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"id": 612,
"title": "Early history of the site of 100-146 Whitechapel Road",
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"b_name": "Former Royal Oak public house",
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"address": "Former Royal Oak public house, 118-120 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>Long frontages of waste ground on the south side of Whitechapel Road were the subjects of 500-year manorial leases from Henry, Lord Wentworth, in 1585. A 528ft stretch on the site of 100–146 Whitechapel Road, extending back 132ft at its east end so as to include what was to become the site of Vine Court, went to James Platt, a London gentleman; Thomas Wilson, a brewer, already had tenure of the westernmost 66ft. ‘Sundrie’ houses and other buildings were built on Platt’s land by 1658 when Meggs’ Almshouses went up at its west end. This whole Whitechapel Road frontage had been largely built up by 1682.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Platt’s lands passed via Robert Greaves of Greenwich, to Thomas Bateman (d.1659), a Whitechapel wheelwright. Now in the shade of Whitechapel Mount to the east, they were inherited by Bateman’s son-in-law Edward Conyers, and were sold in 1705 to Edward Elderton, a butcher who had tenure of grazing land to the south that had been owned by Richard Warren in the 1580s as pasture called Cooke’s Close. This was held with Red Lion Farm and together the property was acquired by the London Hospital in 1755 and 1772. By 1730 Thomas Turner, a Whitechapel house carpenter, had possession of this (Platt’s) estate, where there had been a plague pit in 1665 and where Vine Court had been formed, its main east–west part initially known as Walnut Tree Street. Turner died in 1733 leaving his estate to his son Henry Turner, a tobacco pipe-maker in Wapping, who died in 1737 dividing the property between his three sons. The eldest, John Turner, another carpenter, consolidated ownership of the property in 1750 after litigation. Westwards, Tongues Alley had been reshaped as two small yards and Hampshire Court extended south from the west side of Meggs’ Almshouses. Land to the south of Vine Court remained open till the 1790s and the Turner estate was repartitioned in 1817 following lengthy Chancery proceedings.[^2]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/04/23/turner-estate-in-1817.jpg\"><em>The Turner estate in 1817 (redrawn from The National Archives, C13/2777/49)</em></p>\n\n<p>East of the almshouses the property that Thomas Turner had acquired by 1730 began with a setback row of four houses (at Nos 102–108), with shops added in front by the early years of the nineteenth century (Ill. – Turner estate in 1817, redrawn). Beyond, a 3ft-wide passage called Cock and Horns Court connected to the west end of Walnut Tree Street (later Vine Court). On its other side there were six more brick houses and one of timber, set back and called the ‘whitehouse’. All but two of all these were one room deep. One of the largerhouses, on the west side of the main Vine Court entrance, was further extended to the rear in the 1820s for William Mace, a floorcloth manufacturer. There was then an attached schoolroom over the court entrance.</p>\n\n<p>By 1730 Thomas Turner had, and had perhaps built, a row of five timber houses (on the site of Nos 122–130) set well back from the road. Framed by more forward lying brick buildings the resultant small open space came to be called Turner’s Square. In its early eighteenth-century origins as Walnut Tree Street, Vine Court’s houses included a group called Dupaz’s Buildings, named for Solomon de Paz, a Sephardic Jewish merchant. The court as a whole comprehended about twenty small houses by 1770. On the east side of its entrance a large house (at Nos 118–120) was probably the public house known as the Morocco Slaves in 1730. It later became the Royal Oak. A large brick house on the site of No. 132 that enclosed the east side of Turner’s Square also had early eighteenth-century origins.[^3] John Kincey (sometimes Kinsey or Kensey), a coachmaker–wheelwright, took a 61-year lease in 1778 and built extensive workshop and warehouse ranges to the rear for coachbuilding. An even larger house on the site of No. 138 was built around 1770 (following a 61-year lease of 1763 to Thomas Pearce and John Lamb) on what had been open ground for William Menish, an innovative chemist who was here until around 1810. In 1776 Menish was accused, but acquitted, of creating at the New Road corner, ‘a nusance, in erecting an elaboratory and making spirits of hartshorn’.[^4] Menish was followed by John Burnell, a horn manufacturer, who also succeeded Menish at a mill and workshops on the north side of Whitechapel Road further west. There was a large yard to the rear that came to be used by stone masons. Kincey was at the New Road corner (formed in 1754-6) by 1780, with additional proprietorship of a number of small houses in the vicinity. In the decades either side of 1800 many of the occupants along these parts of Whitechapel Road were upholsterers, cabinet-makers, carpenters, harness makers and the like, including an umbrella maker.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/SLC/1/17/4: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), M93/176, 202 and 241: Faithorne and Newcourt's map, 1658: William Morgan, <em>London Etc Actually Survey’d</em>, 1682</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: THLHLA, P/SLC/1/17/4: Gascoyne's map, 1703: The National Archives (TNA), C13/2777/49; C107/175; PROB11/662/22; PROB/683/271: Rocque's map, 1746: Horwood's maps, 1799 and 1813</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: TNA, C13/2777/49; C107/175; PROB11/799/423: LMA, Land Tax returns (LT); Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks (THCS)</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Lloyd’s Evening Post</em>, 8 July 1776: <em>General Advertiser and Morning Intelligencer</em>, 30 March 1779</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: TNA, C13/2777/49: LMA, MS119136/516/1065824; LT; THCS: Post Office Directories </p>\n",
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"id": 223,
"title": "The former Eastern Dispensary in 1967",
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"body": "<p>A digitised colour slide form the Tower Hamlets Archives collection:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/787998252809543680\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/787998252809543680</a></p>\n",
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"title": "19A Leman Street (former Eastern Dispensary)",
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"body": "<p>The Eastern Dispensary was one of the oldest institutions of its kind in London. Founded in 1782 to provide free healthcare to poor local residents, the dispensary was first housed on the north side of Great Alie Street (in a shophouse on the site of Central House). It was supported by an ‘on-call’ midwife, able to care for women in their homes, and a resident medical officer alongside visiting surgeons and physicians of standing, including Thomas Southwood Smith in the 1820s and ’30s. By the 1850s, against the backdrop of growing demand from a swollen local population, the Alie Street premises were inadequate. Livery companies, local merchants and sugar bakers underwrote the building project. G. H. Simmonds, the secretary of the dispensary and a surveyor, prepared designs and John Jacobs, a builder on Leman Street, submitted the lowest tender in January 1858. The new Eastern Dispensary opened in February 1859. Simmonds, whose confident if staid architectural hand was active elsewhere in Whitechapel, followed the adjoining parochial school in deploying an Italianate palazzo style for a broad seven-bay façade with channelled rustication to its lower storey, pedimented first-floor windows, and loquacious explanatory courses and panels of incised inscription.</p>\n\n<p>The Eastern Dispensary remained popular until the 1930s. Many of its clinics, which drew patients from around London and surrounding counties, were held in the evenings to ensure patients did not lose income, nor employers manpower. Alterations to the façade in 1929 may have included removal of the cornice which was still present around 1910 but gone by the 1960s. Improved general health caused attendances to drop shortly before a loss of staff caused by the outbreak of war precipitated the dispensary’s closure in 1940. Governors hoped to re-open, but the establishment of the National Health Service in 1946 rendered the dispensary finally redundant. </p>\n\n<p>The building had been briefly occupied by the Jewish Hospitality Committee in 1944. Substantial renovation was undertaken to adapt the interior for a canteen and social club for allied forces. Thereafter the lease was transferred to the Association for Jewish Youth. The property was sold in 1952, and thereafter used for several decades by S. Turner & Co., second-hand clothes merchants. By 1980 the building was vacant and a period of neglect followed, punctuated by listing in 1986. It was refurbished and adapted to use as the Dispensary pub in 1997–8, the interior once again greatly altered to designs by Ronald S. Hore. Part of this work was restoration of the missing cornice and other repair that was necessarily reliant on a view of the building published in the <em>Illustrated London News</em> in 1859. The pub closed in 2019 leaving the building once again vacant.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Barts and London Health Trust Archives, RLHED/A/1/1; RLHED/A/2/2; RLHED/A/3/2; RLHED/A/3/5: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, cuttings 022, <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 25 Sept 1782: <em>The Builder</em>, 2 Jan 1858, p.19: <em>Illustrated London News</em>, 19 Feb 1859, p.172: <em>East London Observer</em>, 19 Feb 1859, p.3: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors Returns: Historic England Archives, London historians’ file, TH75: <em>Evening Standard</em>, 17 Oct 2000: Derek Morris, <em>Whitechapel 1600–1800</em>, 2011, p.146: Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, <em>The Buildings of England, London 5: East</em>, 2005, p.435</p>\n",
"created": "2020-07-31",
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"title": "East London Mail Centre and E1 Delivery Office",
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"body": "<p>The large concrete building which dominates the corner of Whitechapel Road and Cavell Street represents the last expression of postal activity on an extensive site which was once the centre of the Post Office’s operations in the East End. Before its closure in 2012, the East London Mail Centre (formerly known as the Eastern District Post Office) processed mail for the entire ‘E’ postal district, an area covering over 50 square miles from Chingford to Poplar, and was the eastern terminus of the Post Office Railway.[^1] During its 130-year association with the Post Office, the site has seen successive building projects prompted by rising workloads, technological developments and changing patterns of consumption.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/features/1227/SoL%20Whitechapel100041_PAfcdH2.jpg\"><em>The East London Mail Centre and E1 Delivery Office in 2016, photographed by Derek Kendall.</em></p>\n\n<p>In the 1880s, the Eastern District Office had outgrown its premises due south at 226 Commercial Road and the Post Office sought a larger site for a new chief office with room for expansion. The offer of a lease from the Trustees of Yoakley’s Charity in 1883 brought a piece of former waste ground near the London Hospital, occupied by a paper-stainer’s shop and two cottages, to its attention. With a 50ft frontage extending south from Whitechapel Road to Raven Row, the site was generous in size and its situation ideal.[^2] In preference to taking a lease, the freehold for the ground was acquired in 1886 under the Post Office (Sites) Act of 1885 and the new post office built to the designs of Henry Tanner of the Office of Works.[^3] The building comprised a three-storey red-brick range with a public office fronting Whitechapel Road, and a single-storey sorting office at the rear. The main elevation of the public office was grand in character, with a central pedimented gable and round-arched windows on the third floor. In contrast, the sorting office presented a robust brick elevation to Cavell Street, with a plain staff entrance and large recessed windows.[^4]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/features/1227/p_g06189_007.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>View of the sorting office range in Cavell Street of the Eastern District Post Office, looking towards the rear extension designed by Jasper Wager. Photographed in 1956. Reproduced by permission of the Historic England Archive. </em></p>\n\n<p>Rapid growth in demand for postal services, which by 1899 had caused the number of letters processed at the Eastern District Office to increase twofold, sparked plans to extend the building to relieve ‘cramped’ working conditions.[^5] Ground to the west of the building was acquired and a significant extension built, replacing shops at 198–204 Whitechapel Road, 15–19 Raven Row and Raven Place, an alley lined with almshouses known as Yoakley’s Buildings, built in 1804 for elderly female servants.[^6] Designed by Jasper Wager of the Office of Works, the extension was sympathetic to the appearance of the earlier building and nearly doubled the floor area.[^7]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/features/1227/p_g06189_002.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>View of the van entrance to the Eastern District Post Office in 1956, part of the extension built to designs by Jasper Wager. Reproduced by permission of the Historic England Archive. </em></p>\n\n<p>Further alterations followed with the construction of the Post Office Railway, or ‘Mail Rail’, to plans by William Slingo, engineer to the General Post Office, and Harley H. Dalrymple-Hay, consulting engineer. The underground electric railway was conceived in 1911 as a solution to the strain on London’s postal services caused by traffic congestion and a soaring volume of letters and parcels. It opened in 1927 to connect all of the capital’s major post offices, with its eastern terminus at Whitechapel. The line approaches from Liverpool Street, following the route of Whitechapel Road before curving southwards to meet the station platform and terminating in a loop to the south of Raven Row.[^8] Although the railway was closed in 2003, the infrastructure survives and has attracted proposals for reuse.</p>\n\n<p>The introduction of mechanised postal sorting equipment in the 1930s led to new requirements for sorting offices and Whitechapel Road’s was probably considered unsuitable for modernisation.[^9] A scheme for the redevelopment of the site seems to have been in place by 1956, when plans indicate that the adaptation of the former clothing factory on the east side of Cavell Street for post-office use was considered, most likely as an interim measure. The acquisition of Nos 180–196 Whitechapel Road and the adjacent builder’s works provided a substantial site with a frontage of over 200ft.[^10]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/features/1227/p_g14555_001.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>The new Eastern District Post Office, photographed in 1970. Reproduced by permission of the Historic England Archive. </em></p>\n\n<p>The earlier buildings were demolished and the present Modernist building constructed in two phases by 1970.[^11] The first phase comprised the eight-storey west block, which housed a ground-floor public post office with administrative offices above.[^12] It was followed by the adjoining four-storey sorting office, which extends along Cavell Street to Raven Row. The drab utilitarian exterior was the product of a short-lived initiative to standardise the design of post office buildings, in a new house style showcased in a 1960s exhibition produced by the architects’ department of the Ministry of Public Building and Works, headed by Eric Bedford. The main elevation facing Whitechapel Road is divided into eleven bays clad with prefabricated-concrete panels and horizontal bands of glazing. The structural frame of the building is exposed on the ground floor by four concrete columns flanking the van entrance to the sorting office.[^13] The widely publicised ‘modular system’ was contrived as a ‘common approach’ to building design to make post offices ‘instantly recognisable in any setting’.[^14]</p>\n\n<p>The interior of the sorting office was laid out for a mechanised workflow, which processed four million items each week.[^15] The ground floor functioned as a loading yard, with large entrances for postal vans opening onto Whitechapel Road and Raven Row. A warren of chutes and conveyors enabled the flow of letters, parcels and mail bags between stages in the sorting process. A chain conveyor brought inward mail bags from the yard to the sorting floors, to be processed by specialised machinery. The first, second and third floors of the sorting office comprised open-plan rooms with continuous steel-framed windows on each exterior wall to maximise light provision. Offices for inspectors were formed from light partitions. On the third floor, inward mail bags were opened and their contents sorted by size in the segregator machine. Small items were organised by stamp and postmarked in the automatic letter facer.[^16] The conveyor system fed items directly to the packet sorting machine, located on a mezzanine above the expanse of letter and parcel enclosures in the first-floor sorting hall. From there, the post was organised into outward mail bags and transported via spiral chutes to the ground floor loading bays or, if destined for the Post Office Railway, to the basement. The Eastern District relied on over 2,000 postal staff working through the day and night, and a lounge, games room and bar were provided on the fourth floor.[^17]</p>\n\n<p>The East London Mail Centre did not survive plans announced in 2000 to modernise London’s sorting system and, at the time of writing (2016), its former offices are occupied by tenants and only a modest delivery desk continues to operate. As the site has been earmarked for redevelopment by Tower Hamlets Council, the building is likely to be demolished.[^18]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: British Postal Museum and Archive (BPMA), POST 110/6007, ‘Eastern District Office publicity leaflets’, <em>c</em>.1970.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: BPMA, POST 30/514A, ‘Eastern District Office: site and plans’, <em>c</em>.1887.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: BPMA, POST 30/514A; BPMA, POST 91/2793, ‘Eastern District Post Office’, <em>c</em>.1903–1981. </p>\n\n<p>[^4]: BPMA, POST 30/1462A, ‘London Postal Service: Eastern District Office, site purchased for enlargement’, <em>c.</em>1907; BPMA POST 91/2793; Historic England Archive (HEA), G/6189/2, ‘East District Office, Whitechapel Road, E1, Elevation of existing P.O. to Raven Row looking east’, 16 May 1956; HEA, G/6189/7, ‘East District Office, Whitechapel Road, E1, Elevation of existing P.O. to Cavell Street looking south’, 16 May 1956; HEA, G/14555/1–2, Whitechapel Road and Cavell Street, Eastern District Office’, October 1970.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: BPMA, POST 30/1462A.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Charles Booth Online Archive, B350, p.111 [online: <a href=\"http://booth.lse.ac.uk/notebooks/b350/jpg/111.html\">http://booth.lse.ac.uk/notebooks/b350/jpg/111.html</a>, accessed 23 June 2016].</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: BPMA, POST 30/1462A; The National Archives (TNA); WORK 13/189, ‘London, Eastern District, Post Office. Additions. J. Garrett and Sons’, 7 March 1905.</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: BPMA, POST 20/361A, ‘Post Office (London) Railway, Plans, Sections, Session 1913’, 1913; BPMA, POST 20/152, ‘Post Office (London) Railway: Session 1913. Railways Nos. 14, 15, 16’, 1 December 1913; BPMA, POST 118/669, ‘Post Office London Railway – diagrammatic drawing’, 1937.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: ‘GPO: House style for offices’, <em>Design</em>, May 1963, p. 35.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: BPMA, POST 91/1414-15, ‘Eastern District Office Outhousing, Cavell Street, E1, proposed alterations’, 17 May 1956.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4052/052, ‘The Old Whitechapel Post Office Before, During and After Demolition and Replacement by the Eastern District Office’, 1960s.</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: Goad 11, 1965.</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: ‘GPO: House style for offices’, <em>Design,</em> May 1963, p. 35.</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: ‘GPO: Design policy in progress, an interview with Sir Ronald German’, <em>Design</em>, May 1963, p. 54; ‘GPO: House style for offices’, <em>Design</em>, May 1963, p. 35.</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: BPMA, POST 110/6007.</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: ‘Inside the Post Office’, <em>The Times</em>, 18 January 1971, p. 12.</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: BPMA, POST 110/6007; BPMA, POST 118/6173–4, ‘Eastern District Sorting Office, Whitechapel Road, London EC1 – isometric plan views of first floor mezzanine, first floor, ground floor and basement’, 1972.</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: <em>The Telegraph</em>, ‘Post Office ploughs £400m into London’, 26 September 2000 [online: <a href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/4466515/Post-Office-ploughs-400m-into-London.html\">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/4466515/Post-Office-ploughs-400m-into-London.html</a>, accessed 23 June 2016], Tower Hamlets Council, ‘Whitechapel Vision Masterplan’ [online: <a href=\"http://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/environment_and_planning/planning/planning_guidance/consultation_and_engagement/whitechapel_vision_spd.aspx\">http://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/environment_and_planning/planning/planning_guidance/consultation_and_engagement/whitechapel_vision_spd.aspx</a>, accessed 23 June 2016].</p>\n",
"created": "2016-06-23",
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"body": "<p>No. 38 Commercial Street is the sole survivor of a group of six warehouses built in 1862-3, some by the extended Moses-Levy family (who built the similar warehouses opposite on the site of Ladbroke Court and Resolution Plaza), with an alleyway to the rear.[^1] Similarly muscular and capacious as the warehouses opposite, the centre bays with loopholes and loading cranes, they had additionally dentil cornices and semicircular-headed windows to the top floor, the first and second floor with mildly Mannerist raised keystones over the lower windows and loopholes. The northmost warehouse, No. 40, adjoining the original Princess Alice pub, enjoyed brief exposure as the ‘Cooking Depot’ visited by Charles Dickens when it was newly opened in July 1863, and described in <em>All The Year Round, </em> 'where accommodation is provided for dining comfortably 300 persons at a time', and a full dinner could be had for 4 1/2d. [^2]</p>\n\n<p>The depot did not last long, closed by January 1865 and demolished c.1882 when Wentworth Street was widened and the Princess Alice public house rebuilt on its site.[^3] No. 38 was in use by various wholesale manufacturers, including Stower’s British Wine and Lime Cordials from 1869, the business taken over by Alexander Riddle & Co. in 1875, who expanded into No. 36; from c.1920 to the 1950s No. 38 was Witty & Wyatt, asbestos manufacturers.[^4] No. 34 was the first home of the Guild of Handicraft, established under the aegis of Toynbee Hall by Charles Robert Ashbee in the top floor of the warehouse in 1888 where it remained till it moved to Essex House, Mile End Road, in 1891.[^5] All the warehouses except No. 38 were destroyed in the war, the site becoming Mallon Gardens, part of the Toynbee Hall estate, in the 1960s, which was redeveloped again by Toynbee Hall, with a new building on the site of the former No. 36, in 2016-19. No. 38 lost its top floor during the war, then had it reinstated with a simple pitched gable in the 1950s, the loopholes and much of the decorative brickwork removed. A new setback top storey was added in 2000 when the upper floors were converted to eight flats to the designs of Neil Hawes & Associates, architects, for Aldgate Warehouse (Wholesale) Ltd. The ground floor and basement are currently occupied by The Complete Works, an independent school providing theatre-based education to children who have failed to flourish in mainstream education.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84809/2693: Ancestry: Tower Hamets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), B/ELL/2/2</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Charles Dickens, '<a href=\"http://www.djo.org.uk/all-the-year-round/volume-ix/page-588.html\">The Uncommercial Traveller</a>', <em>All the Year Round... incorporating Household Words</em>, 15 Aug 1863, pp. 588-91</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Perry’s Bankrupt Gazette</em>, 11 June 1864, p. 14: <em>East London Observer</em> (<em>ELO</em>), 21 Jan 1865, p. 3: <em>London Evening Standard </em>(<em>LES</em>), 5 Feb 1865, p. 8</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Post Office Directories (POD): <em>Chemist and Druggist</em>, 15 Sept 1875, p. 307</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Alan Crawford, <em>C.R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist</em>, 2nd edn 2005, pp. 32-41</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: POD: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: <a href=\"http://www.tcw.org.uk\">http://www.tcw.org.uk</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-17",
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{
"id": 138,
"title": "Whitechapel Pottery",
"author": {
"id": 44,
"username": "dan"
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"body": "<p>From 1996 to 2006 this shop was the site of Whitechapel Pottery, a pottery and art gallery run by Liz Mathews and Frances Bingham. Liz and Frances are now based at Potters' Yard in Tufnell Park.[^1]</p><p>[^1]: http://www.studiopottery.co.uk/profile/Liz/Mathews</p><p><br></p>",
"created": "2016-09-16",
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{
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"title": "105–107 Fieldgate Street",
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"body": "<p>This warehouse and dwelling of 1903 was built on a lease to William John Fage, a New Road metal dealer. E. W. Coldwell was the architect, F. W. Johnson of Whitechapel Road the builder.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Royal London Hospital Archives, RLHLH/S/1/4: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's Returns: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-02",
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{
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"title": "126–127 Whitechapel High Street",
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"body": "<p>This canted-corner building was erected in 1905-6 by W.J. Coleman & Co. to the designs of Martin Luther Saunders, architect (1858–1923).[^1] It is four stock-brick storeys over a basement in a workmanlike commercial manner with vestigial Queen Anne details to the windows – red-brick voussoirs and aprons, painted stone keystones. In 1914–23 it was a branch of Lloyd’s Bank, with a marble-floored banking hall superseded by Dunn & Co.’s second High Street Shop (see No. 75), this one a hatter’s.[^2] By the mid 1930s it was Dunn’s sole High Street shop, and they remained here until the 1980s. The upper floors, entered from Old Castle Street, were until the war divided between offices (accountants and estate agents), and offices and workrooms for clothing manufacturers, who largely took over from the 1950s. Vacant since the mid 1990s, they were converted for Abbey Road Estates Ltd to seven self-contained flats in 2010–11, with an extra floor added, the rear staircase relocated to the side, and the former staircase wing to the rear extended. The shop, formerly a Nationwide Bank, became a Costa Coffee shop in 2010.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Before widening of Old Castle Street in 1898, there were three houses on the site, the former Nos 126 and 127, narrow eighteenth-century shop-houses, and No. 125, which included the low entry to Castle Alley and a shopfront only 9ft wide, though with a prominent bow window.[^4] No. 126 operated as coffee rooms from the 1840s till its demolition, its proprietor, George Newton, diversifying in 1861–75 as an officer of the East London Building Society.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): Census</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Post Office Directories (POD): LMA, O/462/16: DSR: <em>The Investors’ Review</em>, 20 June 1914, p. 879</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets planning appliactions online: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives (THLHLA), B/ELL/2/12: DSR: LMA, SC/PHL/01/405/1733</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: POD: <em>East London Observer, </em>12 Jan 1861, p. 1; 4 Sept 1875 p. 1: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 8 Feb 1902, p. 12: THLHLA, B/ELL/2/40</p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-06",
"last_edited": "2019-07-05"
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{
"id": 613,
"title": "Meggs' Almshouses",
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"properties": {
"b_number": "100",
"b_name": "Ibis Budget Hotel (formerly Brunning House)",
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"address": "Ibis Budget Hotel, 100 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>In 1658 William Megges III, who had inherited the Hart’s Horne, Whitechapel’s largest house, and who remained unmarried and without direct descendants, built almshouses for twelve Whitechapel parishioners, who were to be single, church-going and over the age of fifty, that is ‘Antient’. They were sited immediately across the road from the parish almshouses on the east half of the frontage that is now 100 Whitechapel Road. Megges acquired a plot 90ft wide by 45ft deep from Edward Conyers. The almshouses were a simple two-storey building behind a railed forecourt. There were three three-bay sections, the centre stepped forward under a pediment bearing Megges’ arms and an inscribed panel of stone. Entrances in the middle bays of each of the three sections led to lobbies and staircases for access to the twelve single-room dwellings. Megges died in 1678 and his will granted £1,500 to be held in trust to provide for the inmates’ living costs and repairs. However, Megges’ nephew Sir William Goulston failed to apply the funds properly, a situation not rectified despite a Chancery decree in 1704. The almshouses, all occupied by widows, needed further benefaction which came in 1767 from Benjamin Goodwin who repaired and endowed them, as was recorded across the base of the pediment. A garden to the rear survived through much of the eighteenth century. Later benefactors included Luke Flood, who left £400 in 1818. There were further repairs in 1877 under W. A. Longmore, architect, but Meggs’ almshouses were replaced by St Mary’s Station on the District and Metropolitan lines in 1883–4. New Meggs’ Almshouses were erected by Whitechapel parish at 271–275 Upton Road in West Ham in 1893; they remain extant.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: John Strype, <em>Survey of London</em>, 1720, p.47: Robert Wilkinson, <em>Londina Illustrata</em>, vol. 1, 1819, pp.142–4: The National Archives, C6/368/5: London Metropolitan Archives, SC/GL/PR/S3/WHI/roa; MBW/2646/31/03; Collage 35108: Rocque's map, 1746: Horwood's maps, 1799 and 1813: Ordnance Survey map, 1873: <em>The Builder</em>, 30 June 1877, p. 672</p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-19",
"last_edited": "2020-10-20"
},
{
"id": 256,
"title": "Cambridge Heath Road and Mile End Road, 1969",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"street": "Cambridge Heath Road",
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"body": "<p>Another digitised colour slide from the collection of the Tower Hamlets Archives: the area in front of the White Hart pub on the Mile End Road recently cleared to widen the road. The houses on the left also subsequently went for the widening of Cambridge Heath Road:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/814784999312556032\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/814784999312556032</a></p>\n",
"created": "2017-01-10",
"last_edited": "2018-01-26"
},
{
"id": 679,
"title": "101 Greenfield Road (incorporating 18–24 Fieldgate Street)",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"tags": [
"Davis brothers",
"Lango House",
"synagogue",
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"body": "<p>One of the earliest synagogues on Fieldgate Street was the Crawcour Shul, a 'landsmanschaft' of immigrants from Kraków, Galicia, then Austria (now Poland) that was formed in 1887. Their premises in an annexe at the back of a shophouse at what became No. 18 were bought by the Litvish Chevra Bnai Wilna in 1890, and immigrants from Vilnius, Lithuania, were invited to join. The synagogue later became the Chechanover Shul (from Ciechanow, Poland) and survived until the 1950s.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Nathaniel and Ralph Davis (two of the seven Davis brothers) put up tenements with ground-floor and upper-storey tailoring workshops at 20–24 Fieldgate Street in 1895–9.[^2] By 1961, when it was set to be cleared, 22 Fieldgate Street had become a lodging house, disapprovingly described by Edith Ramsay as ‘nominally for coloured seamen… housing girls as well as men’.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The County of London Plan of 1943 recommended the dispersal of industry away from London’s inner boroughs, but recognised that small factories and workshops, heretofore scattered hither and thither, could not realistically be banished, but would need in some degree to be kept close to the housing of those they employed, and gathered together in low-rent premises. A particular concentration was envisaged around Fieldgate Street, extending from the Whitechapel Road to Commercial Road between Adler Street and the New Road. In keeping with this plan, but much more modestly, the Stepney–Poplar Reconstruction Scheme of the late 1940s proposed an industrial enclave to either side of Plumber’s Row, a heavily bombed area that took in most of Greenfield Road up to Fieldgate Street. This clearance and redevelopment project swung into action in 1954, but compulsory purchase and other difficulties meant that Walter Bor, the planner–architect in charge of redevelopment in Stepney in the LCC Architects’ Department’s Town Planning Division, had to revisit plans for the Plumber’s Row area in 1959 to accept mixed use.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>Building works began in earnest in 1962 with infrastructural preparation that included the blocking up of Yalford Street. Little was achieved along Greenfield Road and Plumber’s Row before the 1970s. One of the first buildings to go up was 101 Greenfield Road, on the west corner of Fieldgate Street. This was built in 1963–5 to plans by De Groot Collis & Co., surveyors acting as architects. The first lessees were Lango Ltd, textile wholesalers and jersey-fabric makers, so the two-storey concrete-framed, brick-clad building became Lango House. Non-residential institutional use was permitted in 2010 and the premises are the East London Business Centre in 2018.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 9 May 1890, p. 3; 10 June 1904, p. 24; 24 July 1942, p. 16: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84791/801: Post Office Directories (POD): Goad insurance maps, 1890–1953</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: DSR: TNA, IR58/84791/801: POD: Goad, 1953</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/RAM/2/3/12</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Denys Munby, <em>Industry and Planning in Stepney: A Report presented to the Stepney Reconstruction Group</em>, 1951: Michael Young and Peter Willmott, <em>Family and Kinship in East London</em>, 1957, pp. 165–6: <em>Architects Journal</em>, 23 April 1959, pp. 625–34: Patricia L. Garside, ‘The significance of post-war London reconstruction plans for East End industry’, <em>Planning Perspectives</em>, vol. 12, 1997, pp. 19–36</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: London County Council Minutes, 6 Feb. 1962, pp. 120–1: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/34/003669; /003705; /003754; /004534; /004644: Goad 1968: Ordnance Survey maps: POD: Toewr Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-02",
"last_edited": "2019-11-28"
},
{
"id": 697,
"title": "128 Whitechapel High Street",
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"id": 2,
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"body": "<p>The modest shop-houses at 128–129 Whitechapel High Street are survivors from the late eighteenth to mid nineteenth century, albeit heavily altered when combined into one building in 2007-8 when the owner, S. Reiss, occupant of the shop, converted the upper floors of Nos 128 and 129 into five flats served by a single staircase, to the designs of Clements & Porter, architects.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>No. 128 was described in 1914 as ‘old premises but in good repair’, and remains the only middling shop-house on Whitechapel High Street to retain a semblance of its late eighteenth-century appearance, perhaps because of the relatively slow turnover of occupants.[^2] Until alteration in 2007-8 it had a valley-gutter roof at fourth-floor level, and its appearance, with flat segmental window heads with widely splayed voussoirs, suggests it was rebuilt in the later eighteenth century, during the tenure, from 1782 to 1851, of the prominent Pace family of Quaker clock and watchmakers, or possibly their predecessor Samuel Meriton (d. 1800), the goldsmith son of a prominent City gold- and silversmith of the same name. Of the Pace family, Thomas Pace Senior (1753–1819) was there in 1782–1808, Thomas Pace Junior (1777–1829) in 1808–1829 and Thomas Junior’s son Henry (1807-?65) in 1829–38, latterly in partnership with his brother Charles. After Henry opened premises in King Street, Cheapside, his brother Charles (1816-97) continued in No. 128 in till 1851, after which the copyhold of the house was sold and Charles, a ‘generous man’ of ‘eccentric habits and peculiar dress’, emigrated to the United States, leaving $100,000 at his death in 1897.[^3] The shop remained a watchmakers (William Gordon) for a few years, and, briefly, a hatters, and from 1858 John C. Young (previously of Mansell Street, and sometimes Anderson and Young) builders and decorators, were there, with a drapers in the shop portion early on, until the mid-1870s when Thomas Thorpe, an oilman and Italian warehouseman (delicatessen), arrived, staying, assisted by his daughter, till his death in 1922.[^4] He was succeeded from then till <em>c</em>.1988 by Isadore Rinsler & Co, wholesale hosiers, who created a display window on the first floor in 1928, and painted ‘128’ still discernible between the second-floor windows.[^5] S. Reiss, men’s outfitters, previously at No. 129, succeeded Rinslers and remained there till c.2017, and the shop is now (July 2018) a combined barbers, dry cleaners and luggage vendors.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives (THLHLA), B/ELL/2/40</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84815/3233</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA),MS 11936/395/613865; MS 11936/441/812543: Brian Loomes, <em>Watchmakers and Clockmakers of the World</em>, London 2005, p. 243: England & Wales, Quaker Birth, Marriage, and Death Registers, 1578-1837: <a href=\"http://www.pacefamilyhistory.info/clocks.htm\">http://www.pacefamilyhistory.info/clocks.htm</a>: TNA, PROB 11/1624/1; PROB 11/1756/92: Ancestry: UK 1841 1851 Census; 1870 1880 US Census<em>: Globe</em>, 4 July 1838, p. 4: <em>Birmingham Journal</em>, 7 July 1838, p. 8: <em>Essex Standard</em>, 21 March 1851, p. 1: <em>San Francisco Chronicle, </em>10 Dec p. 10; 29 Dec, p. 12: <em>San Francisco Call</em>, 31 Dec 1897, p. 9: David Edmund Pace, ‘The Pace family of Quaker clockmakers’, <em>Antiquarian Horology</em>, 34/1, March 2013, pp. 60-71</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Post Office Directories (POD): Census: Ancestry: THLHLA, B/ELL/2/40</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, District Surveyor's Returns: POD</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-06",
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},
{
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"title": "132 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>A large eighteenth-century house on this site and Thomas Kincey’s extensive carriage-making premises to the rear were held by John Pinnell, an oil and colour man from around 1840. Pinnell Brothers gave way to Arthur Winckles Brown around 1886. A rear warehouse of 1855 that Brown raised a storey in 1886–7 was rebuilt in 1892–3 as the hip-roofed two-storey range that is now 123–127 New Road. The five-storey front block was not built until 1905, though with its stock-brick walls, red-brick and stone polychrome bands and cast-iron colonnette mullions, it appears distinctly more conservative in style than Brown’s earlier building to the west at 128–130 Whitechapel Road. Tailoring gradually moved in to the upper storeys of No. 132 from around 1920. By the time Brown died in 1929, he had converted the back parts of his yard to be a motor garage, rebuilt after the war and then again more recently as 121 New Road.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: Goad map, 1953: Ordnance Survey maps</p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-23",
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"title": "9 Manningtree Street",
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"body": "<p>Built in 1898-9 with 19 White Church Lane for Jacob King. Arthur C. Payne, architect, H. W. Brown, builder. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 41972</p>\n",
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"title": "From the Earl of Effingham Saloon to the Rivoli Cinema via Wonderland",
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"body": "<p>Thomas Spackman had a large property on the site of 100 Whitechapel Road around 1770. By 1790, when his son-in-law Walter Fillingham was in control, this was a public house that came to be known as the Earl of Effingham – Thomas Howard, the 3rd Earl of Effingham, was the Master of the Mint in 1784–9 and the Governor of Jamaica in 1789–91. Thomas Sims ran it as a ‘saloon’ from the late 1820s to 1851. It was enlarged and given a skittle ground in 1834–5, and a large theatre was added to the rear, perhaps in 1846, clearing part of Orange Court. This was entered through what had been a shophouse to the east of the pub, beyond which lay the entrance to Hampshire Court.[^1] The Effingham Saloon was said retrospectively to have been a conspicuous failure, ‘where broken-down actors declaimed, with a distressing want of respect for the letter “H”, to empty pit-benches and deserted galleries’.[^2] Phased enlargement and alteration in 1852–5 began with a gallery designed by John Hudson, the local architect, to admit up to 900, and ended in the charge of James W. Elphinstone and Frederick Neale, director and stage manager at the Pavilion Theatre on the other side of Whitechapel Road, possibly having employed William Finch Hill for work that seemingly doubled the capacity of what was now the Effingham Theatre (sometimes the New Garrick Theatre). By 1856 the establishment was being run by Morris Abrahams, later also based at the Pavilion. He remained here up to <em>c.</em>1904.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>In 1862 the Rev. James Cohen, vicar at St Mary Matfelon, singled the place out as a menace to his mission, ‘a school of vice and seduction’.[^4] Bracebridge Hemyng, one of Henry Mayhew’s collaborators, explained, ‘It has no boxes; they would not be patronized if they were in existence. Whitechapel does not go to the play in kid-gloves and white ties. The stage of the Effingham is roomy and excellent, the trap-work very extensive, for Whitechapel rejoices much in pyrotechnic displays, blue demons, red demons, and vanishing Satans that disappear in a cloud of smoke through an invisible hole in the floor.’[^5]</p>\n\n<p>In early 1867 William Booth preached regularly at the Effingham, which was said then to be ‘one of the dingiest and gloomiest places of amusement to be found, perhaps in all London…. The walls are black with dirt, the gaudy tinselled ornaments half-hidden with layers of dust, and the gaslights so few in number as to give an extremely cheerless and dispiriting look to the whole place.’[^6] Later that year and following the acquisition of two more houses on the pub’s west side, Abrahams redeveloped to create the East London Theatre, designed by Hudson, with decoration by W. Fenhoulet, the builder being John Palmer and Sons of Wapping. Substantial enlargement to the rear permitted the formation of a horseshoe-shaped auditorium with two tiers of balconies to give a capacity of around 4,000, greater than that of the Pavilion. Abrahams’ theatre garnered ambivalent acclaim, ‘in spite of the somewhat unpromising locality, [it] forms unquestionably one of the finest and most spacious dramatic buildings that have ever been raised in the metropolis’.[^7] Sadly it was short-lived, and seemingly went unillustrated. The premises were destroyed by fire in 1879, leaving only the outer walls intact.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>The seven-bay pub of 1867 carried on as the East London Tavern, and Abrahams, again working with Hudson, roofed over his ruined theatre in 1880–1 to form a lantern-lit drill hall.[^9] This accommodated the 2nd Tower Hamlets Rifle Volunteers, but only until 1894, by when Abrahams had advanced more ambitious plans. He had bought up cottages on Hampshire Court adjoining to the east, and in 1893 presented plans by Frank Matcham for a new theatre. Abrahams now had to contend with far greater regulation as to the safety of theatres and the London County Council found the scheme unsatisfactory. A year later new plans by William Hancock were advanced, but to no avail. Abrahams changed tack in 1895, proposing use of the drill hall for museum and exhibition purposes, called Wonderland Ltd. This was approved, provided the capacity was kept to 200 and visitors moved around and were not seated. A music licence (for ‘occasional musical selections’) and approval for a larger stage for an orchestra and dressing rooms were sought and granted. Wonderland re-opened in 1896 with Abrahams’ protégé Jack Woolf as manager. Inter alia, there were shooting galleries, and residencies by the circus and menagerie of Albert Haslam and his son Arthur (as Professor Anderton and Captain Rowland), with their ‘untamable’ lions. H. Chance Newton later reported: ‘To those amusement-seekers who may prefer to take their variety entertainment in a rough-and-ready form there are still such haunts as that Whitechapel resort fancifully named “Wonderland”. In this big hall are provided entertainments of the most extraordinary description. They include little plays, songs, and sketches, given first in Yiddish dialect.’[^10] Further theatre conversion schemes had been submitted and rejected when in 1898 the LCC discovered that the entertainment had changed from that of a museum, ‘to something approaching that of a music-hall’. The music licence was not renewed.[^11]</p>\n\n<p>The former drill hall had been adapted to use as a clothing factory in 1899 when a new redevelopment scheme by Matcham gained approval. However, the capital needed for the rebuilding could not be raised, and Woolf revived Wonderland. By 1902 the hall was being used for boxing, packed to the utmost with about 3,000 present. On boxing nights ‘“Wonderland” is to be seen in its most thrilling form.Then it is indeed difficult either to get in or to get out. In the first place it is hard to get in because of the great crowds of hard-faring - often hard-faced - East-End worshippers of the fistic art… In the second place, if you do contrive to get in you speedily find yourself so hemmed in by a sardine-like packed mob that all egress seems hopeless.’[^12] A police report concluded that proceedings to halt use for ‘boxing competitions, cinematograph pictures, gymnastic and juggling performances, and occasionally as a Synagogue’ was unlikely to succeed. The hall was extended to the rear in 1904–5.[^13]</p>\n\n<p>Around 1908 Woolf took ownership from Abrahams, who had retired to Hove, and the rear addition was enhanced, to plans by Samuel Wollrauch, surveyor, to be a small cinema, seating 558. Squeezed between Orange Row and Charlotte Court, this was the New Empire Hall, alternatively the East London Picture Palace. In 1909 the LCC summoned Woolf to explain his having permitted stage plays and directed the removal of a scene store and backcloths. Wonderland was burnt out in 1911. A rebuilding scheme for boxing, cinema and concert use was prepared by Ernest Rüntz and Son, who combined with Woolf to open a Wonderland Picture Palace on York Road in Battersea in 1912. The Whitechapel project was refused consent as was a successor from Matcham that omitted concert use, and another from William G. Ingram in 1914. Cinema use of the East London Palace, Theatre of Varieties, continued up to 1918.[^14] A fresh start was made in 1919–21. Moses Cohen, in partnership with David Morris and Isaac Lewis as Morris, Cohen & Lewis, of 21 Finsbury Pavement and 130–139 Commercial Road, redeveloped the whole Wonderland site and land to the east around St Mary’s Station, as the Rivoli Cinema, designed by George Coles of Adams & Coles, architects, this being their first major project. The cinema had seating for 2,230 and standing room for 349. To Whitechapel Road twin three-storey and attic blocks flanked the diminutive station with up-scale dignity. They were faience-faced in imitation of stone, with giant Corinthian orders above arcades. Entrances were to the west, with tea and dance rooms above, where the tavern had stood. The east block had the exit vestibules below nine flats for the rehousing of people from the ‘slums’ on Hampshire Place that were cleared for the project. The Rivoli suffered bomb damage twice in the Blitz. Coles prepared a scheme for restoration as a smaller Granada Cinema in 1956, but this was abandoned and the site had been sold for other purposes by 1958. A remnant of the Rivoli survives as a strip alongside 102 Whitechapel Road.[^15]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/1248/76: <em>Morning Post</em>, 6 Nov 1816: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax returns (LT): Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks (THCS) </p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The Nonconformist</em>, 10 April 1867, p. 290</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, MBO Plans/484–6; District Surveyors Returns (DSR): <em>The Era</em>, 13 Nov. 1853, p. 16: <em>The Builder</em>, 13 May 1854, p. 260: <em>Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle</em>, 23 July 1854, p. 3: East London Theatre Archive, 38041008523284: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Church of England Record Centre, Tait 441/457</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Henry Mayhew, <em>London Labour and the London Poor</em>, vol. 4, 1861, p. 227</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>The Nonconformist</em>, 10 April 1867, p. 290</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 14 October 1867, p. 3: <em>East London Observer</em>, 12 Oct 1867, p. 5: <em>Building News</em>, 18 Oct. 1867, p. 726: Ordnance Survey map, 1873</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>The Builder</em>, 22 March 1879, p. 328: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: <em>The</em><em><em> </em>Builder</em>, 25 Sept. 1880, p. 400: DSR</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: H. Chance Newton, ‘Music-Hall London’, in George Robert Sims, <em>Living London: its work and its play, etc</em>, vol. 2, 1902, p. 225: <em>Reynolds’s Newspaper</em>, 27 Dec. 1896, p. 8</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/0574: DSR: POD: Goad map, 1890</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: Newton in Sims, <em>loc. cit.</em></p>\n\n<p>[^13]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/0574: London County Council Minutes (LCC Mins), passim: Goad map, 1899: DSR </p>\n\n<p>[^14]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/0094; GLC/AR/BR/07/0574; GLC/AR/BR/19/0094; GLC/AR/BR/22/ES/021945: LCC Mins, 12 Nov. 1912, p. 1122: DSR</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/0574; GLC/AR/BR/22/ES/021945: DSR: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub</em> Coles</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Capitalising on London’s booming market for speculative office developments, Seifert and Partners had grown from twelve employees in 1955 to three hundred in 1969. Colonel Seifert estimated that his practice was responsible for over 700 office blocks and remembered of London ‘you only had to lay the first stone and the office was let. The demand was difficult to satisfy.’[^1] Yet while other Seifert buildings such as Centre Point and Space House remained controversially empty years after their opening, Beagle House’s immediate tenancy was sure. Overseas Containers Ltd (OCL) was made up of a consortium of four shipping companies, formed to take advantage of the new opportunities presented by containerisation in the mid-1960s. The growth rate of OCL had been exceptional leading to a congested head office and staff dispersed in sub-standard City offices. Also recognising the evaporation of the initial excitement associated with OCL’s establishment, the move to Beagle House was designed to endear employees to stay with the company. The Board considered that ‘provision of an optimum working environment for all levels of staff [is] the overriding objective.’[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The nine-storey office block was designed to accommodate 900 staff, with rooftop services concealed behind an extension of the angular faceted panels that enveloped its exterior. Some described Beagle House’s unusual plan as lozenge shaped, others ship shaped. The building was constructed with an in-situ reinforced concrete frame and slabs carried on piled foundations. Two solid service and circulation cores projected outwards on the narrow east and west ends, and eight structural columns spanned between the cores across the centre of the open-plan office space. The ground floor receded back from the building’s upper edge and was clad with granite, marble and mosaic. The main elevation above first-floor level rested on oversized angular columns and consisted of mosaic-faced precast structural mullions set with double-glazed aluminium windows. In place of 12 to 14 Camperdown Street, a modest canteen and garage of two storeys connected to the west end of the main block, clad in dark purple brick and crowned with six flagpoles (see figure 3). Despite assertions from Seifert’s staff that there was no ‘house-style’, repeated motifs such as angled pilotis, expressive facades and rhythmic concrete panelling are evident in many of the firm’s designs from this period. Ideas and technical details were carried over from one building to the next along with engineers and other design team members (figure 4). Long-time collaborators Pell Frischmann and Partners, engineers of the Nat West Tower, were also engaged at Beagle House. Structural glass balustrades were supplied by Pilkington based on tests already completed at Nat West and Centre Point. The project architect for Beagle House was Henry Grovners, who was also the lead architect on Corinthian House in Croydon. The construction process was not without its obstacles. The District Surveyor made several complaints about what he saw to be the low standard of workmanship of main contractors Sir Robert McAlpine and Sons in relation to the reinforced-concrete columns and walls, and the project ran behind schedule.[^3]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/sol-whitechapel-100468.jpg\"><em>Figure 3: Maersk (formerly Beagle) House photographed by Derek Kendall in early 2017</em></p>\n\n<p><em><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/sol-whitechapel-100483.jpg\"></em></p>\n\n<p><em>Figure 4: Facade detail of Maersk (formerly Beagle) House photographed by Derek Kendall in early 2017</em></p>\n\n<p>Rather than utilise Seifert’s in-house team, OCL appointed their own interior designers, husband and wife consultancy Ward Associates. The Wards were favoured designers of passenger-ship interiors in the 1970s, proving themselves capable of considerable creativity in confined spaces. As a result of these ship interiors, Neville Ward was awarded the title of Royal Designer for Industry in 1971. The couple shared a London office with Wyndham Goodden, Professor of Textiles at the Royal College of Art, who designed the Chairman’s office at Beagle House (see figure 5).[^4]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/chairmans-office-2.JPG\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Figure 5: Chairman's office designed by Wyndham Goodden. Photographed by Millar & Harris c. 1974 (Historic England Archive, bb036029)</em></p>\n\n<p>The building’s peculiar shape made provision of individual offices difficult, only a handful were designed, those clinging to the outer corners of the building. The open-plan interior was at first regarded as a six-month experiment in part, to ease anxiety from middle-level managers about the shift away from traditional layouts (see figure 6). The top floor however was exclusively dedicated to upper-level management and company directors, each of whom was afforded the privileges of a separate office illuminated by plastic-domed roof lights and access to a serviced dining room reserved for their use (see figure 7). Deep storage units divided each pair of offices leaving the open-plan central space to be occupied by secretaries (figure 8). Addressing the concerns of managers on the lower floors who were uneasy about the loss of visual and acoustic privacy, Ward Associates fashioned ‘carefully arranged enclosures’ using screens, planting and storage cabinets (see figure 9). Outside Beagle was skeletal and grey, while the interior was decorated in trendy hues of brown, orange and blue, each floor differentiated by a unique colour scheme. Floor-to-ceiling length curtains lined exterior walls and defined meeting spaces. There were coffee areas, a lounge, snack bar and the licensed subsidised canteen, while conference rooms were fitted with well-stocked bars, all intended to provide OCL workers with ‘a high degree of home comfort’ (see figure 10). As computers and machines increasingly invaded the office environment, the interior-design press claimed that the general introduction of plants to interiors compensated for ‘the ever increasing emergence of soulless concrete edifices all too common today.’ They noted that ‘where a plant will survive so an office-worker’. The entrance hall was graced with a wall-mounted model ship and an interior fish pond.[^5]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/bb036033-typical-floor-plan.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Figure 6: Ward Associates' design for a typical open-plan office floor. Photographed by Millar & Harris c. 1974 (Historic England Archive, bb036033)</em></p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/bb036022-bar-unit-on-eighth-floor.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Figure 7: Bar area for directors on the eight floor. Photographed by Millar & Harris c. 1974 (Historic England Archive, bb036022)</em></p>\n\n<p><em><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/bb036024-typical-directors-office.jpg\"></em></p>\n\n<p><em>Figure 8: Typical director's office on the eighth floor. Photographed by Millar & Harris c. 1974 (Historic England Archive, bb036024)</em></p>\n\n<p><em><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/bb036027-detail-of-typical-office-floor.jpg\"></em></p>\n\n<p><em>Figure 9: Storage cabinets and plants defined spaces within the open-plan layouts. Photographed by Millar & Harris c. 1974 (Historic England Archive, bb036027)</em></p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/04/12/lounge.JPG\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Figure 10: Typical communal lounge area on open-plan floors. Photographed by Millar & Harris c. 1974 (Historic England Archive, bb036037)</em></p>\n\n<p>At this time interior designers were increasingly engaged in office designs that prioritised the comfort of workers and new mechanisms for climate control also worked to humanise working environments. Reflecting the forward-looking spirit of OCL, the new Beagle House claimed its own technological innovations in this respect. Writing in 1975, <em>Interior Design</em> regarded it as ‘London’s first privately developed Integrated Environmental Design (IED) office building…without a doubt, one of the most advanced buildings in the country’. Suspended ceilings throughout Beagle House provided air-conditioning to all spaces powered by a roof-top plant. Teething issues were resolved by mechanical engineers Thom Benhams who were supervised by OCL’s appointed Barlow Leslie and Partners. A resident engineer, responsible for the system’s ongoing maintenance, was allocated a first-floor flat in the building. A press visit in July 1974 sponsored by the Electricity Council resulted in widespread reporting of the project in service journals. No major changes were made to the interior layout until 1977 when the computer room doubled in size, the air conditioning capacity was increased, and the company purchased the freehold of Beagle House from Sterling subsidiary Town and City Properties.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>One of the original four investors in OCL, P&O, secured full ownership of the company by 1985. In 1996 what had become P&O Containers merged with Dutch firm Royal Nedlloyd to form P&O Nedlloyd and two headquarters were retained, one in Rotterdam, and the other at Beagle House. Following this, in 2005 PONL was taken over by their rivals Moller-Maersk and Beagle House was renamed Maersk House.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: BL, National Life Stories Collection: Architects’ Lives, Richard Seifert, 1996</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Elain Harwood, <em>Space, Hope and Brutalism: English Architecture, 1945-1975</em>, 2015, p. 401; Caird Library and Archive, PON/1/3/10</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Concrete</em>, Vols 5-6, Oct 1972, p. 41; Alan Bott, <em>British Box Business - A History of OCL</em>, 2009; Private conversation with Ewan Harrison, 22 Feb 2017; PONL Heritage: https://sites.google.com/site/ponlheritage2//news/lastfewweeksforformerlondonhq; THLHLA, L/THL/D/1/1/228</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Caird Library and Archive, PON/1/3/12; <em>Interior Design</em>, Jan 1975, p. 35; <em>Shipbuilding and Shipping Record</em>, Vol 120, 1972, p. 69; Royal Society of Arts: https://www.thersa.org/about-us/royal-designers-for-industry/past-royal-designers</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Caird Library and Archive, PON/1/3/10; <em>Interior Design</em>, Jan 1975, p. 33, p. 36</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Caird Library and Archive, PON/1/3/12, PON/1/3/20; <em>Interior Design</em>, Jan 1975, p. 33; <em>The Engineer</em>, 15 Sep 1974, pp. 33-34; <em>Insulation</em>, Vols 17-19, 1975, p. 25</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: PONL Heritage: https://sites.google.com/site/ponlheritage2//news/lastfewweeksforformerlondonhq</p>\n",
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"id": 875,
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"b_name": "Sugar House, 99 Leman Street",
"street": "Leman Street",
"address": "Sugar House, 99 Leman Street",
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"body": "<p>By 1970 the Co-operative Wholesale Society had a number of empty premises in and around Leman Street, reflecting internal changes within the Society and national and local economic conditions. The extensive warehousing that once characterised the area declined dramatically under the influence of the closure of the London Docks and following changes to the economics of distribution.[^1] Although London co-operative societies had pioneered the self-service concept in 1942, the Co-op retail stores were losing their share of the market for food and consumer goods to the multiple retailers and the ensuing five decades ‘proved to be the most difficult in the history of British co-operative wholesaling and retailing’.[^2] In 1955, the Co-operative congress launched an inquiry into the field of wholesale and retail co-operative production and marketing and its recommendations included the reorganisation of the relationship between wholesale and retail. This meant a move away from selling to societies towards buying for them – and ‘a complete overhaul’ of the Wholesale’s warehousing policy.[^3] Major restructuring of the CWS took place in 1967–8, principally the creation of three divisions for food, non-food and administration, and the rationalisation of its warehousing, with some controversial closures including the historic London premises at Leman Street.[^4] The CWS-led ‘Operation Facelift’ of 1968 entailed the renovation of retail stores and the new CO-OP clover-leaf symbol, which later appeared on the front of 1 Prescot Street.</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile the CWS negotiated with Tower Hamlets Council for the inclusion of CWS and E&SCWS buildings within the council’s regeneration scheme, retaining some sites for the CWS banking and computer businesses with a view to selling on others for redevelopment. By 1973 the CWS had entered into a planning agreement with the Council, which specified that if CWS property at 53–73 Leman Street and 33–37 Goodmans’ Yard was used as offices, 99 Leman Street and 41–42 Goodman’s Yard would only be employed for warehousing.[^5] In 1974, however, 99 Leman Street was still empty and looking down-at-heel and by 1977 and probably before, had lost its stepped parapets and finials, which had survived until at least 1949.[^6] In 1977 the National Westminster Bank, as leaseholders from the CWS, applied to change the use of part of 53–73 Leman Street (Ekins’s 1930s’ drapery warehouse extension) and all of 75–89 Leman Street (Harris’s drapery extension of 1910) from office to light industrial use.[^7] A new planning agreement was issued in 1978, which released the CWS from the earlier agreement and required that the whole development be undertaken on an agreed schedule of works.[^8] Centre-file Ltd, a computer service company and subsidiary of the NatWest, soon occupied the former drapery extension at 75 Leman Street.[^9] It was a condition of Tower Hamlets’ planning consent for the conversion of No. 75 for Centre-file that Goodey’s headquarters building at No. 99 be turned into small business units managed by Tower Hamlets Council.[^10] Despite the bank’s objections, in the early 1980s Ian Mikardo, Labour and Co-operative MP, was allowed to use Unit 1 at 99 Leman Street, which remained in use by Tower Hamlets Centre for Small Business Ltd until the late 1980s.[^11] It was reported in 1980 that NatWest had donated three bells from the clock tower to the church of St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, on Holborn Viaduct, and that they were at that time resting in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.[^12] St Sepulchre’s bells – famously ‘the Bells of Old Bailey’ in the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons – were restored in the mid-1980s and, assuming that the plan went ahead, must presumably have been incorporated those from Leman Street.[^13] Inside No. 99, the main staircase and its balustrade survived and the committee room retained its plastered ceiling panels, but by 2003 the mahogany mouldings and panelling had been removed.[^14]</p>\n\n<p>English Heritage stipulated that the stair tower on Hooper Street – the entrance to the first CWS warehouse of 1881 – should remain, along with Goodey’s elevations on Leman Street and Hooper Street, and the main internal staircase and balustrade. Tower Hamlets Development Committee’s suggestion in 2003 for a plaque to record the contribution to the community made by the Co-operative Wholesale Society was not carried out.[^15] The first phase of the Sheppard Robson redevelopment, City Quarter, was completed in 2008, and incorporates the headquarters building at 99 Leman Street – now Sugar House – and the 1910 extension by Harris, which is now called Sterling Mansions, behind which is the landscaped ‘Four Seasons’ square, designed by Fabrik landscape architects in 2012–13.[^16] New-build apartments, including some social housing, occupy the space where some of the earliest CWS warehousing in Whitechapel once stood.[^17] Of the original warehouse built in 1879–1881, only the stair tower survives, a yellow-brick column between Goodey’s red-brick headquarters building and the new flats. The new development thus preserves the awkward junction between the three phases of development, while the high-gloss white finish of the flats echoes the white-glazed bricks of the CWS warehouses that lined Goodman Street until at least the 1980s.[^18] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Proof of Evidence given to Local Enquiry, 22 May 1974 by G. M. Jones for Tower Hamlets Council in support of the Greater London Council, p. 1, London School of Economics Archive, SHORE/19/100.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: John Wilson, Anthony Webster, Rachael Vorberg-Rugh, ‘The Co-operative Movement in Britain: From Crisis to “Renaissance,” 1950–2010’, <em>Enterprise & Society</em>, 14(2), 2013, pp .271–302, p. 279.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Building Co-operation</em>, pp. 247–8.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Ibid</em>., pp. 248–50.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Linda Carole Johnson, ‘Planning Gain in Tower Hamlets’, unpublished PhD thesis, Brunel University, 1988, p. 252.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Historic England Archives, Britain from Above: EAW021448; <a href=\"http://www.flickriver.com/photos/dmcl/tags/lemanstreet/\">http://www.flickriver.com/photos/dmcl/tags/lemanstreet/</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Johnson, ‘Planning Gain’, p. 252.</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>Ibid</em>.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: <em>Estates Gazette</em>, 8 July 1978, p. 105.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: ‘Planning Gain’, pp. 252–3.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: ‘Planning Gain’, p. 253; Derrick Johnstone, <em>Developing Businesses</em>, 1988, p. 121.</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: Ross Davies, ‘Business Diary: NatWest’s hang-up’,<em>The Times</em>, 10 October 1980, p. 21.</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: <a href=\"http://london.lovesguide.com/sepulchre_newgate.htm\">http://london.lovesguide.com/sepulchre_newgate.htm</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP), PA/03/00585.</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: THP, PA/03/00585.</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: <a href=\"https://www.fabrikuk.com/posts/article/items/fabriks-new-plaza-at-goodmans-fields-is-now-open/\">https://www.fabrikuk.com/posts/article/items/fabriks-new-plaza-at-goodmans-fields-is-now-open/</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: <a href=\"https://www.sheppardrobson.com/architecture/view/city-quarter\">https://www.sheppardrobson.com/architecture/view/city-quarter</a>.</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: Photograph, 1982, London Metropolitan Archives, SC/PHL/02/0628/82/1112.</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-29",
"last_edited": "2021-04-28"
},
{
"id": 358,
"title": "1891",
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"properties": {
"b_number": "47",
"b_name": "The Artful Dodger (formerly the Crown and Seven Stars)",
"street": "Royal Mint Street",
"address": "The Artful Dodger (formerly the Crown and Seven Stars) public house, 47 Royal Mint Street",
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"body": "<p>The 1891 census shows that William Vinall was the innkeeper here with his wife Alice Tigwell. We believe that his father Fred Vinall, who later kept the Old Bull and Bush (Hampstead) in the days of the music hall song, was the actual leaseholder or owned the freehold. My husband's father, Albert Sidney, was born at the Crown and Seven Stars in 1901 and often visited his grandfather at the Old Bull and Bush where he also ran errands for the ballerina Anna Pavlova.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-05-03",
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{
"id": 650,
"title": "Childhood memories of the Taja restaurant",
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"street": "Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>Tanha Quadi remembers growing up with the Taja restaurant at 199A Whitechapel Road that was owned and managed by her parents in the early 2000s.</p>\n\n<p>\"It was somewhere we used to go everyday, we’d find something new to explore and get up to so much mischief. The place had two floors and a small loft space that we endlessly tried to reach into (we knew there were old Christmas crackers up there). It was a place of joy and happiness.</p>\n\n<p>The building was bought when my mother and father were still together and they jointly ran a restaurant called ‘Taja’ that served traditional Indian cuisine. There used to be a lot of anti-social behaviour around the restaurant as there was a lot of homelessness on Whitechapel Road, along with the rough sleepers there were two hostels close to the premises as well. I remember mum feeding them to keep them under control, it did work.</p>\n\n<p>As time went on my parents began going through a divorce and things became a little more tricky, the building was split with my father running the restaurant upstairs and my mother running a salon downstairs. Both ran successfully and I even recall ‘Rachel’ from S Club 7 coming to do her eyebrows at the salon (apparently we did the best eyebrows in town), an exciting day for us indeed.</p>\n\n<p>Things were not always smooth sailing; as you can imagine when emotions and a business are present, nonetheless me and my brother were very much in our own world oblivious to life’s problems. We went to Kobi Nazrul Primary School which was down the road and we’d get picked up by my uncle and dropped at ‘Taja’.</p>\n\n<p>Mum would be busy almost all the time so we had full rein to go wild, as we did. Bothering customers and creating ‘potions’ in the kitchen and salon. I remember customers at the restaurant complaining, saying that they had come to an Indian restaurant not a disco as the four of us would play ‘The Venga boys’ CD (that we were obsessed with) on full volume and dance and sing.</p>\n\n<p>I remember quite randomly loving the chairs of the restaurant. They were thin wooden circular topped with royal blue seats and thin metal arm rails. I used to think they were so cool.</p>\n\n<p>I remember finding out the building got hit in the middle of the night and my mum rushed out of the house. A coach drove straight into the building, no passengers were hurt but I remember the driver being in a coma. I don’t know what happened to him. There was a lot of mainstream news coverage of the crash.</p>\n\n<p>It was a shock and we saw the devastation the next day after school. It was surreal and horrible to see. One minute it was there and the next it was gone. The downstairs was sealed off and the top structure was demolished. I remember a fireman bringing my sister's bike out from the rubble and her screaming to go get it, that’s all I remember of the day.</p>\n\n<p>It was really strange. The downstairs was such a big part of our lives. The staircase was my favourite. It was metal and winded down all the way. We use to light candles all the way down to the salon and I would spend ages playing with the candle wax sitting on the stairs (and occasionally burning my hair from bending over the candles).</p>\n\n<p>It feels weird to walk past and know that it’s still there. As it was. No one knows that when passing by; there’s a beautiful staircase and the ruins of a salon and a kitchen under the road. I would love to see how it looks now.</p>\n\n<p>At the time the salon was also our only source of income, not only for us but for the five or so staff we hired. Lives for many that day changed.</p>\n\n<p>I loved that place. We grew up in the building. Times change, I don’t know how things would be if it was still standing.\"</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-15",
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{
"id": 747,
"title": "From Princess Alice to The Culpeper",
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"b_number": "40-42",
"b_name": "The Culpeper, 40-42 Commercial Street",
"street": "Commercial Street",
"address": "The Culpeper, 40 Commercial Street",
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"body": "<p>The Culpeper, formerly the Princess Alice, is a rebuilding of 1883 of a compact public house built by William Hooper, builder, of Kentish Town, in 1846 on the corner of Wentworth Street with the new Commercial Street. The first lesses were the brewers Elliot and Watney of the Stag Brewery, Pimlico, and it was named after Queen Victoria’s second daughter, born in 1843.[^1] A ventil-horn (a type of upright cornet) band operated from the Princess Alice in the early 1860s.[^2] In 1882 Wentworth Street was widened as part of the Goulston Street Improvement by the Metropolitan Board of Works , and the Princess Alice was demolished, and rebuilt by W. Shurmur, an early work of the architect Bruce J. Capell (1855-1943) of 70 Whitechapel Road for the then-owner, the Brick Lane brewers Truman, Hanbury & Buxton. It was on a larger scale than the old pub, as it was on a new corner site slightly further south incorporating the site of the warehouse at No. 40.[^3] The new pub was five stories high, in a robust commercial Gothic in red brick with moulded terracotta tiles to the second floor, soaring chimneys and a steeply pointed gable to the fifth floor on the Commercial Street frontage. There were formalised floral mosaic panels to the canted corner bays at second and third floors.</p>\n\n<p>The Princess Alice was seriously damaged during the second world war and reduced by two stories. In 1985 the pub was heavily modernised internally and renamed the City Darts by the owner Thorley Taverns, during the 1980s darts boom when it sported five boards, though it reverted to ‘Princess Alice’ by 2005.[^4] In 2014 it was renamed again, during a major refurbishment as a gastropub which included the erection of a reclaimed 1940s greenhouse on the flat roof terrace for the growing of herbs and other produce, to which the pub’s new name, the Culpeper, after the herbalist Nicholas Culpeper (1616-54), alludes. Events including star-gazing, gardening, drawing and cocktail-making are are also held on the roof. Five letting bedrooms were created on the second floor.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 18 March 1847, p. 4: <a href=\"https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Elliot,_Watney_and_Co\">https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Elliot,_Watney_and_Co</a>: The National Archives, CRES 60/6</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>East London Observer</em>, 4 May 1861, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Builder</em>, 7 July 1883, p. 33: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's returns: Ancestry.co.uk</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Justin Irwin, <em>Murder on the Darts Board: One Man’s Journey to the Heart of Dartness</em>, London 2008, p. 101: <a href=\"http://www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/21/2171/City_Darts/Whitechapel\">www.beerintheevening.com/pubs/s/21/2171/City_Darts/Whitechapel</a>: <a href=\"http://capitalarrows.com/londons-dart-pubs-continue-to-decline/\">capitalarrows.com/londons-dart-pubs-continue-to-decline/</a></p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: <a href=\"https://www.theculpeper.com/\">https://www.theculpeper.com/</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-18",
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