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"id": 373,
"title": "Whitechapel Charities schools, Leman Street",
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"username": "Johanna"
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"body": "<p>A tender for the construction of schools in Leman Street mentions that the architect was Mr Beck.[1] This might be William Beck (1823-1907), a Quaker historian and architect, of London. In the 1860s and 1870s, Beck was in partnership with William Ward Lee (as Beck & Lee). He was surveyor to Six Weeks Meeting by 1862 and until c.1874, when he was succeeded by Lee who continued his practice. Beck retired in 1876 and resigned his RIBA membership in 1877. Beck & Lee designed hospitals in London and Saffron Walden, Quaker meeting houses, the Quaker Bedford Institute, new buildings and alterations for the British and Foreign School Society, and housing for the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, and the Improved Industrious Dwellings Company.</p>\n\n<p>[1]: <em>The Builder</em>, 18 Oct 1856, p. 576</p>\n",
"created": "2017-05-31",
"last_edited": "2021-02-17"
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"id": 213,
"title": "1754: Theft at the Blue Anchor",
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"b_number": "47",
"b_name": "The Artful Dodger (formerly the Crown and Seven Stars)",
"street": "Royal Mint Street",
"address": "The Artful Dodger (formerly the Crown and Seven Stars) public house, 47 Royal Mint Street",
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"body": "<p>On 27 February 1754 the Old Bailey heard the case of Gerrard Gervise, accused of theft from the Blue Anchor public house in Whitechapel (at that date the only pub of that name in the parish was on Rosemary Lane, present-day Royal Mint Street). The full account can be read on the Proceedings of the Old Bailey website.[^1] Gervise was accused of stealing eight and a half guineas, seven shillings and sixpence, plus two gold rings, from pub licensee William Hall. The court heard that Gervise had lodged at the pub for several days in advance of going to sea. On the day of his departure, William Hall found the money and rings missing from the drawer where they had been kept and confronted Gervise, having heard that the latter had just purchased two silver buckles at Mr Bond's shop in Whitechapel. Gervise confessed all when arrested, saying that as well as the buckles, he had bought a wig, a hat, a coat, a waistcoat and some breeches. But in court he claimed he had been given the money by his aunt to buy clothes for his sea voyage and that the rings were his family's. He was found guilty of theft and sentenced to transportation.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17540227-49&div=t17540227-49</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2016-12-16",
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"id": 332,
"title": "40 Osborn Street",
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"body": "<p>This was the site of Orlando Jones & Co.’s patent rice-starch factory in the 1840s. The property was rebuilt in 1903–4 as a house, shop and warehouse for H. O. Ellis who was also the architect, with Michael Calnan as his builder. There was a printers’ workshop to the rear, and an early occupant was Leo Anatole Jouques, a publisher who went on to set up an aviation works. Plans for conversion to a restaurant with a dance hall to the rear, possibly unexecuted, were prepared in 1935–6 by Richard Seifert.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: District Surveyors Returns: The National Archives, IR58/84800/1739: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/THL/D/2/30/110: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"title": "Royal College of Psychiatrists, 21 Prescot Street (on the site of the London Infirmary and the Magdalen Hospital)",
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"body": "<p>An office block that spans from Magdalen Passage to 23 Prescot Street occupies a site with a remarkable history, that of a mansion of the 1680s that was converted along with adjoining smaller houses in the middle decades of the eighteenth century to host the London Hospital in its original form, adapted afterwards to be the Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes. A larger site was redeveloped in 1778–81 as a terrace of nine houses called Magdalen Row, from which No. 23 survives. </p>\n\n<p>The present office building on the site of the seven most easterly Magdalen Row houses was erected in 1986–8 to plans by the Barnard Partnership as a clearing and call centre for the Abbey National Building Society, which demutualized to become a public limited company in 1989 and was then taken over and rebranded as Santander in 2009–10. Its four-storey eight-bay form, striped with stock-brick and precast concrete, has the characteristic ungainly bulk of its period and building type, yet it is comparatively shapely by local standards. It was refurbished in 2013 to house the Royal College of Psychiatrists, consolidating from premises in Belgrave Square and Aldgate.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The west part of this site was where Prescot Street’s largest first-phase house went up in the late 1680s, a mansion reserved for himself by Sir Thomas Chamber. With a rental value of £40 where almost all the street’s other houses were valued at £15 to £17, it was probably double fronted. Chamber left the house to his widow, Elizabeth, in 1692, but its occupant from 1693 was John Colson (d. 1709), a leading mathematical and astronomical teacher and an associate of John Flamsteed and Edmond Halley, the first astronomers royal. Colson used it as a boarding school where he ‘taught these Mathematical Sciences, (viz.) Arithmetick, Algebra, Trigonometry, Navigation, Astronomy, Dialling, Surveying, Gauging, Fortification, and Gunnery, the Use of the Globes, and other Mathematical Instruments, Projection of the Sphere, and other parts of the Mathematicks. And Youth Boarded.'[^2] John Colson FRS (1680–1759), a relative more eminent to posterity, was among those who lodged here. In the 1730s the mansion was held by Joseph Moses and then by David Lopez Pereira (d. 1756), an investor in the Royal African Company and the Bank of England who had an estimable Hebrew library.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>In 1741, the <strong>London Infirmary</strong>, the forerunner of the Royal London Hospital, acquired this ‘large convenient house in the most airy part of Goodman’s Fields’.[^4] It was adapted with wards for men and women and the following year a further house adjoining east was taken to isolate patients with venereal diseases. By the end of 1744 the infirmary occupied two more contiguous houses further east, one used as a dispensary. Extensive improvements were undertaken in 1745 by the infirmary’s governors, led by John Harrison, a surgeon, and overseen by Isaac Ware, acting as surveyor. William Simon Youd, a plasterer living at what is now 30 Prescot Street, stuccoed the fronts of the houses, adding rusticated quoins at the ends and ‘THE LONDON INFIRMARY SUPPORTED BY VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS BEGUN NOVEMBER THE 3, 1740’ in large letters. Railings guarded the forecourts with stone obelisks at either end. An inspection of the property by a committee of governors, including Harrison, initiated plans to rebuild a ‘shed’ at the back of the former mansion’s garden, to accommodate a range of functions, including a waiting room, a chapel, a laundry, a distillery, a laboratory, a mortuary, and a cold bath. Ware prepared designs and Joel Johnson, the local carpenter, and Robert Taylor were contracted as builders in partnership. The building was completed in 1747, but there were reports that the cold bath was poorly finished and complaints from neighbours about a cesspool emptying into Chamber Street.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>In 1746, the infirmary expanded to the west, grafting on the house on the site later occupied by 23 Prescot Street. Robert Lindsey (d. 1777), a wine merchant, who had lived there since at least the 1730s, gave this house to the infirmary and relocated to the north side of Prescot Street. His house was converted to be offices and residences for infirmary staff , with a ground-floor back room put to use as a surgery. Other houses on Chamber Street were also taken in. Despite the works and the expansion, the infirmary had been looking for a larger site for a purpose-built hospital since 1744. This had been secured by 1750 and the London Hospital opened on Whitechapel Road in 1757.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>The <strong>Magdalen Hospital </strong>for the reception of penitent prostitutes succeeded the infirmary in its former Prescot Street premises. This self-consciously innovative institution was established in 1758, having been first mooted in 1750–1 by Robert Dingley (1710–1781), a wealthy Russia Company merchant, a governor of the Foundling Hospital, a leading antiquary and connoisseur, and a gentleman architect, operating in collaboration with Jonas Hanway (1712–1786), another Russia Company merchant and a serial philanthropic reformer. Their proposal, which lay dormant for several years, was borne out of an understanding of prostitution as a social problem and a desire not just to provide refuge to girls and young women seen as victims, but also to reform the individuals in body and soul through a solitary (prison-like) life of work and prayer. In 1758 the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Science and Commerce offered a medal for the best plan for a charity for reforming prostitutes. Dingley and Hanway both submitted schemes, as did John Fielding and Saunders Welch, Henry Fielding’s sidekick, an indication of the project’s unavowed links to policing.</p>\n\n<p>From such an influential base, and through the publication of promotional pamphlets, the charity became something of a sensation and attracted wealthy subscribers. That enabled the rapid formation of the Magdalen Hospital. Dingley arranged to lease the London Hospital’s Prescot Street property for seven years, which tenure ended up doubled. The Magdalen opened on the 10 August 1758, eight girls aged nine to fourteen reportedly presenting themselves to be the first inmates. With the focus on rehabilitation rather than correction, they and their successors were encouraged to submit to three-year terms and to regard the hospital as a home before returns to families or virtuous employment. The premises comprised five houses on Prescot Street (the later sites of Nos 19–23) and at least two, eventually four, behind on Chamber Street, providing space, air and privacy. Originally intended to hold fifty beds in wards divided according to behaviour and education, those deemed most serious and best behaved being rewarded with a private room, the Magdalen boasted 136 beds by 1766. John Entick then reported that the institution was ‘formed out of several contiguous messuages or tenements, with a wall and small area before it: and to prevent the prying curiosity of the public, there is not only a close gate and a porter, but the windows next the street are concealed by wooden blinds sloping from the bottom of each, so as to admit the light only at the top’.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>The Magdalen followed a similar trajectory to that of the infirmary, finding its late seventeenth-century buildings costly to repair and the location increasingly inconvenient. Plans to erect a purpose-built hospital in Southwark were formed in 1763, but there were delays. By 1769 there had been 1,500 admissions; the institution continued on Prescot Street until 1772 when it did move to Southwark.[^8] </p>\n\n<p>The chapel was open to private visitors on Sundays, when offerings were taken. The infamous Dr William Dodd (1729–1777), the ‘Macaroni Parson’ who was executed for forgery, often preached and was formally recognized as the Hospital’s chaplain in 1761. Horace Walpole visited alongside Prince Edward in 1760:</p>\n\n<p>‘This new convent is beyond Goodman's Fields, and I assure you would content any Catholic alive. … The chapel is small and low, but neat, hung with Gothic paper and tablets of benefactions. At the west end were inclosed the sisterhood, above a hundred and thirty, all in greyish brown stuffs, broad handkerchiefs, and flat straw hats with a ribband pulled quite over their faces. As soon as we entered the chapel, the organ played, and the Magdalens sang a hymn in parts; you cannot imagine how well. The chapel was dressed with orange and myrtle, and there wanted nothing but a little incense, to drive away the devil – or to invite him. Prayers then began, psalms, and a sermon; the latter by a young clergyman, one Dodd; who contributed to the Popish idea one had imbibed, by haranguing entirely in the French style, and very eloquently and touchingly. He apostrophised the lost sheep, who sobbed and cried from their souls – so did my Lady Hertford and Fanny Pelham. … From thence we went to the refectory, where all the nuns, without their hats, were ranged at long tables ready for supper.’[^9]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 23263: Post Office Directories: <em>Facilities Management Journal</em>, Jan 2014, pp.20–24: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Samuel Sturmy, <em>The Mariner’s Magazine, stor'd with these Mathematical Arts</em>, 1700, p.4, as quoted in Robert Collis, <em>The Petrine Instauration: religion, esotericism and science at the Court of Peter the Great, 1689–1725</em>, 2012, pp.61–4: The National Archives, C5/148/42: British History Online, Four Shillings in the Pound Assessments, 1693–4</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: London Metropolitan Archives, Land Tax Returns (LT): <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) sub</em> Colson: The National Archives, PROB11/821/209: blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/mullerlibrary/2013/11/</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>London Daily Post and General Advertiser</em>, 24 July 1741, p.2</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 2 June 1743, p.1: LT: Barts Health Archives (BHA), RLHLH/A/4/1, p.155; RLHLH/A/5/1, <em>passim</em>; RLHLH/A/5/2, pp.5,77,109</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LT: BHA, RLHLH/A/5/1: pp.257,306; RLHLH/A/5/2, pp.75,77,82,87–8,118,124,284–6; RLHLH/A/5/3, p.43: A. E. Clark-Kennedy, <em>London Pride: Story of a Voluntary Hospital,</em> 1979, pp.71–2</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: John Entick, <em>A New and Accurate History and </em><em>Survey of London</em><em>, </em>vol.4, 1766, p.311</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: LT: <em>ODNB sub</em> Dingley and Hanway: H. M. Colvin, <em>Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840</em>, 1995, 3rd edn, pp.304–5: Jonas Hanway, <em>Thoughts on the plan for a Magdalen-House for repentant prostitutes</em>, 1758: H. F. B. Compston, <em>The Magdalen Hospital: The story of a great charity</em>, 1917, pp.41–2,68–9: G. Howson, <em>The Macaroni Parson: A life of the unfortunate Dr Dodd</em>, 1973, p.42: J. H. Appleby, ‘Robert Dingley, FRS (1710–1781), Merchant, Architect and Pioneering Philanthropist’, <em>Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London</em>, vol.45/2, 1991, pp.139–54: Miles Ogborn, <em>Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1870</em>, 1998, pp.39–74</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Horace Walpole to George Montagu, 26 Jan 1760, in <em>Letters from the Hon Horace Walpole to George Montagu Esq</em>, 1818, p.192</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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{
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"body": "<p>The extensive archives of this church are held at Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives</p>\n",
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{
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"title": "Katy (?) of the Queen's Head",
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"body": "<p>A neighbour - and former colleague - would go into the Queen's Head on Fieldgate Street. He said that the landlady claimed to be a Polish Countess... was she 'Katy' and married to George the Pole? (see above) I read this: '...the Queen’s Head, one of those pubs bigger on the inside than the outside, and so convenient I hear you say. Katy, is that what she was called? She runs a tight ship, the dossers are allowed in when they have money in their pockets. Piss away your last penny but don’t you dare start your singing, or George will have you outside on your arse before the end of the first verse of <em>Kevin Barry</em>...'[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <a href=\"http://www.unofficialbritain.com/fieldgate-street/\">http://www.unofficialbritain.com/fieldgate-street/</a> </p>\n",
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{
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"body": "<p>I was born in 1949. My family lived at 18 Stepney Way and had been there from the time it was called Oxford Street. The matriarch of the family was my Booba, Sarah Steppel. My mother, her daughter Hetty, had married my father, Eugen Grunwald, in 1942. He had arrived in the UK from Czechoslovakia on 4th August, 1939, armed with a work permit. He had trained as a chef and the work permit had been granted by <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/874/detail/#128-130-whitechapel-road\">Feld's Restaurant</a> on Whitechapel Road. He had lodged with my Booba and had then married the landlady's daughter. They stayed living with my Booba, who ruled the roost until her death in 1970. I attended Fairclough Street (later Henriques Street) <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1689/detail/\">Infant School</a> and then followed my sister, Frances, to <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1057/detail/\">Rutland Street Primary School</a>. Our shul was <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1463/detail/#history\">New Road Synagogue</a>, where I was barmitzvahed in 1962. The family shul had been Dunk Street, but that had been bombed during the war. I was lucky enough, thanks to an inspirational Head Teacher at Rutland Street, Mrs Giles, to get a scholarship to City of London School. In 1960 or 61 my family moved to a small block of flats in Myrdle Street, when 18 Stepney Way was demolished to make room for the Dental School. I remained living there until I qualified at the Bar in 1972. My parents remained there until they died, my father in 1998 and my mother in 2002. I have many fond recollections of the area.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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{
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"body": "<p>The Magdalen Hospital’s premises were advertised in July 1772 with a fifty-year building lease. This sale evidently failed as several houses with large gardens were again being promoted for redevelopment in June 1778. The hospital estate had been combined with adjoining property to the east, the three westernmost houses that Thomas Quarrill had built in the 1740s with leases that ran to 1777–8; William Quarrill vacated the end house after 1775. In 1778–81 a uniform terrace of nine large houses went up, with Magdalen Passage formed to the east as a way through to Chamber Street. It came to be known as Magdalen Buildings or Magdalen Row (16–24 Prescot Street from 1869). The builder of Nos 4 and 7–9 (Nos 19 and 22–24) was Thomas Tourll, a Limehouse timber merchant, who in January 1779 abandoned unfinished carcasses having fallen bankrupt. Other builders remain unknown. Nos 5 and 6 (Nos 20–21) had been completed and offered with sixty-year leases. The houses, possibly all now complete, were entirely empty in 1781. This appears to have been too high-quality a speculation for its location. On plain three-bay four-storey and basement stock-brick fronts there were pedimented Doric doorcases, a surprisingly old-fashioned plat band to the first floor, and blind central windows in the top storey on account of centre-valley or butterfly roofs. X-pattern iron railings, misleadingly called <em>chevaux de frise</em>, secured the forecourts. Inside, each house had three parlours, a dining room, eight bedrooms, two kitchens, and wine and coal vaults, with coach-houses and stables to the rear for Nos 5–8 (Nos 20–23) on what became Yeoman’s Yard off Chamber Street.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Takers were found, and six of the houses were occupied by 1783, including by Abraham Goldsmid (<em>c.</em>1756–1810) at No. 2 (No. 17), moving here from the family home on Leman Street. It was 1791 before all were occupied, many early residents being merchants. The first occupant in No. 8 (No. 23) by 1783 was James Fisher, an attorney, followed in 1788 by William Lafosse, who was or had been Fisher’s partner, then from 1791 by Benjamin Nind, another attorney and Secretary of the Middlesex Dispensary, whose lease was held by John Harris (see below). Nind stayed resident here until about 1823. Abraham Abrahams, a watchmaker, followed until at least 1830 when the property was also premises for Milligen & Co., wholesale jewellers. Henry Trinder, a dealer in glass objects, took the house on and then in the 1840s Ann Pool, a widow, made it a lodging house.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>In 1838 the executors of Giles Crompe, a Clothworker, sold the freehold of all nine Magdalen Row houses with four more on Chamber Street. They were advertised as having ‘excellent counting houses, show rooms and other buildings … particularly adapted to professional men or merchants’, but by this time Prescot Street was losing appeal for gentlemanly traders.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>No. 8 (No. 23) was leased around mid-century by Samuel Elias Moss, a Houndsditch-based wholesale jeweller trading as Moss and Levetus. He lived here with three Irish servants and twelve relatives, including his sister Marian, a governess married to Alphonse Hartog, a professor of languages from France. Abraham Levy, an elderly gentleman, moved here from 48 Prescot Street with his servant. Then Salomon Pool, a Dutch-born cattle salesman, made No. 23 his home in the late 1860s. English Martyrs’ Roman Catholic Church briefly had the house for a presbytery around1880. Moses Goldstein, a Polish cap maker, followed and it was probably during his tenure that the garden was built over with a workshop that was used around 1900 by Harris Braidman & Co., boot-makers. Tailoring followed in the first decades of the twentieth century. H. Frost Ltd, plumbers and builders, were based at No. 23 from after the Second World War to around 1986 when the building had to be shored up. Repair and conversion back to residential use ensued with a rear extension replacing the former workshop. The building was in fact thereafter used as offices, being reconverted back to be a house in 1996.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>No. 23 is the only house from Magdalen Row to survive. Nos 17–19 (formerly Nos 2–4) stood largely unaltered until they came to be owned by the CWS from at least the 1930s. Arthur Crow, Whitechapel’s District Surveyor, and John Robert Smith, an architect, were based at No. 18 from around 1894 to 1904. The Sisters of the Immaculate Conception moved their convent to No. 17 from about 1904 to 1928. The Women’s Co-operative Guild leased No. 17 from the CWS for its headquarters from 1936 until 1940, and during 1939 it was also the address of the No Conscription League, whose Honorary Secretary was the former Labour Co-operative MP, James Hindle Hudson. The row was damaged in a raid in 1940. The site of Nos 20–22 was developed in 1953 with a three-storey brick-faced office building for the Shipping Federation, from where seamen signed on to ships via the Merchant Navy Reserve Pool. The ruinous houses at 17–19 Prescot Street had been cleared by the 1960s and the CWS pushed for office use of the site on a planning-gain basis. No. 16 survived till about 1984 when office development was permitted.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 21 July 1772, p.4; 26 May 1773, p.3; 8 Dec 1778, p.4: <em>Morning Post</em>, 23 June 1778, p.1; 28 Jan 1779, p.3; 15 Sept 1791, p.4: <em>Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser</em>, 15 Dec 1778, p.4: <em>General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer</em>, 10 March 1779, p.5: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 17 March 1808, p.4: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax Returns (LT): Stephen Porter (ed.), <em>Survey of London, vol.43: Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs</em>, 1994, p.71</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The World</em>, 15 Aug 1791, p.2: <em>Oracle</em>, 24 Oct 1798, p.1: Ancestry: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub</em> Goldsmid: LMA, LT; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/497/1017869: Post Office Directories (POD): <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 21 March 1839, p.4: The National Archives (TNA), BT43/60/63006: Census</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>The Sun</em>, 30 Jan 1838, p.1: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 3 Aug 1841, p.4: TNA, PROB11/1881/210</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: POD: Census: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 29 June 1894: LMA, District Surveyors Returns (DSR): Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), Building Control files 23273–5: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: THLHLA, L/THL/D/2/30/119: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/17/077204; GLC/AR/BR/17/077326/02; DSR: POD: J. Gaffin and D. Thomas, <em>Caring & Sharing: the Centenary History of the Co-operative Women’s Guild</em>, 1983, p.165: <em>Daily Herald</em>, 11 March 1939, p.8: Ordnance Survey maps: THP: Linda Carole Johnson, ‘Planning Gain in Tower Hamlets’, PhD thesis, Brunel University, 1988, pp.252–4</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-03",
"last_edited": "2021-04-30"
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{
"id": 1140,
"title": "Early White Church Lane",
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"body": "<p>White Church Lane's origins are as the north end of Church Lane, the only early north–south route through the parish of Whitechapel, in existence by the seventeenth century to link Well Close to the south via what is now Back Church Lane and a dogleg west onto White Horse Lane (subsumed into Commercial Road when it was extended), before another turn to run north to meet Whitechapel High Street along what was renamed White Church Lane in 1939. </p>\n\n<p>This northern stretch may not have been much built up until the 1660s, back building by the 1670s indicating density and low status. Church Rents or Maidenhead Court (nineteen mostly one- or two-hearth houses), later Dyer’s Yard, was behind the east side, on the site of No. 4A. Thomas Bridgwater, a silk thrower, was among early occupants in houses that appear to have shared upper-storey workshop space along with an adjacent warehouse. This yard was largely cleared in the 1760s for enlargement of the churchyard, a tiny four-house court, Church Place, squeezed in by 1790. Off the lane’s west side, Hatchet Alley (later Spectacle Alley, now Whitechurch Passage) gave onto Adam and Eve Court (thirteen two- to five-hearth houses) on its south side until about 1800; beyond there was Back Yard, already gone by the 1740s. Tenure of a significant part of this area appears to have passed from Robert Burchall junior to Dr Peirce Dodd in 1738. A substantial house on the lane’s west side at the corner of the alley facing the churchyard gate and next door to the Cow and Hare public house was held by John Weld (d. 1746), a silk thrower, then by Samuel Darkin (d. 1756), a Barber Surgeon who operated from ‘the sign of the Bleeder’, followed by his son, Samuel Darkin the Younger, ‘Bleeder and Operator of the Teeth’. His successor, here from about 1767 to 1787, was John Parkinson, another surgeon dentist whose son, James Thompson Parkinson (1780–1859), was in later life an architect and surveyor to the Portman Estate. A white-lead works and a cooperage lay to the west of Church Lane south of Colchester Street (now Manningtree Street) up to 1811. There was a sugarhouse on the east side opposite Colchester Street by 1769, when it was James Greenhow’s. It passed to Davey & Hounsom, John Doorman and Thomas Hodgson up to 1831. The Fir Tree public house was at the south end of the east side by 1760, adjacent to a site later taken for John Furze’s brewery, and north of John (later Assam) Street there were livery stables, possibly built around 1772 with six houses when the manor of Stepney ceded freehold possession of two acres on Church Lane’s east side to Samuel Bull and John Thompson Bull. The north end of Church Lane’s east side (Nos 2–12) was wholly redeveloped in the early 1850s and buildings to the south were cleared for the extension of the Commercial Road in 1869–70. Redevelopment since has been piecemeal, with the central part of the road’s east side replaced in 2000–2 by the Naylor Building West flats, and the south end of the west side transformed by the tower of 2018–19 at 27 Commercial Road.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: William Faithorne and Richard Newcourt, 1658: William Morgan, <em>London Etc Actually Survey’d</em>, 1682: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, C/OFR/1/14/2–4; P/SLC/1/17/32: The National Archives, E179/143/370, r.34; PROB11/826/219; PROB11/750/32: London Metropolitan Archives, M/93/028, pp.472–3; M/93/322; MDR/1772/5/160–1; THCS/432; Land Tax Returns: Ancestry: Bryan Mawer's sugar-refiners' website: Sheila O’Connell, <em>London 1753</em>, 2003, pp.92–3: Laura Wright, <em>Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names</em>, 2020, p.41</p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-06",
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{
"id": 675,
"title": "83–89 Fieldgate Street",
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"street": "Fieldgate Street",
"address": "Tayyabs (former Queen's Head public house), 83 Fieldgate Street",
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"body": "<p>Now unified as a well-known restaurant of Pakistani origins, this group comprises several distinct buildings. The former Queen’s Head public house (No. 83) was rebuilt in 1885–6 for Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Co., with J. T. Newman, architect, and Hearle & Son, builder. Grey paint disguises low-relief moulded and gauged red-brick architraves on the first floor.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The flat-faced three-bay building at Nos 85–87 was erected in 1907 with a two-storey (galleried) synagogue to the rear. This was for the Austrian Gemilus Chasodim congregation, and was founded by Simon Lewis, an oilman of Mile End Road (later Wentworth Street). Samuel Lissner of Cannon Street Road was the builder. No. 89 went up separately at the same time, built by George Barker for Abraham Steinberg, a grocer of 117 New Road who established a chandler’s shop here. Both developments (Nos 85–89) were assigned to Frederic Roger Betenson, architect. From the 1920s to the 1950s the synagogue was used as the Chevra Kehal Chasidim, different sects worshipping together, and perhaps reflecting a move from 33–35 Fieldgate Street or Black Lion Yard. A change of use for storage was approved in 1972, and later the former shtiebl became Tayyabs restaurant kitchen. Tayyabs grew from 1970s origins as the Spicy Foods snack bar at No. 89, adding other outlets before unifying the group in 2005, the Queen’s Head having closed in 2001.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>The Builder</em>, 28 Feb. 1885, p. 326: Royal London Hospital Archives, RLHLH/S/1/4; RLHLH/D/3/6; RLHLH/D/3/24, p. 14: The National Archives, IR58/84790/781</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives, Distriict Surveyor's Returns: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 28 July 1916, p.11: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archivevs, Building Control file 40634: Post Office Directories: Census returns: <em>Guardian</em>, 8 May 2005</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-02",
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{
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"title": "Former Clergy House (St Mary's House), 2 White Church Lane",
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"body": "<p>This site near the north-west corner of what was the parish churchyard was part occupied by the parish watch house and a fire-engine house from the early years of the nineteenth century. The fire-engine house fell redundant in 1875 and in 1881 the Rev. Arthur James Robinson sought a long lease of the site to build a curate’s house. The Vestry approved his plans but the project did not advance until 1892 when Robinson put forward a different scheme for a new building on the site of an old cottage and the former engine house. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>The Clergy House was built in 1894–5, seen through by the Rev. Ernest A. B. Sanders with Herbert O. Ellis as architect and Thomas Little as builder. Of red brick with stone dressings, like the parish church that had been rebuilt in the 1870s, its corner turret gave it a strong presence. This was diminished by the loss of a conical roof, perhaps due to war damage, which may also account for the rebuilding of the north flank elevation. The building accommodated not just curates, but also the Working Men’s Club and the Lads’ Brigade on its lower storeys. It was converted to be a Post Office in the mid 1930s and there was upper-storey office use from the 1940s. The building now houses a Japanese restaurant. [^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/SMW/A/1/1: London Metropolitan Archives, P93/MRY1/092; DL/A/C/MS19224/441</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: District Surveyors Returns: G. Reginald Balleine, <em>The Story of St Mary Matfelon</em>, 1898, p. 38: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/THL/D/1/1/117: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2016-06-22",
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{
"id": 906,
"title": "41 Royal Mint Street",
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"body": "<p>This four-storey internally metal-framed warehouse was built in 1883–4 by Samuel Blow, a builder based at 3 Royal Mint Street, near Tower Hill, in a seventeenth-century timber house. It was in use by the Great Northern Railway Company by 1887. Jane Cooper had it as a chandler’s shop from about 1894 to 1910, and the United Sponge Company, importers and dealers in sponges and chamois leathers, held the building from the early 1920s to the late 1940s. It was converted to community and residential use in 1978–82 as part of the Royal Mint Estate.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns; Collage 119997: Goad insurance maps: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2019-05-01",
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{
"id": 648,
"title": "Brewers' Company almshouses and garden",
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"street": "Stepney Way",
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"body": "<p>In 1882 the Rev. Sidney Vateber and his charitable committee turned a ‘dirty and neglected piece of ground in front of the Brewers' Company almshouses (funded by John Baker's charity) on the south side of Oxford Street (now Stepney Way), just at the rear of the London Hospital, from a public nuisance, which it was, into a thing of beauty.’ The half acre ground, donated by the Brewers' Company, was provided with landscaping, iron gates, and an ornamental water feature with fish. A garden house was gifted by Lord Brabazon who founded the Metropolitan Gardens Association in the same year. The garden was intended for the use of patients, particularly the many consumptives, and local working people. Mrs Charles Cheston gave a water filter installed with ‘homely white crockery-ware mugs’ and a notice to ‘please help yourself’. The donors, it was reported, ‘will feel amply rewarded… when they see working-men spending their dinner-hour... washing down their bread and cheese with a draft of fresh, filtered water'.[^1] Some of the charitable contributions had questionable origins. Charles Cheston was for decades solicitor to William Amherst, Lord of Hackney, and oversaw construction of much of Dalston and Stoke Newington. When Cheston committed suicide in 1906 it was discovered he had embezzled around £250,000 (perhaps £25m today), ruining Lord Amherst. Charles Cheston was also for many years trustee and treasurer of the East London Hospital for Children. </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>East London Observer</em>, 8 July 1882</p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-12",
"last_edited": "2021-02-23"
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"id": 914,
"title": "Royal Mint Gardens",
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"body": "<p>The north side of Royal Mint Street was clear in the 1970s save for car parking and the survival next to Mansell Street of a hydraulic accumulator tower of 1894 and 1913 from the Midland Railway Company’s depot. With the formation through this site of the Docklands Light Railway in the 1980s, the British Rail Property Board, as landowner, planned to develop the remaining ground, which widened to the west, employing Watkins Gray International (Ivor Berresford) as architects, working with Ove Arup & Partners, and contemplating air rights over the railways. The Royal Fine Art Commission judged an office scheme, which rose to ten storeys at its west end, unacceptably bulky in 1989. Revised plans from Oxford Real Estates Ltd and the same architects up to 1996 were consistently rejected by the Commission, whose Deputy Secretary, Richard Coleman, noted ‘The site requires the skills of an architect of immense ingenuity and a developer with deep pockets and considerable nerve.’[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Even so, the ten-storey office and retail scheme gained planning permission in 1998. It was amended in 2003–4, but again deferred. From 2008 the project and planning consents were taken forward by Zog Brownfield Ventures Ltd, a joint venture between the Zog Group, a consortium of property companies, and HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) that had been incorporated in 2007, employing GML Architects Ltd. Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd, which had inherited the freehold, granted ZBV (RMS) Ltd an option on a 999-year lease on the 2.7 acre site and air rights. In 2011–12 this was assigned to IJM Land, a major Malaysian construction and property company, which had formed another joint venture, IJM Land Berhad/RMS (England) Ltd. This new developer employed Broadway Malyan to design a new and differently purposed complex. This proposed a twelve-storey block to the west for a 236-room hotel with 33 apart-hotel spaces and 79 flats, and, further east beyond open ground connecting Royal Mint Street and Chamber Street, three fifteen-storey blocks for 266 flats above shops and offices, all cantilevered over the railways as far as Chamber Street, where use would be made of the London and Blackwall Railway viaduct’s arches. This huge project, which can only be described as bulky, was deemed acceptable. Farrells (London) LLP were engaged as architects, working with AKT II as structural engineers, and Chris Blandford Associates as landscape designer. Reworked plans for what was named Royal Mint Gardens were advanced and agreed in 2014–15. The eastern section was taken forward first, revised as 254 mixed-tenure flats in fourteen-storey blocks, incorporating ground-floor shops and first- and second-floor offices, with central gardens at third- and fifth-floor levels, and is being built in 2018–19 by the JRL Group’s Midgard Ltd. The western hotel block is set to follow.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4625/C/02/036</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>New London Architecture – Project Showcase, New Ideas for Housing</em>, 2015, p. 86: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2019-05-01",
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"id": 1141,
"title": "The Lambeth Street area in the eighteenth century",
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"body": "<p>The eighteenth century saw gradual industrialisation of the Lambeth Street area. The west side of Rupert Street was from an early date effectively a service yard for Leman Street’s properties. On the triangle between Rupert Street and Lambeth Street commercial activity increased, especially at the south end. Joseph Bagnall, who had married John Hooper’s widow Margaret and sold up a huge sugar business in 1722 that included premises on Leman Street, took a short lease in that year of an already existing sugarhouse on Lambeth Street, probably on the west side adjacent to Johnson’s Court. Successive owners enlarged these or nearby premises, Christian Schütte in the 1730s, and William Baker in partnership with John Carter in the 1740s. Baker over-extended himself and forged nearly £1,000 of East India Company warrants for which he was hanged at Tyburn in 1750. Successors were John Walker and James Richdale (d. 1799).[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Further north off the west side of Lambeth Street there was a large stable yard by the 1730s that came to be associated with the Flying Horse public house. Other pubs in the area were the White Bear (sometimes the White Hart) on the east side of Lambeth Street immediately south of the alley that projected Johnson’s Court into Masters’ Garden, the Crown (sometimes the Crown and Sugar Loaf), on the south-east corner of Rupert Street and Johnson’s Court, and the White Hart at the junction of Rupert Street and Lambeth Street on Hooper’s Square. Domestic industry can be instanced by James Purdey, a blacksmith whose family occupied a house on Lambeth Street’s east side (No. 30) from the 1750s to the 1790s. His son, James Purdey (1784–1863), rose to prominence as a gun maker.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax Returns (LT): Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/PAG/1/4/1/2–7: <em>Whitehall Evening Post</em>, 3 Jan 1751: <em>Select Trials … at the Old Bailey … 1741 to 1764</em>, 1764, pp.64–71: Bryan Mawer's sugar-industry website</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, LT; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/399/639775: THLHLA, P/PAG/1/4/1/1; P/PAG/1/4/1/4: Ancestry: Post Office Directories: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub</em> Purdey</p>\n",
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"body": "<p><em>Establishment of the mosque</em></p>\n\n<p>In 1905 a number of prominent Indian Muslims in London ‘conducted the ‘Id (Eid) prayers in Hyde Park, near Marble Arch, in spite of sleet and snowfall’.[^1] The lack of a place for indoor Muslim worship in the Imperial capital led Syed Ameer Ali, a judge, the first Indian Privy Councillor and an Islamic scholar, to convene a meeting at the Ritz Hotel in 1910 that led to the founding of the London Mosque Fund, established to carry forward the building in London of a mosque for Muslims of all nationalities and schools of thought. Early supporters included the Aga Khan, as well as some prominent non-Muslims, notably (Arthur) Oliver Villiers Russell, 2nd Baron Ampthill, who had been Governor of Madras and acted as Viceroy of India, Charles Wallace Alexander Napier Ross Cochrane-Baillie, 2nd Baron Lamington, who had been Governor of Bombay, and Professor (Sir) Thomas Walker Arnold, another scholar of Islam. Initially Friday prayers were held in rented rooms in the West End. </p>\n\n<p>After the formation in 1934 of the Jamiat-ul-Muslimin, a charitable society for the promotion of Islam formed by predominantly working-class Muslims in East London, the East End came to be preferred as a place for this worship, and for the intended mosque. The area’s docks meant that Asian sailors, known as Lascars, had settled there, giving the locality a Muslim population of 500 to 1,000 in the 1930s, much the largest concentration in any part of London. It was also relevant to the Fund’s shift that in 1928 the Nizamiah Mosque Trust had been separately established to provide a mosque in central London.</p>\n\n<p>The King’s Hall in the Commercial Road (No. 85, just west of Settles Street) was rented for Friday prayers until 1940 when sufficient money (£2,800) had accrued to permit the purchase of three early nineteenth-century terrace houses a distance further east at 446–450 Commercial Road. Following a programme led by Lt. Col. Sir Hassan Suhrawardy, Chairman of the London Mosque Fund Executive Committee, the converted houses opened as the East London Mosque and Islamic Cultural Centre on 1 August 1941, the first prayer being led by the Saudi Arabian Ambassador, Sheikh Hafiz Wahba. The capacity was said to have been about 400, spaces other than the prayer hall being mostly devoted to use as a hostel for Muslim sailors. There was also a library, and medical and burial services were provided. Attendances grew after the Second World War as more merchant seamen, many from Sylhet in north-east Bengal, settled in the East End.[^2] </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p><em>43–45 Fieldgate Street</em></p>\n\n<p>The Commercial Road house mosque was always seen as an interim measure, but for a long time the wherewithal for further development was lacking. Circumstances changed in 1974–5 when the Greater London Council acquired the Commercial Road property in a compulsory purchase order for a housing development. Sulaiman Mohammed Jetha (1906–1996), who had come to London from India in 1933 and run a spice importing business, was the Chairman of the East London Mosque Trust at the time. He played the central role in negotiations that led the GLC to provide for relocation of the East London Mosque, allocating it a site on the north side of Fieldgate Street, where Great Eastern Buildings (see p.xx) had been demolished in 1972–3. Plans for an expressly temporary pre-fabricated building were prepared by the GLC’s Housing Department, Maintenance Branch, Division M2C, in 1974 and at a total cost of £45,000 the mosque was accommodated from 1975 in cedar-clad single-storey premises at 43–45 Fieldgate Street, later the site of the Maryam Centre. </p>\n\n<p>The hall, square on plan, was used diagonally, worshippers facing south-east in <em>Qibla</em> orientation on carpeting that had been recycled from the Islamic Cultural Centre in Regent’s Park, then rebuilding. With a capacity of 320 it was too small to meet demand and many worshippers had to pray outside in Fieldgate Street. Offices and a library were housed in the front range and an ablutions hall stood to the west. Further west and separate next to the Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue there was a mortuary, an important aspect of the mosque’s community support.[^3]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p><em>82–98 Whitechapel Road</em></p>\n\n<p>Jetha continued to lead negotiations with the GLC and fundraising campaigns in London and the Middle East. First plans for a permanent mosque on the site of 82–98 Whitechapel Road were drawn up in 1978 with GLC agreement as regards transfer of the land, the eastern part of which was to be granted, the western part sold. Eventually, in 1982, Jetha also secured £192,000 compensation for the Commercial Road property. Another key figure was Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, Secretary to the mosque’s managing committee. The project was publicised with an estimate of £1m, proposing a building with a capacity of 2,000 that would be England’s second-largest mosque, smaller only than the Regent’s Park Mosque, which had been completed in 1977. The first scheme of 1978 was by Michael Jonas, a Potters Bar architect, who designed a building both Modernist and Islamised, intending a three-storey façade of concrete grillage, evoking <em>mashrabiya</em>, interrupted by a prominent minaret and backed by a large dome. This was not pursued and a second proposition in 1980 by Team 3, architects (including a Mr Ahari based in Belsize Park), presented an austerely Modernist four-storey glass-block wall interrupted only by a geometric arabesque-patterned entrance arch in front of a glazed dome over the prayer hall with a semi-glazed minaret set well back. This gained planning permission in 1981 but was subsequently rejected by the mosque committee. The projected building was said to look too much like a warehouse. Ahmed S. Eliwa, a Bristol-based Egyptian architect who was designing mosques in Maidenhead and Gloucester, drew up a third scheme in 1982. His far more traditional or historicist design included an ornate minaret and a large dome. Unlike the earlier projects, the façade was to be oriented to the <em>Qibla</em>, not aligned to Whitechapel Road. But this too was scrapped. The problems were financial rather than aesthetic. Indeed, it seems evident that there was a good deal of stylistic agnosticism or indeterminacy as regards formal criteria. Uncertainty as regards suitable modes of architectural design was characteristic of British mosque design at this period. However, as in many other mosque projects a minaret and a dome were fixed elements of the brief, though not religious requirements. Their presence was seen as primarily symbolic, to make it clear at a glance that the building is a mosque, whatever else the rest of the architecture might be saying. </p>\n\n<p>John Gill Associates, architects based in Eltham (Barry Morse, job architect), were approached, apparently on no basis other than that their sign board was noticed at a building site in the City, and a fourth scheme, taking yet another stylistic turn, was presented in August 1982. Crucially, this was estimated at around £1.2m as opposed to Eliwa’s £2.4m. It kept the prayer hall oriented to the <em>Qibla</em>, but also built up to the Whitechapel Road frontage. A foundation stone was laid on 23 September 1982, but the scheme did not gain full planning approval until April 1983 and the building work, by W. J. Mitchell & Son Ltd, began in June 1983 and continued through 1984. B.S.S. Designs Ltd acted as structural engineers and the moulding of glass-reinforced plastic (GRP) elements was by Anmac Ltd of Nottingham.</p>\n\n<p>The East London Mosque was completed at a final construction cost of about £1.4m and an overall cost of around £2m, the largest single contribution of £1.1m having come from King Fahd of Saudi Arabia. Jetha, as Chairman of the Council of Management, formally opened the mosque on 12 July 1985, with Sheikh Abdullah bin Subail, Imam of Masjidul Haram, Mecca, saying the first prayer. Some council members had argued against such a large building, which with its capacity of 2,000 was the largest community mosque anywhere in the British Isles. However, the decision to go ahead proved foresightful if not overcautious. Already at the opening it was recognised that the building would be inadequate to meet expanding demand.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The East London Mosque is prominently situated on the south side of Whitechapel Road. Constructed with walls of load-bearing brick, it mixes yellow/orange stocks with red trim, with reinforced-concrete stiffening and some steelwork. Flat-roofed forward parts comprised entrance spaces, a library, lettable shops and offices in two storeys. Behind is the domed prayer hall, a square-plan block set at approximately forty-five degrees to the road front to ensure that the rear (south-east) wall is correctly oriented (<em>Qibla</em>) to face the Ka’bah in Mecca. A single 100ft-tall octagonal minaret rises near the north-west corner of the forward block, its upper GRP part articulated around the balcony at its head with simplified motifs (<em>mukarna</em> and <em>mashrabiya</em>) of traditional Islamic derivation, and topped by a crescent (<em>hilal</em>) finial. This was the first mosque in Britain to broadcast the daytime call to prayer (<em>adhan</em>) through public speakers, something that soon led to controversy. </p>\n\n<p>The Whitechapel Road elevation is asymmetrically and somewhat awkwardly composed around the main (men’s) entrance portal. This has a double four-centred arch in a plain artificial Portland stone surround, across the head of which ‘THE EAST LONDON MOSQUE’ is prominently lettered (an early drawing envisaged this in Arabic script). Within the inner arch above the doors there is a stained-glass roundel bearing the word ‘Allah’ in green Arabic script. The portal is flanked by pinnacles, detailed at their heads like the minaret, though more simply and without crescent finials. To the right or west of the portal is what was originally a women’s entrance, in a smaller double four-centred arch with a stone surround. To the left or east there are four two-storey bays in which four-centred arches proliferate, blind over two shopfronts, another entrance for access to upper-storey offices, also with a door that served originally as an exit for women, and a small window, as well as in five-light runs of small windows in each bay except that of the entrance to light what were originally the library and offices, later subdivided for use as classrooms.</p>\n\n<p>The returns and south sides of the prayer-hall block were of similar brick and plainer. The <em>Qibla</em> wall had a central prayer alcove (<em>mihrab</em>) projection, removed around 2016, presumably in anticipation of expansion. A hipped roof rises to the circular GRP dome, which was intended to echo that of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. It stands over a brick band with small oculi, and is topped by a crescent finial.</p>\n\n<p>The main (men’s) entrance leads into a full-height top-lit vestibule that is an irregular quadrilateral, a simple quatrefoil-pattern frieze dividing its height, and its far side having steps up to three closely spaced four-centred arch-headed doors that lead into the prayer hall. The tympana above the triple doors are calligraphically decorated, with <em>shahada</em> inscriptions in square Kufic script. Shoe racks are placed near entrances to the prayer hall. Behind, against the front wall, an open-well staircase enclosed by an ornamental metal grille leads down to a basement hall, classrooms and a kitchen for catering to events such as weddings. Other stairs on the east side of the entrance hall lead down to the men’s ablutions (<em>wudu</em>) hall, which was designed with facilities for fifty people. The first staircase gives access to a first-floor walkway across the vestibule that originally led to the library. Ranged along the west side of the vestibule are rooms that were originally a committee room, a classroom and offices, displaying clocks and prayer times, timekeeping being essential to Muslim prayer (<em>salat</em>). Above, and only readily accessible via a staircase from the separate west entrance, were spaces for women, including an ablutions hall. This gave access to the women’s prayer gallery, which overlooked the prayer hall, an unusual arrangement in a mosque. It was fronted with four-centred arcading – one-way glass was originally intended so that the women would not be visible from the main hall. Above the shops to the east was office space.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>The prayer hall is a large open space with wall-to-wall prayer carpeting (<em>janamaz</em> or <em>musallah</em>) of Belgian manufacture. In traditional manner a pulpit (<em>minbar</em>) stands in front of the <em>mihrab</em> at the centre of the <em>Qibla</em> wall. Overhead, cylindrical pendant blocks articulate the dome where it meets the four angles of the hip. A painted calligraphic band describes the ninety-nine attributes of Allah in Arabic. This links the oculi, in which there is stained glass.</p>\n\n<p>The temporary mosque on Fieldgate Street was replaced in 1983–5 with space for car parking and a freestanding imam’s house (45 Fieldgate Street), a two-storey three-bedroom brick block graced with four-centred arches under a hipped roof. A single-storey mortuary was attached to the south-west side of the prayer hall. The women’s gallery was converted to form an additional classroom in 2002, and a women’s prayer hall with a capacity of 500 was formed in the western spaces on the first floor. The building of the Maryam Centre in 2009–13 (see below) displaced the imam’s house and allowed the first-floor women’s prayer hall area to be converted to be a viewing gallery.</p>\n\n<p>After it opened in 1985 the mosque’s capacity was quickly uprated to 3,000, without any extension, but even this was insufficient to meet demand. Regular attendance in 2003 was said to be in the region of 2,000 each day across five prayer sessions. Available space was regularly inadequate for Friday prayer attendance. Festival prayers had to be conducted in shifts.</p>\n\n<p>In Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets more generally there is in the early twenty-first century a large Muslim population, predominantly of Bangladeshi origins. Census figures do not supply a full account, but they are indicative, recording that the population of Tower Hamlets grew from 196,101 in 2001 to 254,096 in 2011, with the proportion of people defining themselves as Muslim rising from thirty-seven to thirty-eight per cent (71,839 to 96,536). Thirty-two per cent (81,377) of the whole population identified as of Bangladeshi origin in 2011. </p>\n\n<p>Dawatul Islam, founded in 1978 as a specifically Bangladeshi group, had been a dominant presence at the East London Mosque in the 1980s. It was displaced and succeeded by the Islamic Forum of Europe, another group led by British Bangladeshis. In 2003 the East London Mosque’s three imams were from Bangladesh, following the Hanafi school of Sunni Islam, as in almost all of Tower Hamlet’s mosques, but the broader-based origins of the foundation has meant continuing use by other Muslim ethnicities. Emphasis is given to the use of English, to encourage younger people to become involved. The East London Mosque is the largest and most influential mosque in east London, and one of the most important and heavily used places of Muslim worship in Britain.More than simply a place of worship, the mosque has increasingly operated as a community centre, with emphasis on welfare and education, social services, counselling and the organisation of activities. The growth of community support roles has embraced many forms, from formal on-site religious and general education, to partnerships in support of local-authority schooling, young adult education, and English as well as Bengali, Somali and Arabic language classes. Beyond education the mosque provides support in matters of housing, employment, funerals and personal counselling. It also endeavours to present Islam to wider society, aiming to be a bridge between London’s Islamic and non-Islamic populations. In the later years of the twentieth century the East London Mosque secured its status as a locally influential institution with political clout.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Sir Ernest Hotson, at the opening of the East London Mosque in 1941, as quoted by Fatima Ghailani, <em>The Mosques of London</em>, 2000, p. 34: This account draws extensively on: Shahed Saleem, <em>The British Mosque: An architectural and social history</em>, 2018, pp. 133–6, 155–67: Humayun Ansari (ed.), <em>The Making of the East London Mosque, 1910–1951</em>, Royal Historical Society Camden Fifth Series, vol. 38, 2011: Historic England Archives (HEA), East London Mosque report, 2002–3, BI No. 106882</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Saleem, pp. 155–6: Ansari, pp. 296–7</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), Building Control (BC) file 40631: <em>East London Advertiser (ELA)</em>, 4 July 1975: Saleem, pp. 156–7: Ansari, pp. 52–3: Information kindly supplied by Jamil Sherif, see surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/954/detail/#community-veteran-sulaiman-jetha</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Saleem, pp. 158–62: <em>ELA</em>, 26 Jan and 30 March 1979; 13 Feb. 1981; 1 Oct 1982; 15 April 1983; 29 June 1984; 19 July 1985: <em>Standard</em>, 1 June 1981: THLHLA, BC files 41854–6: Information kindly supplied by Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin: Mark Crinson, ‘The Mosque and the Metropolis’, in Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (eds), <em>Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography</em>, 2002, pp. 79–98</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: THLHLA, BC files 41854–6: HEA, East London Mosque report, 2002–3, BI No. 106882</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Ansari, pp. 53–80: Nazneen Ahmed, Jane Garnett, Ben Gidley, Alana Harris and Michael Keith, ‘Shifting markers of identity in East London’s diasporic religious spaces’, <em>Ethnic and Racial Studies</em>, vol.39/2, pp. 223–242 (225–232): Census: Sarah Glynn, <em>Class, ethnicity and religion in the Bengali East End: A political history</em>, 2015, pp. 179–92: surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/954/detail/#story</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Census records from 1911 list my great-grandparents: Jacob and Betty Felixson, who came from 'Russia'. They lived at 90 Brick Lane with their seven children: Golda, Millie (both born in 'Russia'), Rebecca, Sam (my grandfather), Alfy, Meyer and Pinchas. Jacob's occupation was 'Costermonger' or 'Fruit Hawker'. My grandfather, Sam, was born at 4 Bell Lane[^1]. He eventually moved to Hackney, where my mother was born and raised on Victoria Park Road. Jacob Felixson passed away at the young age of 47, in 1922. His last known address was 7 Queen St, Brick Lane - which I believe to be Coverly Close, off Hanbury street today.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Survey of London note: on the site of Brune House, Bell Lane </p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Survey of London note: on the site of Chicksand Estate, Block 201-223 Hanbury Street</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"b_number": "92-3",
"b_name": "92-3 Whitechapel High Street",
"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
"address": "92-3 Whitechapel High Street",
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"search_str": "92-3 Whitechapel High Street"
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"body": "<p>contributed by Barry Gelkoff</p>\n\n<p>This whole property is now a Costcutter shop, but prior to that <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/322/detail/#images\">No 93</a> was M.Prevezer, wholesale hosier. From 1956 until 1988 No 92 was Gelkoff’s, a high-class confectioners and tobacconist specialising in continental chocolates. In the 1920s it was a haberdasher shop owned by the Bronowski family. Their son, who lived there, was Jacob Bronowski who in 1973, by then Professor Bronowski, presented the television programme <em>The Ascent of Man</em> on the BBC. The premises for many years was owned by the Davenant Foundation Trust.</p>\n\n<p>Gelkoff's shopfront as it was in 1988 can be seen here: <a href=\"http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/05/19/alan-deins-east-end-shopfronts-revisited/\">http://spitalfieldslife.com/2012/05/19/alan-deins-east-end-shopfronts-revisited/</a></p>\n",
"created": "2016-11-02",
"last_edited": "2020-08-18"
},
{
"id": 978,
"title": "36 Commercial Road",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"b_number": "36",
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"body": "<p>A three-storey and attic shophouse of the early 1870s was replaced at No. 36 in 2015–16 for Nelcraft Ltd (Israel Gross) by Reddington Construction to the designs of PHD Associates. Seven storeys of flats over a shop (initially a nail bar) step back from a five-storey façade providing north-facing roof terraces to the top two floors. Some of the flats are Cuckooz serviced apartments.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Historic England Archives, MD94/00899–900: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: Post Office Directories: www.cuckooz.co.uk/locations/aldgate-east/?locations/aldgate-east/</p>\n",
"created": "2020-02-13",
"last_edited": "2020-02-17"
},
{
"id": 1116,
"title": "Premier Inn, 24 Prescot Street",
"author": {
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"b_number": "24",
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"body": "<p>A building of 1985–7, in use as a hotel, occupies the site of four early houses. That of 1778–81 at No. 24 (previously 9 Magdalen Row) was replaced in 1928–9 by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the order of priests that founded English Martyrs, to be a convent for the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, a branch of the Holy Family Bordeaux, who had since 1880 moved gradually westwards along Prescot Street, from No. 10 to the County Court to No. 17, ever closer to English Martyrs’ Catholic Church. J. S. Gilbert, of Norton, Trist & Gilbert, architects, and J. & R. Thompson Ltd, Acton builders, were responsible for this four-storey red-brick building, embellished with a figure of the Virgin Mary in a niche above the arched doorway. A rear wing had a first-floor chapel above a kitchen.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>A three-storey house with a garret in a steeply pitched hipped roof, perhaps in part still a building of the late 1680s, stood at No. 25 into the 1980s. There may have been some rebuilding upon the grant of a thirty-one-year lease in 1746. The house had a tightly wound twin-newel staircase with both column-on-vase and barley-twist balusters and there were angle fireplaces in the back rooms. A Captain Hicks had the house on this site in 1693–4. Captain Jasper (or Gaspar) Hicks (d. 1714), the captain of HMS <em>Kingfisher</em> who in 1704 was involved in the capture of Gibraltar, held this house in the early 1690s.[^2] A heavily quoined door surround was probably late eighteenth century and the front wall was seemingly rebuilt in the nineteenth century. There was a substantial rear extension by the 1870s and a long window was inserted for an attic workshop. The house had been inhabited in the 1840s by Moses Magnus, a merchant, followed by Louisa Daeffner, from France, who kept a boarding-house. After a decade of dereliction, No. 25 was a presbytery for English Martyrs from the 1870s to the 1920s. Thereafter it housed tailoring workshops until the 1960s.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>On somewhat narrower plots, Nos 26 and 27 were of unequal rateable values through the eighteenth century, and appear to have been rebuilt as a mirrored pair around 1800. In the 1840s and ’50s No. 26 was the home of Barnard Morris (1796–1880), the German immigrant cigar maker whose factory was on Half Moon Passage. His son, Philip Morris (1835–1873), after whom one of the world’s largest tobacco companies is named, grew up here. These houses were also homes to a coal merchant, a smith, and Jacob Salomons, secretary to the Hambro Synagogue.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>A large presbytery and community house for the Church of English Martyrs replaced this pair in 1881. The Oblates purchased Nos 26 and 27 in the late 1870s, Father Robert Cooke arguing that ‘the number of foreign Catholics of all nations and languages who sojourned for a time in the neighbourhood of the church … would more frequently avail themselves of the ministrations of the clergy if they could more easily ascertain where they resided’.[^5] The Carthusian Order made a substantial contribution to the building fund in memory of the Order’s eighteen monks, most from the Charterhouse, executed at Tower Hill in 1535–7. Designed by Pugin & Pugin (Cuthbert Welby Pugin and Peter Paul Pugin), the presbytery of 1881 was built by Kelly and Son of Highgate. It lacked any of the architectural ambition of the adjacent church, a plain four-storey and basement stock-brick façade lifted only by blue-brick stringcourses and a pointed entrance arch. It had seventeen rooms, but was recorded as accommodating only three priests, a visiting preacher, and a cook in 1891.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>The replacement of No. 25 was permitted in 1964, but not taken forward, and then refused in 1971 on grounds of historic interest. But the Oblates, feeling the pinch of reduced income in 1979, proposed redevelopment of the whole site at 24–26 Prescot Street for offices, envisioning a community centre to the rear on Chamber Street where the church had a redundant school building. They commissioned Tim Hamilton of Hamilton Associates, architects, to prepare plans and a postmodern, sharply angular and granite-clad elevation to Prescot Street emerged in 1981. This was well received by the church – ‘very attractive and fits in very well with the Church’.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>But it was only in 1982, when the presbytery at No. 26 was demolished, that the Oblates approached the Sisters about selling the convent at No. 24. The Sisters’ work had shifted from an emphasis on education to low-key community social-welfare projects. It was argued that moving into rented accommodation would better suit their outreach. The Sisters duly gave up the convent and moved to flats in Royal Mint Square, but only on a temporary basis. A proposal for a new convent on Scarborough Street was rejected by the GLC and the Sisters withdrew from the parish. The Oblates needed the income from the site of Nos 24–26 to sustain English Martyrs’ Church. They accordingly decanted themselves from their roomy presbytery to the upper storeys of 30 Prescot Street.[^8] </p>\n\n<p>Building work in 1985–7 appears to have been undertaken by Tarmac, retaining Hamilton Associates as architects. The ‘brashly unpleasant’ office block, named Juno Court,The office block, named Juno Court, which extends across a large site with a plain brick elevation to Chamber Street, was converted to use as a Premier Inn in 2005. A small community centre to the west on Chamber Street followed on.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), LC14367, Jean Olwen Maynard, ‘History of the parish of English Martyrs Tower Hill, vol.2: 1870–1886’, <em>c.</em>2005, pp.38,54: <em>Estates Gazette</em>, 24 May 1919, p.660: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyors Returns (DSR); Collage 119545: Post Office Directories (POD): English Martyrs’ Church (EMC), Visitation Returns, 1963: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1295/detail/#</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: British History Online, Four Shillings in the Pound Assessments, 1693–4 (4s£): The National Archives, C5/148/42: Ancestry: John Charnock, <em>Biographia Navalis</em>, 1795, pp.256–60: <a href=\"https://threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=crewman_search\">threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=crewman_search</a>: LMA, Collage 119539–40, 119545–6: Historic England Archives (HEA), London historians’ file TH5</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: POD: Census: DSR: Ordnance Survey maps (OS): <em>Architects' Journal</em>, 5 Nov 1975, p.959</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser</em>, 1 June 1779, p.8: LT: Richard Horwood's maps of London, 1792–1819: OS: POD: Census: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Freeman’s Journal</em>, 25 June 1877, p.7: EMC, agreement between Trustees of the Oblates and the Provinsulate, 1983; Codex Historicus, unpaginated</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: EMC, centenary brochure, 1965; Codex Historicus: <em>British Architect</em>, 10 June 1881, p.297: DSR: Census: photograph kindly supplied by Danny McLaughlin, surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1295/detail/#</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: EMC, letter from Father Coady to Illtyd (Harrington), 31 Oct 1981: THP: HEA, London historians’ file TH5</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: EMC, Father Coady’s correspondence, 23 Mar 1982 to 27 Jan 1983, <em>passim</em></p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, <em>The Buildings of England, London 5: East</em>, 2005, p.433: EMC, Father Coady’s correspondence, 16 Feb to 7 June 1979; letter from T. A. Morgan to Bateman, 17 June 1983: THLHLA, Building Control file 23276: THP: Interview with Father Oliver Barry, 23 March 2018, surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1296/detail/</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-04",
"last_edited": "2021-02-11"
}
]
}