, 23 July 1937, p.4: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 19 March 1937, p.65: <em>Daily Herald</em>, 6 March 1937, p.13: The National Archives, IR58/84814/3447–54: Royal Institute of British Architects, British Architectural Library, AP53/19</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Daily Herald</em>, 4 March 1988, p. 88; 29 Oct 2010, p. 24: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P33767; P00513; P00517: THP: <a href=\"http://10scrivenstreet.co.uk/assets/Uploads/Scriven_eBrochure.pdf\">10scrivenstreet.co.uk/assets/Uploads/Scriven_eBrochure.pdf</a>: <a href=\"https://www.aitchgroup.com/about-us/henry-smith/\">www.aitchgroup.com/about-us/henry-smith/</a></p>\n",
"created": "2020-06-05",
"last_edited": "2020-08-04"
},
{
"id": 328,
"title": "24 Osborn Street",
"author": {
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>Osborn Street's east side had a new frontage formed by road widening in the 1780s. It was only slowly built up. A courthouse flanked by tall sugarhouses took up places at its centre in the 1790s. The Court of Requests for the Tower Hamlets was a small claims court established in 1750 to succeed Stepney’s manorial Court of Record in the north-east of Whitechapel parish in dealing with debts under 40<em>s.</em> Its courthouse on Osborn Street (on the site of Nos 22–24), built in 1790–2 following enabling Acts, was said by J. P. Malcolm to have been ‘handsome’ and appears to have had a pedimented façade. Samuel Hawkins, the treasurer, and perhaps also the builder–architect, laid the foundation stone. The County Court Act of 1846 abolished courts of requests, but these premises continued to be used for Whitechapel County Court until 1859.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The present building at No. 24 was erected in 1904–5 for Joseph Donn of Princelet Street as developer, to designs by J. R. Moore-Smith, with C. North of Stratford as builder. Designed with ‘offices’ below a dwelling, and the third window bay squeezed in as an afterthought, it may have been intended for Louis Turiansky, a physician and surgeon, who immediately took up what was to be a long-lasting residence, his surgery to the rear. The building retains its original shopfront under an applied fascia, but was cut down in post-war repairs. It originally had a gable-fronted attic.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>The World</em>, 3 June 1790, p.3: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 11 Dec 1792, p.2: James Peller Malcolm, <em>Londinium Redivivum: Or an Ancient History and Modern Description of London</em>, vol.4, 1807, p.454: Hubert Llewellyn Smith, <em>The History of East London</em>, 1939, p.69: Richard Horwood's map, 1813: Ordnance Survey map, 1873: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: The National Archives, IR58/84800/1728–9: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/THL/D/2/30/110: Historic England, Aerial Photographs EPW005770, EPW055309: Post Office Directories </p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-30",
"last_edited": "2020-08-26"
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"id": 937,
"title": "The Goulston Street Improvement",
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"body": "<p>The topography of the area between Middlesex Street and Old Castle Street changed radically in the 1880s as a consequence of concerted slum clearances and road widenings. This owed much to the Rev. Samuel Barnett and John Liddle, the Whitechapel District Board of Works' Medical Officer of Health, who had been campaigning for improvements in living conditions since the 1840s.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Drainage aside, little had changed in the huddled streets north of Whitechapel High Street. The Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Act of 1868 (the Torrens Act) to encourage large-scale slum clearance and rebuilding had lacked the force of Torrens’ original bill, as was pointed out by an influential report of 1873 (and subsequent memorial to Parliament) by the Charity Organisation Society, with which Barnett was closely involved. This recommended that local authorities be given compulsory purchase powers in slum areas. The Society’s aim was not philanthropic and it opposed municipal house building except as a last resort. Rather it aspired to social engineering through improved housing. If the slum houses were demolished and replaced with good-quality blocks, better tenants would be drawn in and the most resilient of the poor (the ‘deserving’) would occupy the houses they had left, thus ‘levelling up’ an area. Barnett put it more starkly: ‘If the gang of thieves and idlers who inhabit this quarter could be scattered and good houses built, the boon would be immense’.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>The Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act of 1875, introduced by the Home Secretary Richard Assheton Cross, aimed to remedy the shortcomings of the Torrens Act by enabling local authorities (in London, the Metropolitan Board of Works) to conduct slum clearance on a scale large enough to generate sites attractive to model dwellings companies. The thorniest issue was compensation to the slum landlord – not to give full market value was considered inequitable, selling sites below market value an unjustified imposition on ratepayers, yet selling them at full market value made them unattractive to builders. Barnett’s view was that ‘the community must be content to lose money by letting the ground at a lower rate’.[^3] This played out in wrangling over compensation that dragged on through arbitration and saw awards that made slum clearance onerous to the Board, and slow in the time it took to sell cleared sites.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>Whitechapel was subject early and extensively to the Cross Act, first in the Whitechapel and Limehouse Improvement Act of 1876, the implementation of which in an area south of Royal Mint Street benefited from the early involvement of the Peabody Trust, and shortly after in the Metropolis (Goulston Street and Flower and Dean Street, Whitechapel) Improvement Act of 1877, which led to a slower process. These Acts came about through representations to the MBW by Liddle, the later one in particular concerning two sites, one of about three acres, encompassing Queen’s Court off the High Street (the site of Whitechapel Gallery) and parts of Angel Alley and George Yard, running north across Wentworth Street into Spitalfields to Flower and Dean Street, and, the subject here, four and a half acres bounded by Middlesex Street and Goulston Street east and west, and Wentworth Street and the backs of High Street properties north and south.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>Fragmented ownership and displacement from both areas of more than 4,000 people, meant that assembling the sites was laborious. Amendments to the Cross Act in 1879 and 1882, reducing both the rate of compensation to slum landlords, and the proportion of displaced persons who had to be rehoused locally, speeded up clearances, much of which occurred in 1880–1, though it was not until 1884 that final acquisitions of the many crowded and insanitary courts were made. The amended legislation enabled widening of the main streets; sections of Middlesex Street, Goulston Street and Wentworth Street were widened to 40ft, and New Goulston Street to 30ft.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>The scheme proposed commercial redevelopment of the main street frontages (Middlesex Street, the eastern part of Wentworth Street, and odd plots on Commercial Street), and envisaged five-storey parallel blocks mostly end-on to New Goulston Street and the western part of Wentworth Street. Model-dwelling use for eighty years was to be stipulated. Some smaller commercial sites were built up in 1883–4, including the Bell on Middlesex Street and the Princess Alice on Commercial Street, and widened Middlesex Street was paved in granite, with York-stone pavements, by J. J. Griffiths, builder. But the core work of building blocks of model dwellings was slow to start. As Barnett bemoaned in 1884: ‘During the whole year acres of ground cleared by the Metropolitan Board of Works … have remained barren as a desert’.[^7] Another short-term consequence of the slow pace of demolition was, as Barnett had predicted, that slum property deteriorated as landlords saw no reason to improve condemned houses. Before 1882 local authorities were reluctant to buy and demolish as there was a requirement to rehouse occupants locally. Moreover, the scale of clearances when they finally happened and subsequent delays in selling sites were also deleterious. At the end of 1884 the Whitechapel Board of Works estimated that 12,000 had been made homeless in its district. The need for many to remain close to their places of work, or simply to stay with their friends and family, meant that overcrowding increased sharply.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>The MBW’s first sale of property scheduled for blocks of dwellings was of the largest site, fronting Wentworth Street, the north end of Goulston Street on both sides and Old Castle Street’s west side. The buyer in June 1884 was William Boutcher, of the Wentworth Dwellings Company Ltd. Boutcher was unusual as a developer of model dwellings: he was an artist and illustrator, who had travelled in 1854–5 at the behest of the British Museum to make record drawings of Nimrud for W. K. Loftus’s excavation; a some-time architectural student at the Royal Academy (and designer of, <em>inter alia</em>, model dairies); a crack-shot member of the Artists’ Rifles; and, in the late 1880s, the MBW’s member for Kensington. He declined to deal with T. J. Robertson, an MBW Architects’ clerk under investigation for taking bribes to secure tenders.[^9]</p>\n\n<p>Complete by the end of 1886, Wentworth Dwellings, 471 flats in all, comprised four main and largely surviving blocks of five storeys over basements, with shops on the ground floors of the Wentworth Street and Goulston Street frontages. An additional four-storey block and six single-storey workshops stood behind the eastern L. There were also washhouse blocks in the yards. Boutcher’s scheme was architecturally a cut above standard model dwellings. The stock-brick elevations were enlivened with occasional red-brick courses, gauged window heads and residually Gothic Revival composite-stone doorheads on Goulston Street. Open staircases under red-brick arches sub-divided the blocks.[^10]</p>\n\n<p>The flats varied from one to three rooms, the majority being of two. The return for Boutcher and his investors was healthy, six per cent in the 1890s, a consequence of the rents, at 6s.6d.to 10s.6d., which, as often observed, precluded the poorest class of labourers. The shops reflected Wentworth Street’s status as an adjunct to Petticoat Lane market. There was from the outset a fair representation of the rag trade (milliners, drapers, silk mercers, trimmings), but most shops housed such as fishmongers, fruiterers, grocers, butchers and tobacconists. The workshops fell to use mainly as builders’ stores.[^11]</p>\n\n<p>In February 1885 Samuel Toye bought the whole west side of Goulston Street south of New Goulston Street for the erection of model dwellings. Toye was an intermediary for James Hartnoll, a joiner turned developer and self-styled ‘architect’, with whom he had worked on at least one other scheme in Clerkenwell. Hartnoll, who died at forty-six in 1900, made a fortune in the 1880s and ’90s building model dwellings and mansion flats on ground left over from public schemes – slum clearances, railway developments and street improvements. He was undeterred by the statutory requirements and restrictive conditions that often made such sites unattractive to philanthropic societies and other developers.[^12] According to Hartnoll gave evidence in 1888 to the Royal Commission examining alleged irregularities at the Metropolitan Board. The MBW had declined to deal with him as they doubted his competence to build such a large scheme; this despite him having paid for the services of T. J. Robertson, the allegedly corrupt clerk. In his own words, Hartnoll was ‘exceptionally experienced in the successful planning, erection and maintenance of Model Dwellings, as well as being the largest individual owner of this class of property in London’. Brunswick Buildings, the vast scheme he built on Goulston Street in 1885–6, contributed greatly to that claim.[^13]</p>\n\n<p>Hartnoll had lived in Germany, and used German names for many of his developments. Brunswick Buildings was a continuous run of fifteen six- and seven-storey blocks that turned the corner to New Goulston Street with a further four blocks. There were also a few more blocks behind the Goulston Street range for 280 flats altogether.[^14] In a manner typical of Hartnoll, the development was of stock brick with stone quoins and two continuous reconstituted-stone courses stepped up as window heads, articulation like that at Hartnoll’s surviving shophouses at 52–72 Middlesex Street. Most flats were of two rooms plus a scullery, though a number had one or three rooms, all were reached by open stone stairs.</p>\n\n<p>Barnett noted: ‘In the broad streets with their clean, tall dwellings it is almost impossible to recall the net of squalid courts and filthy passages which went by the name of streets. After nine years’ waiting and the delays which seem to be necessary in the action of the Metropolitan Board of Works, the improvement has been completed. Brunswick Buildings in Goulston Street and Wentworth Buildings {sic} in Wentworth Street, are inhabited.’[^15] Charles Booth’s researcher found the residents ‘decent working people … mainly Jews’.[^16] By the First World War Hartnoll Estates had disposed of Brunswick Buildings to the UK Temperance and General Provident Institution, and they were described as ‘in a pretty bad state with poor class of tenants’.[^17] </p>\n\n<p>The north side of New Goulston Street was excluded from the clearance area in the Improvement Act of 1877 on account, no doubt, of the cost of acquiring the former sugarhouse there (see above). When the site did come up for sale in 1890, with the suggestion that it might be adapted for commercial purposes, it was acquired by Abraham Davis (1857–1924), the third of the seven Davis brothers who built widely in Whitechapel, generally putting up working-class tenements. Abraham went on to have a hugely versatile career, but the building of Davis Mansions on this site, in a part of Whitechapel he had lived in as a child, was his first major solo development. It followed an established model, with five floors of flats over shops to New Goulston Street. Built in 1894–5, there were 148 flats in four contiguous blocks behind the western blocks of Wentworth Dwellings.[^18] </p>\n\n<p>Davis Mansions bore more than a passing resemblance to red-brick ‘mansion’ blocks erected by James Hartnoll on Rosebery Avenue and Gray’s Inn Road to a higher specification than Brunswick Buildings. They had similar architectural pretension, with Queen Anne details, pedimented shop fronts, high-level arcading and a modest corner tourelle, but they were not ‘mansion flats’ in the West End sense. They had a higher proportion of three-room flats than Wentworth Dwellings and Brunswick Buildings and were aimed at a class of tenant one step up. As in other Davis developments, Davis Mansions included workshops, here in the basements, to cater for local domestic industries. </p>\n\n<p>Davis Mansions was notable for its almost exclusively Jewish occupancy, an apparently deliberate policy of Davis’s that provoked controversy when notices that ‘No English need apply’ were displayed to prospective tenants.[^19] The shops were almost exclusively in clothing-trade use throughout the buildings’ existence. One exception was a small synagogue, possibly a successor to a synagogue on Newcastle Street, converted from a shop unit by Davis in 1895–6. This was known as the Sons of Lodz, or Lodzer, Synagogue until around1934 when it closed following merger with the Lubner synagogue, which merged in turn with the Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue after 1947.[^20]</p>\n\n<p>The west end of the westernmost Wentworth Dwellings block was a casualty of the Second World War, rebuilt in 1954 in Utility style with plain brick fronts and metal windows. All but the six northernmost Brunswick Buildings blocks were also damaged beyond repair after a direct hit by a V2 rocket bomb on 10 November 1944; the corner block was rebuilt in 1955. By the 1960s the remaining dwelling blocks in the area were scheduled for slum clearance by the London County Council, but work was slow to be implemented.[^21]</p>\n\n<p>Davis Mansions had been the first of the late-nineteenth-century dwellings in the Goulston Street–Wentworth Street nexus to be condemned as unfit for habitation and in 1965 the first for which a Compulsory Purchase Order was secured. Clearance was completed by the GLC in 1974, and the site was laid out as public open space for a time from 1976.[^22] </p>\n\n<p>A survey of 1972 found what remained of Brunswick Buildings beset by ‘disrepair, dampness, unsatisfactory internal arrangements, insufficient natural lighting and ventilation, inconveniently situated sanitary accommodation and water supplies and inadequate facilities for the preparation of food’.[^23] Compulsory Purchase Orders for Brunswick Buildings were secured in 1975–6, despite objections from the several freeholders. Interviews with tenants to assess compensation for good maintenance revealed the poor condition of the buildings and the shifting demography of Whitechapel.Alexander Solomons at Flat 264 on New Goulston Street said he had lived there for seventy-one years and that ‘the flat is rotting, the ceiling is in places wood, the windows [are] rotting’, complaints echoed by Tuta Miah at Flat 242. An unnamed tenant at Flat 233 said ‘I am only living here with great difficulties’.[^24] The corner block, only twenty years old, had a factory in its basement. </p>\n\n<p>The last old blocks of Brunswick Buildings were duly demolished in 1981. There was less certainty about how far a redevelopment scheme should include Wentworth Dwellings. The view in Tower Hamlets Council in 1965 was that ‘the only really effective way to deal with tenement blocks is to demolish and rebuild’.[^25] But the issues with this for Roy Archer, the GLC’s Valuer, were cost and disruption. Wentworth Dwellings incorporated ground-floor commerce, ‘which accounts for a lot of the value of the blocks but doesn’t come under the terms of [Section III of] the [1957] Housing Act’.[^26] Similar exemption also applied to the two rebuilds of the 1950s, the corner block at Brunswick Buildings and the section of Wentworth Dwellings at 6–14 Wentworth Street. Rehabilitation was under contemplation by the mid-1970s, but there was fierce resistance to the idea, even within the GLC. Archer pursued the possibility and considered the commercial activity in social as well as economic terms: ‘These streets (Wentworth and Goulston) form part of the “Petticoat Lane” complex, a dedicated market area, with a vigorous barrow trade, and provide a focal point for the local community’.[^27] The GLC decided to acquire Wentworth Dwellings, then still in private ownership, under another clause of the Housing Act, and carried out a feasibility study with a view to rehabilitation. </p>\n\n<p>In parallel, designs for replacing Brunswick Buildings, Wentworth Dwellings and Davis Mansions were prepared in 1982–3 by the GLC Architect’s Department. The scheme proposed extinguishing Goulston Street north of New Goulston Street to create a glass-roofed pedestrian market extending westwards, between blocks of low-rise flats on the site of Davis Mansions and all but the 1950s part of Wentworth Dwellings, with a further block on the Brunswick Buildings site south of New Goulston Street. Three phases were intended, to start at Brunswick Buildings and proceed clockwise to conclude east of Goulston Street. In the event only the first phase was built, in 1985, as blocks either side of New Goulston Street: Brunswick House, twenty flats to the south; and 20–27 Wentworth Dwellings, to the north, set back to allow for the intended market and finished abruptly at the flank wall of the reprieved Wentworth Dwellings. These buildings of up to four storeys are in a late-GLC neo-vernacular style, of brown brick with canted oriel windows, slate-effect hipped roofs and canted corners creating rhomboid shapes on plan. Bright-red tubular canopies over the shops were removed in 2018. At 20–27 Wentworth Dwellings single-storey shops form a podium for raised communal gardens and private terraces. Brunswick House has glazed sunrooms to the rear. In 2005 a flat was added above 21 Wentworth Dwellings, a consequence of tenants exercising their ‘right to buy’.[^28] </p>\n\n<p>By 1986 the old Wentworth Dwellings blocks were empty and boarded up, awaiting refurbishment which eventually came in 1991–2 when the name Arcadia Court was introduced; the western ranges had come to be known as Merchant House. To the rear, podiums were formed above space for market storage, with gardens on the roof and access to staircases, now lit by glass louvres. On the west side of Goulston Street new access came via a mildly Post-modern gateway to the south. A new four-storey block of eleven flats, architecturally in keeping, was built on the west side of Old Castle Street. Arcadia Court and Brunswick House were transferred to East End Homes in 2006, along with the New Holland Estate and Jacobson and Herbert Houses.[^29] </p>\n\n<p>Brunswick Buildings had survived long enough to provide a base, in a basement flat (No. 269), for the founding in 1977 by Anwara Begum and Muhammad Nurul Huq of the East End Community School, a mother-tongue supplementary school for children of Bengali heritage. This reflected concern among parents at their children’s lack of access to Bengali language and culture. In 1980, after a period in a classroom on the site of Davis Mansions, the school moved to Portakabins on the east side of Old Castle Street behind Denning Point where it remained for more than thirty years. By 2011 there were more than ninety Bengali supplementary schools in Tower Hamlets.[^30] In 1995 a shop at 33–35 Goulston Street, opened as the Brunswick and Wentworth Community Centre, a registered charity offering housing, health and welfare advice, a children’s supplementary evening school, and IT training. The area in front has been enclosed since 2001 with low railed walls with bench seats. Around 2011 the East End Community School transferred here from its Old Castle Street Portakabins. In 2019 it is a branch of Tanzeel, a chain of Islamic schools founded in 2007, providing after-school courses in Qu’ranic studies and Arabic.[^31]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>East London Observer</em>, 4 Aug 1883, p.3; 27 Oct 1888, p.4</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Henrietta Barnett, <em>Canon Barnett: His Life, Works and Friends</em>, 1918, vol.1, p.129: Anthony S. Wohl, <em>The Eternal Slum: Housing and Social Policy in Victorian London</em>, 1977, edn 2009, pp.84–95: Gareth Stedman Jones, <em>Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between the Classes in Victorian London</em>, 1971, edn 2013, pp.197–9</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Barnett, p.130</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes (MBW Mins), 1878–84, passim: Wohl, pp.93–5,100–1</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MBW/1838/5</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: MBW Mins, 1877–84, passim: ed. C. J. Stewart, <em>The Housing Question in London, Being an Account of the Housing Work done by the Metropolitan Board of Works and the London County Council between … 1855 and 1900</em>, 1900, pp.118–20: John Nelson Tarn, <em>Five Per Cent Philanthropy: An Account of Housing in Urban Areas between 1840 and 1914</em>, 1973, pp.87–8</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Barnett, p.137: LMA, MBW/2635/20</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>The Builder</em>, 27 Dec 1884, p.878: <em>Report from the Select Committee on Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings</em>, 1882, pp.161–8: Wohl, p.105</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: MBW Mins, 9 Feb, 20 June and 27 June 1884, pp.285,1012,1030: <em>Civil Engineer’s and Architect’s Journal</em>, August 1847, pp.261–2: <em>The Builder</em>, 15 April 1848, p.190; 14 Feb 1891, p.126: <em>Building News</em>, 3 Oct 1862, pp.256–8; 12 April 1878, p.366:<em>Volunteer Service Gazette and Military Despatch</em>, 22 May 1880, p.16; 28 July 1883, p.16: <em>West London Observer</em>, 17 July 1886, p.3: <em>The Graphic</em>, 12 May 1888, p.4: <em>Warminster and Westbury Journal</em>, 23 June 1888, p.7:V&A, SP.109; E.3524–1909: British Museum, 2007,6024.21: H. V. Hilprecht, <em>The Resurrection of Assyria and Babylonia</em>, 1904, p.129: Caroline Dakers, <em>The Holland Park Circle</em>, 1999, p.183</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: LMA, District Surveyors Returns (DSR): Barnett, p.138: The National Archives (TNA), IR58/82818/3588–3606; IR58/82819/3601–37, 3696–3707, 3788–92; IR58/82820/3701–3800</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>Jewish Chronicle (JC)</em>, 14 Nov 1884, p.14; 27 Feb 1885, p.8: <em>St James’s Gazette</em>, 26 May 1897, p.15: Post Office Directories (POD): Tarn, pp.87–8</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: MBW Mins, 24 April 1885, p.726: ed. Stewart, pp.122–3: Isobel Watson, ‘The Buildings of James Hartnoll’, <em>Newsletter of the Camden History Society</em>, no.58, March 1980: Isobel Watson, ‘Five Per Cent Philanthropy: Model Houses for the Working Classes in Victorian Camden’, <em>Camden History Review</em>, no.9, 1981, pp.4–9: information kindly supplied by Christopher Hartnoll: ed. Philip Temple,<em>Survey of London</em>, vol.47: <em>Northern Clerkenwell and Pentonville</em>, 2008, p.120</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: LMA, LCC/MIN/2815, 7 July 1890: <em>Kentish Independent</em>, 16 June 1888, p.2</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: DSR: TNA, IR58/84810–12</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: Barnett, p.138</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: London School of Economics, British Library of Political and Economic Science (LSE), BOOTH B/10</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: TNA, IR58/84810/2709–857; IR58/84812/2901,2929–72</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: DSR: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 9 June 1890, p.12: <em>Morning Post</em>, 17 July 1891, p.8: TNA, IR58/84813/3001–9, 3017–72: Isobel Watson, ‘Rebuilding London: Abraham Davis and his Brothers,1881–1924’, <em>London Journal</em>, vol.29/1, 2004, pp.62–84: Isobel Watson, ‘Work, Wait, Win: The Davis Brothers of Whitechapel and their London Buildings’, <em>East London History Society Newsletter</em>, no.2/11, Spring 2005, pp.17–19</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: LSE, Booth Archive, B/351, p.113</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: POD: <em>JC</em>, 8 Oct 1897, p.27; 8 Sept 1899, p.23: DSR: Richard Mudie-Smith, <em>The Religious Life of London</em>, 1904, p.265: <u><a href=\"https://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/EE_lublin-lodz/index.htm\">www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/EE_lublin-lodz/index.htm</a></u></p>\n\n<p>[^21]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/THL/D/1/3/1: J. B. Cullingworth, ‘Urban Renewal’, <em>Town and Country Planning in England and Wales</em>, 1971, pp.262–88 (p.269): Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: LMA, GLC/MA/SC/003/2742; SC/PHL/01/390/X74/914; SC/PHL/01/394/X74/511; SC/PHL/01/394/75/35/76/11</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: LMA, GLC/MA/SC/003/2740–3</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: LMA, GLC/MA/SC/003/2740; GLC/MA/SC/003/2742</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: THLHLA, L/THL/A/11/1/1: THP</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: LMA, GLC/MA/SC/003/2742</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: Ibid: Jim Yelling, ‘The incidence of slum clearance in England and Wales, 1955–85', <em>Urban History</em>, vol.27/2, August 2000, pp.234–54</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: LMA, GLC/AR/G/10/8: THP</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: information and photographs kindly supplied by Lesley Love and Gary Hutton: THP</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: M. Huque, <em>The Story of East End Community School</em>, 2009: Ansar Ahmed Ullah and John Eversley, <em>Bengalis in London’s East End</em>, London, 2010, p.68</p>\n\n<p>[^31]: THP: THLHLA, LC13812: democracy.towerhamlets.gov.uk/mgConvert2PDF.aspx?ID=3073: <a href=\"https://www.tanzeel.co.uk/aboutus.html\">www.tanzeel.co.uk/aboutus.html</a></p>\n\n<p><div> <div> <div></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p></div> </div> </div></p>\n",
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"body": "<p>The eighteenth-century house on this site was demolished in 1913. An iron cooper’s shed had been built to its south alongside the railway viaduct in 1894–5. A larger shed extending behind No. 141 was a garage and cart store from the 1920s, with an associated snack bar.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Greg & Co., electrical and mechanical engineers (G. Gregory and John Polycarpou and Costantine Polycarpou), initiated a redevelopment of 2004–6 that included a five-storey and basement block to the rear to Mill Yard, the proprietorship reincorporated by the Polycarpou brothers in 2005 as Polyteck Building Services Ltd. Papa Architects Ltd (George Kalopedis and Andrew Paps) supplied the designs for ground-floor commercial units, first-floor offices and seven flats above and behind; the owners were their own building contractors.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns: Ordnance Survey maps: Goad insurance maps: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control files 27164, 81263: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>East End historian and guide David Charnick gives some background to the School Board for London which built what is now Canon Barnett School.</p>\n\n<p>[This is] a School Board for London school [which] were the schools that came about from the 1870s onwards. The School Board for London like other schools boards in other cities provided free but compulsory education for children up to the age of 13. In a very real sense, it took them away from the workforce. It's a major step towards improving the condition for children in London, and obviously gave them a proper education which enabled them to break out into more profitable life.</p>\n\n<p>Education was very important for the Victorians to break the cycle of poverty so that you didn't just drift into the same social strata as your parents were. You could actually improve and by improving your condition, obviously, you would improve theirs as well.</p>\n\n<p>[The School Board buildings built] very distinctive buildings. You can see, particularly because of their high windows, the classrooms had very tall ceilings to allow maximum lighting, which is good for the children because they were no doubt living squashed into a room with the rest of their family, and [this] also allowed through a flow of air because a lot of these families would not have access to a great deal of sanitation and consequently a bit of fresh air was needed if you've got a few dozen children crammed into one room.</p>\n\n<p>David Charnick (www.charnowalks.co.uk) was speaking to Shahed Saleem on 23.02.18. The text has been edited for print.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-17",
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"title": "Canon Barnett Primary School",
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"body": "<p>The School Board for London built this primary school as Commercial Street School in 1900–1. Designs in the latest and most evolved of the Board’s styles were prepared under the supervision of T. J. Bailey. The builders were Ebenezer Lawrance & Sons of the City Road. The site had been Black Horse Yard to the east and the John Bull brewery to the west. Until the Second World War the school was entered via a path from Commercial Street to its south side that had previously given access to the brewery. The school for 800 pupils, rectangular in plan and on four levels, was for infants, boys and girls, with a special section for physically disabled students. The main south elevation has large windows for halls and a top-floor blind arcade, flanked by turret-roofed stair towers set slightly forward. There were full-height outer classroom wings, east and west, principally lit from their return elevations. The north side backed onto St Jude’s National Schools.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In 1913 a mural, 8ft by 14ft, of ‘The granting of the Commune to the citizens of London by Prince John in 1191’ (an approved LCC subject), was unveiled in the first-floor hall. Louise Rica Jacobs (1880–1946), a Hull artist associated with the Suffrage Atelier, a women’s suffrage group, won the commission in competition.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>The school was renamed Canon Barnett Primary School in 1951 when the west wing, badly damaged in the Second World War, was rebuilt at a lower level in a utilitarian manner, stock-brick faced with strip windows, decorative panels of cast concrete and a recessed third-floor balcony. In 1976 a playground was formed on the adjoining Commercial Street bomb-site. An open ground-floor arcade on the Gunthorpe Street side was filled in 1993 with windows and a new entrance, and in 2011 a lift was added along with single-storey timber and aluminium-frame extensions west and east, for reception and nursery classrooms, meeting and mentoring rooms and a more obvious entrance from Gunthorpe Street. Classrooms continue to flank the original large south-facing halls, that on the second floor now used for dining. At the time of writing, proposals for large-scale redevelopment to the south-west include plans to demolish the school’s west wing and to build over the playground, losses to be compensated for by a playground and sports pitch to the south, on the Spread Eagle Yard car-park site, and a four-storey classroom block, designed by Haverstock LLP architects, that would abut the south front at its east end, with a single-storey range along the east front.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns: <em>Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Advertiser</em>, 12 Oct 1901, p.8</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Shoreditch Observer</em>, 13 Dec 1913, p.5: <em>East London Observer</em>, 15 Dec 1913, p.5: Ancestry: Colleen Denney, <em>The Visual Culture of Women’s Activism in London, Paris and Beyond</em>, 2018, pp.110–12 </p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/6221; GLC/AR/BR/36/002740: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P26239–44</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Memories of Eric Shorter, b. 1936</p>\n\n<p>Still in existence, the warehouse near the bottom of Gower's Walk on its eastern side had a small jutting-out piece of building that throttled the street in a sense, taking away some of the street width. It is visible on maps of the past. I have always referred to it as ‘the sticky-out bit’. Its function was never clear to me, and I never saw it in use in any sense. But in recent times, I have seen that it is now fitted with a narrow roller blind, and must be some sort of awkward goods in/out facility. As a child this sticky-out bit bothered me, because if I were walking in either direction to/from Hooper Street, then it afforded a hiding place for any of the strange folk who used to be present in Whitechapel at the time. So when passing it, I would tend to hug the Tilbury Warehouse side of the road so as to see waiting strangers before they saw me.</p>\n\n<p>The overall structure of Gower's Walk was that the street was effectively a deep trough bounded by high walls all along. There was nowhere to escape.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Memories of Eric Shorter, b. 1936</p>\n\n<p>As I walked it, ran it, cycled it, the Gowers Walk that I knew in the early 1950s was structured as I now describe. It runs roughly north/south and was cobbled throughout. From the southern end, the eastern side of Gowers walk consisted roughly of three parts. The first third was occupied by another warehouse, extant in 2011, and converted into lots of little designer places for small industries. This warehouse had a strange extension at one end that jutted out into Gower's Walk, and is still there. It narrowed Gower's Walk a fair bit.</p>\n",
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