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            "id": 128,
            "title": "Historic England list description for 39-49 Walden Street",
            "author": {
                "id": 11,
                "username": "amyspencer"
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                    "b_number": "33",
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                    "address": "33 Walden Street",
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            "body": "<p>Excerpt from Historic England list entry for 39-49 Walden Street (listed at Grade II):</p>\n\n<p>1. WALDEN STREET E1 4431 (North Side) Nos 39 to 49 (odd) TQ 3481 15/506 II GV 2. Early C19 terrace. Stock brick with coped parapet and mansard slate roof. 2 storeys, dormers and basements, 2 windows sashes with flat gauged arches, about half with glazing bars. Round headed doorways with fanlights and 6 panelled doors. Associated with Philpot Street terraces. (Nos 31 to 37 not listed though part of same terrace, 2 rebuilt end half demolished and a different roof line.)<br>\n<br>\nNos 39 to 49 (odd) form a group.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Historic England, National Heritage List for England, list entry number: 1242330 (online: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1242330, accessed 26 August 2016).</p>\n",
            "created": "2016-08-26",
            "last_edited": "2020-02-17"
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        {
            "id": 1014,
            "title": "33–51 Walden Street",
            "author": {
                "id": 2,
                "username": "surveyoflondon"
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            "body": "<p>On the north side of Walden Street, Nos 33–51 are isolated by the nurses’ residential quarter of 1969–76. Thomas and John Goodman were granted a lease for Nos 37–49 in 1829, and agreed to build seven houses. In the following year John Clarke took Nos 33 and 35 on similar terms. The two-storey houses with raised basements are typical of the type built on the cross streets of the hospital’s estate. They were converted into nurses’ accommodation around 1990. Similar houses at Nos 25–31 were destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. No. 51 probably originated as a workshop or stables in existence by 1855 in the garden of 43 Philpot Street.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Royal London Hospital Archives, RLHLH/S/1/3</p>\n",
            "created": "2020-02-17",
            "last_edited": "2020-02-17"
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        {
            "id": 541,
            "title": "White's Row",
            "author": {
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                "username": "surveyoflondon"
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                    "street": "Durward Street",
                    "address": "Underground railway services building, Durward Street",
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            "body": "<p>Edmund White, a Puritan merchant adventurer and founder of the Massachusetts Bay Company, held the freehold of twenty-four acres in the north-east part of the parish of Whitechapel and across into Stepney, land that was called Hare’s Marsh, by the time of his death in London in 1633. It passed to his son and grandson, both also named Edmund White and City merchants. By the time the third Edmund White (d. 1691) inherited in 1674 development was afoot in the vicinity of what are now Durward Street and Vallance Road.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>White’s Row (now the west end of Durward Street), labelled Whitechapel Green on some early maps, took its name from the three Edmund Whites who were this area's successive seventeenth-century landowners. Land occupied by Simon Cage by 1654 was being used as a brickfield by 1670. Development ensued, other streets being laid out extending north beyond the Quakers’ Burial Ground. The new roads included Thomas Street, initially it seems just the short northerly east–west arm, the name later also being applied to the north–south link to White’s Row, labelled Virginia Row on Rocque’s map and now echoed by Castlemain Street. The younger Edmund White gave William Cox, his brother-in-law and a Cripplegate brewer, a building lease of a frontage of 172ft on the north side of White’s Row in 1681, and John Hooper, a City merchant, took a substantial parcel to the west in 1683, both on unusually long (110-year) leases. Baker’s Row was evidently part of this development, probably taking its name from John Baker, a Whitechapel joiner who built houses here on leases from White and Hooper, working with John Croft, a bricklayer. Baker died in 1689 when further development was intended.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives (TNA), C10/227/12; PROB11/163/227; PROB11/346/405; PROB11/398/352: John Ward Dean (ed.), <em>The New-England Historical and Genealogical Register</em>, vol.48, 1894, pp. 136–7: John Coffey, <em>John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in 17th-Century England</em>, 2006, p. 48: Francis J. Bremer, <em>Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds</em>, 2012, p. 94</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Robert Morden and Philip Lea, map of London, 1690: John Rocque, map of London, 1746: TNA, C10/227/12: London Metropolitan Archives, MS9172/77/233; M/93/304: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/RIV/1/15/1/2; P/RIV/1/15/3/3; map 75a, 1755</p>\n",
            "created": "2018-01-03",
            "last_edited": "2020-03-19"
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            "id": 1081,
            "title": "48 Gower's Walk",
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            "body": "<p>No. 48 is the sole building on this stretch of Gower’s Walk to survive from before the 1990s. It is plain, of four storeys, and in stock brick with minimal red-brick dressings and a two-storey extension. It was built in 1924 by West End protagonists, Stanley Whiddington of Berners Street acting as agent for the owner, A. C. Rickatson of Ridinghouse Street, with Augustus E. Hughes &amp; Son of Mortimer Street as architects, and Townsends of Dean Street as builders. Early occupants were the Albion Soap Company Ltd. Eric Shorter, who lived next door in the early 1950s, has recalled in a contribution to this website that ‘it triple-milled laundry soap and the smell was awful’. Thereafter there was use as a jewellery factory and gown wholesalers. The building was converted to flats in 1997.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors' Returns: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: Philip Temple and Colin Thom (eds), <em>Survey of London</em>, vol. 51: <em>South-East Marylebone, Part 1</em>’, 2017, p. 446</p>\n",
            "created": "2020-06-05",
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        {
            "id": 1118,
            "title": "30 Prescot Street",
            "author": {
                "id": 2,
                "username": "surveyoflondon"
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            "body": "<p>The house adjoining English Martyrs to the west appears to have origins in the 1730s as a replacement of a house of the 1680s the lease of which would have run to 1745. In the 1980s it retained a column-on-vase-baluster closed-string staircase of early eighteenth-century character. It was evidently refronted and raised a storey in the early nineteenth century. The house was perhaps built by William Simon Youd (d. 1754), a plasterer and member of the Skinners’ Company, who moved from the west side of Mansell Street to live in it from 1735 till his death. He then held leases of four other houses on Prescot Street, including Nos 7, 9 and 10. His widow, Elizabeth Youd (d. 1757) was followed by John Milward, a distiller. James Montgomery (d. 1793), a ship owner and merchant who traded with Virginia, was resident from around 1775. By 1790 until after 1800 Solomon Spier, a jeweller and merchant, had the house. Thomas Springford (<em>c.</em>1776–1856), who owned slum-court property off Little Prescot Street, held it from 1841 to his death.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The freehold of No. 30 was acquired by the Oblates in 1879, soon after the completion of English Martyrs. Six years later the property was in use as a lodging house. It attracted interest owing to a young lodger, who identified himself as James Gilbert Cunningham, a dock labourer arrested in connection with a Fenian plot to bomb the Tower of London. Police found ‘three copies of <em>United Ireland</em> stuffed up the chimney’. The premises were described: ‘No. 30 is a tenement of four floors, kept by Miss Cannon, proprietor of a Book Depository, pamphlets, &amp;c, being displayed in the windows of the apartment on the ground floor, which is also used as a sitting-room by the lodgers. Of these there are several, but, owing to the exclusiveness which the inhabitants of London cultivate, very little attention is paid to one another’s movements.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The church undertook alterations and additions in 1908, with Crisp, Fowler &amp; Co. as builders, and minor war damage precipitated further work in 1951. A two-storey rear extension followed in 1979 after which, with renovation by M. C. Brickwork, builders, and the provision of access to the church, the house became the presbytery to English Martyrs.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: British History Online, Four Shillings in the Pound Assessments, 1693–4: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax Returns; COL/CHD/FR/02/0480–7; MDR1753/4/411; MDR1746/2/405; Collage 119538: Ancestry: The National Archives, PROB11/807/63; PROB11/830/21: <em>Public Advertiser</em>, 14 May 1760, p.3: <em>True Briton</em>, 27–29 Aug 1771, p.3; 8 Feb 1793, p.4: <em>General Evening Post</em>, 24–26 Oct 1771, p.1: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Daily Telegraph</em>, 28 Jan 1885, p.5, information kindly supplied by Amy Milne Smith, <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1298/detail/\">surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1298/detail/</a>: <em>Globe</em>, 2 Feb 1885, p.5: English Martyrs' Church, Codex Historicus; letter to Trustees of the Oblates, 21 Feb 1935</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, District Surveyors Returns; Collage 119537: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
            "created": "2020-08-04",
            "last_edited": "2020-09-14"
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        {
            "id": 216,
            "title": "Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1971",
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            "body": "<p>Another slide from the Tower Hamlets Archives collection:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/805010230383955969\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/805010230383955969</a></p>\n",
            "created": "2016-12-16",
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        {
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            "title": "The Co-operative Wholesale Society's London Tea Department (demolished)",
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            "body": "<p>From 1869, the Co-operative Wholesale Society acquired its tea on the London market in an arrangement with Joseph Woodin, a merchant with Co-operative sympathies, who had been in the tea business since about 1830.[^1] Following an exposéof the adulteration of food by <em>The Lancet</em> in 1851–54, Woodin founded the Co-operative Central Agency, a forerunner of the CWS, to supply pure foodstuffs including tea and sugar to local Co-operative suppliers and in 1856 he advised Parliament on the adulteration of tea.[^2] When the price of tea fell in 1878, the CWS reconsidered the arrangement and in 1879 gave him three years’ notice with a view to entering the tea trade in its own right. After plans to employ Woodin’s sons and other staff fell through, Charles Fielding, a broker and dealer with twenty years’ experience in the tea market, was engaged as the manager of the new tea department at Hooper Square.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The Tea Department premises opened on 1 November 1882 in one of the original CWS warehouses near Hooper Square, fitted out with packing benches and manned by a staff of ten.[^4] This was a joint operation between the CWS and the Scottish CWS, with a committee formed to manage the English and Scottish Joint Co-operative Wholesale Society Tea (E&amp;SCWS) Department in London. It was, as the CWS acknowledged, difficult to separate the two enterprises and the arrangement was not formalised until 1923.[^5] From 1882 to 1894, the revenue from tea sales was easily the largest after grocery and provisions, amounting to £255,849 in the year ending 1882, and had more than doubled to £527,308 by the end of 1894.[^6] Such was its success that the tea department had already outgrown the space in the new London Branch headquarters when it opened in 1887, which was credited to Fielding’s management.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>By 1890 Fielding was the highest-paid Wholesale employee in Britain, with the same annual salary of £1,000 as the CWS manager in New York.[^8] At this date the CWS supplied 350 different blends of tea and employed 300 people.[^9] Fielding had opposed the acquisition of tea plantations in 1892 on the grounds that the range of tea required could not be supplied from a few estates but changed his mind when private tea suppliers began increasingly to sell to co-operative customers.[^10] The investment shortly to be made in the new tea warehouse at Leman Street underscored the need for the CWS to go into production and thereby maintain its position in a competitive market.[^11] Thus in 1898 he accompanied a deputation to India and Ceylon to view tea gardens and in 1902 the first of a series of plantations was purchased in Ceylon.[^12] A ‘flotilla’ of CWS steamers carried the tea back to England and ran to and from the Wholesale branches and depots in Ceylon, America, France, and Denmark.[^13] Tea from the E&amp;SCWS estates at Nugawella, Weliganga and Mahavilla was taken to the new warehouse in Leman Street, which was close to bonded warehouses used by the Society in the Pool of London.[^14] By 1914 the tea gardens amounted to more than 4,600 acres and at the end of the First World War a further 13,871 acres had been purchased at eight estates in India.[^15] Tea cards, given away free with E&amp;SCWS tea, graphically demonstrated the Wholesales’ involvement at all stages of the supply chain,[^16] and the ‘filling the nation’s tea pot’ series included a view of the tea warehouse in Leman Street.</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile in 1886 a large piece of land had been purchased by the E&amp;SCWS for £22,000 at the junction of Leman Street and Great Prescott (now Prescot) Street, opposite the CWS London Branch headquarters.[^17] Twelve houses were demolished on the site, which included the Golden Lion public house at the corner with Prescot Street, with whom the CWS had settled a rights to light claim in 1887.[^18] In October 1891 designs were prepared by Phineas Heyhurst for a large new tea blending and packing warehouse on this spot.[^19] Heyhurst worked for the CWS building department in Manchester, and later became its manager. He was educated at the Building Trades Technical School in Bradford, becoming a joiner before his promotion to building manager.[^20] He was assisted in the building of the London tea department by Isaac Mort (1854–1925), as clerk of works, and who acted as Heyhurst’s representative in London.[^21] The two had recently collaborated on the CWS Wheatsheaf Boot and Shoe Works in Leicester, then the largest footwear factory in Britain, which opened in 1891.[^22] Mort was the first manager of the London Building Department and at his election to the CWS Committee in about 1904 was succeeded by E. W. Chicken.[^23]</p>\n\n<p>The new tea department faced a series of hurdles. Heyhurst’s plans of 1891 were amended due to LCC objections to the unobstructed floors, which ran end to end within the warehouses. The Council insisted upon six fireproof sections, which ‘still [made] the branch interiors the despair of the photographer’ in 1913.[^24] Further delays were caused by leases that had yet to expire and, as already noticed, by the multiple claims of neighbouring property holders for rights to light and air.[^25] A series of six warehouses of six and eight floors was agreed in March 1894 and in April drainage plans submitted by Isaac Mort were passed by the Board of Works, only to be stopped later in the year while the claims were assessed.[^26] Jasper Keeble of Wynne-Baxter, Rance and Meade, solicitors to the Tea Department and the London Branch since its establishment in the Minories, advised the committee, attended by Mort and Heyhurst, that the height of the building should be reduced on its Prescot Street elevation, to match the width of the street, but that afterwards they should ‘endeavour to treat for carrying the buildings to the height shown on the original plans’.[^27] When a further injunction was threatened by the tenant of 90 Leman Street in 1895, Arthur Beresford Pite submitted plans to the tea committee to show the alterations which must be made to avoid interference with ancient lights in two directions, presumably at Keeble’s invitation. Pite was an early member of the Art Workers’ Guild and president of the Architectural Association in 1896–7, and appears to have had connections with both Keeble and the co-operative movement. In 1898 he was called as a witness in defence of the Co-operative Printing Company, whose solicitor was Keeble, and whose building in Blackfriars (designed in 1895 by Goodey’s practice Goodey &amp; Cressall) was the subject of a successful injunction by the <em>Christian Herald</em> against interference with ancient lights.[^28] At around the same time Pite also designed new branch premises at Plaistow for the Stratford Co-operative Society, a forerunner of the London Co-operative Society.[^29] His new design for the London tea warehouse ‘cut into’ the original planned by the building department, creating a more distinctive stepped frontage to Leman Street and a courtyard that hollowed out the building to the rear, alterations which represented a loss of more than 1,000 feet of floor space.[^30] The committee then agreed to proceed with an extra storey in the centre of the Leman Street elevation, creating an even more dramatic sloping front, and also to purchase the freeholds of 88 and 90 Leman Street and their premises adjoining in Tenter Street to the rear of the building, presumably with a view to expanding the footprint.[^31] Goodey, who had resigned from the CWS branch committee in order to act as architect to the new branch headquarters, resumed his position in 1889 and for a short time from around 1891 he, and from 1892, Goodey &amp; Cressall, kept offices in London at 20 Bishopsgate Street in addition to Colchester, which gave him easy access to both Whitechapel and Liverpool Street Station.[^32] By at least the mid-1890s Goodey took a close interest in the development of the new tea department, attending committee meetings and inspecting the building’s progress, together with Isaac Mort and the tea department manager, Charles Fielding.[^33] Just as Goodey had been involved with the acquisition and development of property for the new headquarters building in the 1870s Fielding was now engaged in negotiating for the acquisition of plots for the tea warehouse and its future extension and both men attended committee meetings to discuss amendments to its design. It seems very likely that, in addition to the formal designs made by Heyhurst and Pite, these men, who steered the building through its various alterations to meet the requirements of building control and ancient lights, contributed in no small measure to the shape of its final design. The tea warehouse was similar to CWS buildings in Manchester, while the central bay in particular echoed that of Goodey’s 1887 headquarters building opposite. </p>\n\n<p>In 1895 the CWS reported that the ‘huge new building’ of the tea department was in the course of erection on the ‘best side of Leman Street’.[^34] Designed and erected by the CWS Building Department with the engineering work supervised by the Engineer’s Department, the five-storey warehouse (plus basement) opened on 22 March 1897 and Fielding presented a golden key to the chair of the Tea Committee as 2,000 Co-operators gathered in Leman Street to celebrate its completion.[^35] In addition to his role in the development of the site and the supervision of the building and its equipment, Fielding managed the staff and possessed ‘the chief and deciding tongue’ of the four expert tea testers.[^36]</p>\n\n<p>The new tea warehouse occupied the sites of 94, 96, 98 and 100 Leman Street and was henceforth known as 100 Leman Street.[^37] With a 170-ft frontage in Leman Street and 100-ft in Prescot Street, and elevations in Leicester facing bricks with ornamental panels and Derbyshire stone dressings, the Tea Department was heralded as ‘something more than a mere warehouse’.[^38] The few photographs to survive offer a glimpse of what Co-operative supporters insisted was a ‘magnificent and imposing building’, quite possibly in response to criticisms of its bleakness.[^39] Its basement floor extended beneath the Leman Street pavement and a subterranean passageway, 4ft 6in wide, connected with the London Branch opposite.[^40] At the rear, abutting on Tenter Street, and lined in white glazed bricks that were most probably supplied by the Ruabon works in Wales, was the loading yard (100 feet by 33 feet) for the delivery vans bringing tea from the London Docks.[^41] This was enclosed by two ‘bold iron gates’, which lay close to the ‘workpeople’s entrance’. An exterior hydraulic lift – ‘an innovation to the tea trade’ – carried the tea chests to the fifth floor, where 450 different varieties of Chinese, Indian and Ceylon teas were stored. From here they descended via the milling, blending and other processes to the ground floor, packeted and ready to be despatched to their destination.[^42] For the supply of water an artesian well was sunk 1,300 feet deep in order to be free of ‘the bad old East London Water Company’.[^43] Siemens Brothers had the contract for the electric lighting and also the dynamos installed in the generating room, which supplied the power via five electric motors for all the machinery used in packing and blending.[^44] As a Co-operative newspaper announced, ‘we know of no progress so striking and so gratifying to the student of social progress as the development from the small chest of tea with which the great Co-operative system of distribution was inaugurated to the palatial warehouse from whence the wholesale agency now transacts about a twenty-fifth of the tea trade of the United Kingdom. What a change in less than sixty years!'[^45]</p>\n\n<p>The tea warehouse was extended upwards and outwards by F. E. L. Harris in 1908–10, with new top floors and additions at ground level in Leman Street and Prescot Street,[^46] which were said to occupy the sites of a gambling den and an equally notorious sweating den.[^47] The main expansion was on the north side of the building fronting Leman Street. The CWS had bought the freehold of 88–90 Leman Street in 1895 (having previously taken it on a lease) and this property would later make way for Harris’s new three-bay wing for the tea department. By August 1908 the ‘houses lately numbered 88 &amp; 90 Leman Street’ had gone.[^48] These ‘houses’, a three-storey building, had until recently served as the German Artisans’ Home – established at this address in 1889 – run by Wilhelm Muller, who applied to extend the premises in 1897, prior to his summons for running an illegal lodging house in 1904.[^49] At the time of the 1901 census forty-seven men of mostly German and Austrian birth were staying at ‘the Christian Home for Christians’.[^50] In 1881 88 Leman Street had been a Scandinavian Home and a decade later No. 90 was a German YMCA.[^51] .</p>\n\n<p>The tea warehouse now rose seven storeys above its basement and was 95 feet high at its tallest point.[^52] There were 470 people employed in the new building, of which 280 were women, and the rest men and boys. The white-clad women worked mostly in the packing departments, while the men were engaged in both the higher-paid sales and tasting departments and on heavy work. When interviewed in 1895 for the poverty series of Charles Booth’s <em>Survey of Life and Labour in London</em>, Fielding said that he paid ‘higher wages than those in the trade’ and that ‘Lipton especially is a sweater’ and thought it unlikely that he would agree to an interview.[^53] In the wake of the Tea Girls’ Strike in 1904 (when 150 CWS tea packers walked out of Leman Street in protest at the proposed switch from a weekly wage to piecework) and the formation of the Tea Packers’ Union, ‘the Leman Street girls’ were said to ‘have practically “run” the union’, and about one-third of all workers were members of the Anchor Co-operative Society, which was then based at 37 Leman Street. Piecework was being abolished in 1908, and most workers were on the staff.[^54] The warehouse was billed as the largest in the country and at the close of 1912, thirty years after its opening in Hooper Square, the department was annually supplying English and Scottish co-operators 25,000,000lb of tea.[^55] Nearly 400,000lbs of this quantity came from the CWS’s own estates in Ceylon and the rest was supplied via the public auction at the Commercial Sale Rooms in Mincing Lane.[^56] The tea passed through the Tea Clearing House, just to the west of Mincing Lane, at 16 Philpot Lane, the central City office for public bonded tea warehouses in the Port of London, and which served as an intermediary between the wharfingers and the trade.[^57] From here it was delivered to Leman Street. The ‘all-electric tea factory’ was held by the CWS to be ‘the world’s best in buildings and mechanical equipment’.[^58] The auction itself moved across Mincing Lane in 1937 to the new Plantation House, which was purpose-built for commodity auctions and expanded in 1951. Such was the growth of the tea department that, during the First World War, ‘trumped up charges’ of over-buying were broadcast on the market, ‘with the aim of discrediting the co-operative movement’, but when Board of Trade officers arrived at Leman Street with search warrants they found that the co-operative stocks were below normal and thus the ‘slanders’ were exposed.[^59]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Percy Redfern, <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, 1913, p.92; <em>Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee on Adulteration of Food, &amp;c</em>., 4 April 1856, p. 285.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: John Burnett, <em>Liquid Pleasures: A Social History of Drinks in Modern Britain</em>, 1999, p. 62; John Burnett, <em>Plenty and Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present Day</em>, 1966, 1989 edn, pp. 219, 226; <em>Minutes of Evidence Taken Before the Select Committee on Adulteration of Food, &amp;c</em>., 4 April 1856, pp. 270–87.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, pp. 120–1; John F. Wilson, Anthony Webster, Rachael Vorberg-Rugh, <em>Building Co-operation: A Business History of The Co-operative Group, 1863</em>–<em>2013</em>, p. 82; ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, September 1897, p. 54.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, September 1897, pp. 54, 56.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>21stAnniversary Programme</em>, 1895, p. 10; Wilson, Webster, Vorberg-Rugh, <em>Building Co-operation</em>, p. 131.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>21stAnniversary Programme</em>, 1895, pp. 13–14.</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p. 42; <em>21stAnniversary Programme</em>, 1895, p. 10.</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>Building Co-Operation</em>, p. 83.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Anthony Webster, John F. Wilson, ‘Going Global. The Rise of the CWS as an International Commercial and Political Actor, 1863–1950: Scoping the Agenda for Further Research’, in Mary Hilson, Silke Neunsinger, Greg Patmore, Eds, <em>A Global History of Consumer Co-operation since 1850: Movements and Businesses</em>, 2017, p .578.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>Building Co-operation</em>, p.130.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>Ibid</em>.</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: <em>Ibid.</em>, p. 131.</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: <em>Economic Review</em>, April 1903, pp. 242–6.</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: ‘CWS: Tea Growers, Blenders and Packers II’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, February 1908, p. 120.</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: <em>Wholesale Co-operation in Scotland</em>, 1918, pp. 426–7.</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: <em>Building Co-operation</em>, p.448.</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: National Co-operative Archive (NCA), CWS Minutes, 23 July 1886; <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, p. 162.</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre (continued)’,<em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, November 1897, p. 72: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), 7 May 1869, renumbering plan no. 901; NCA, CWS Minutes, 28 January 1887.</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, September 1897, p. 56; <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, p. 214.</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: Ancestry, baptismal record and censuses for 1851–1911; <em>Journal of the RSA</em>, 7 June 1872, p. 604; <em>Bradford Observer</em>, 9 July 1874, p. 8.</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: NCA, E&amp;SCWS, Tea Committee Minutes, 17 December 1894, 1 August 1895, 29 November 1897, 9 January 1899.</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, p. 171; Lynn Pearson, Architecture of the Co-operative Movement, draft Chapter 2, p. 3.</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: ‘Co-operative Building Enterprise’, <em>The Producer</em>, May 1921, p. 204 </p>\n\n<p>[^24]: ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, September 1897, p. 56; <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, p. 214.</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: <em>Ibid</em>.</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: LMA, District Surveyors Returns serial no. 1894.0163-8: Leman Street drainage plans, 92–104 Leman Street, 18 April 1894, Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/THL/D/2/30/80; NCA, E&amp;SCWS Tea Committee Minutes, 17 December 1894.</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: NCA, E&amp;SCWS Tea Committee Minutes, 17 December 1894.</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: ‘The Tudor-Street Ancient Light Case’, <em>The Builder</em>, 2 July 1898, p. 16.</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: W. Henry Brown, <em>A Century of London Co-operation</em>, 1928, p. 91.</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: NCA, E&amp;SCWS Tea Committee Minutes, 1 August 1895.</p>\n\n<p>[^31]: NCA, E&amp;SCWS Tea Committee Minutes, 21 November 1895.</p>\n\n<p>[^32]: <em>Story of the C.W.S</em>., pp. 354, 379–80; <em>Essex Standard</em>, 27 June 1891, p. 8; <em>The Builder</em>, 4 June 1892, p. 449.</p>\n\n<p>[^33]: NCA, E&amp;SCWS Tea Committee Minutes, 12 November 1895, 15 February 1897, 1 May 1897, 12 July 1897, 20 June 1898.</p>\n\n<p>[^34]: <em>21st Anniversary Programme</em>, 1895, p. 10.</p>\n\n<p>[^35]: ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre (continued)’,<em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, January 1898, p. 104; ‘The Wholesales’ New Tea Premises’, <em>The Co-operative News</em>, 27 March 1897, p. 326.</p>\n\n<p>[^36]: ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre (continued)’,<em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, December 1897, p. 87.</p>\n\n<p>[^37]: Deeds of covenant, 1897, THLHLA, WBW/11/8.</p>\n\n<p>[^38]: ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre (continued)’,<em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, November 1897, p.72.</p>\n\n<p>[^39]: ‘Progress of Co-operation’, <em>Evening Star</em>, 23 March 1897, p. 3; ‘The Wholesales’ New Tea Premises’, <em>The Co-operative News</em>, 27 March 1897, pp. 325–7.</p>\n\n<p>[^40]: LMA, DSR serial no. 1897.0306-7; THLHLA, WBW/11/8, Deeds of covenant, 1897; ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre, continued’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, November 1897, p. 74.</p>\n\n<p>[^41]: NCA, E&amp;SCWS Tea Committee Minutes, 1 August 1895; ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre (continued)’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, December 1897, p. 88.</p>\n\n<p>[^42]: ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre, continued’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, December 1897, p. 88; ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre (concluded)’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, January 1898, pp. 104–5.</p>\n\n<p>[^43]: ‘CWS: Tea Growers, Blenders and Packers, III’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, March 1908, p. 137.</p>\n\n<p>[^44]: ‘The Co-operative Tea Centre (continued)’,<em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, November 1897, pp. 72, 74.</p>\n\n<p>[^45]: ‘Co-operative Tea Centre’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, September 1897, p. 54.</p>\n\n<p>[^46]: ‘CWS: Tea Growers, Blenders and Packers II’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, February 1908, p. 121; ‘CWS premises extended during 1909’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, January 1910, p. 109; THLHLA, building control file, 22355, 84–100 Leman Street.</p>\n\n<p>[^47]: ‘CWS: Tea Growers, Blenders and Packers II’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, February 1908, p. 120.</p>\n\n<p>[^48]: NCA, E&amp;SCWS Tea Committee Minutes (date obscured),<em>c</em>.12 November 1895, 21 November 1895, 12 July 1897; THLHLA, Building Control file 22355.</p>\n\n<p>[^49]: LMA, DSR serial no. 1897.0284; ‘What is a Common Lodging House?’, <em>London Daily News</em>, 28 March 1904, p. 8.</p>\n\n<p>[^50]: The National Archives (TNA), RG13/306 folio 67, pp. 59–62.</p>\n\n<p>[^51]: TNA, RG11/446 folio 13, pp. 20–21, RG12/282 folio 24, pp. 8–9.</p>\n\n<p>[^52]: ‘Packing Tea in East London’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, April 1913, p. v.</p>\n\n<p>[^53]: Notebook: Grocers, Greengrocers and Oil Colourmen, <em>c</em>.1895, London School of Economics, BOOTH/B/134.</p>\n\n<p>[^54]: ‘CWS: Tea Growers, Blenders and Packers’,<em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, March 1908, pp. 136–8.</p>\n\n<p>[^55]: ‘Packing Tea in East London’, supplement to <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, May 1913, pp. i–ii; <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, p. 219.</p>\n\n<p>[^56]: ‘Round the Tea Department’, <em>The Wheatsheaf</em>, January 1913, p. 103.</p>\n\n<p>[^57]: William H. Ukers, <em>All About Tea</em>, Vol. II, 1935, pp. 45–6.</p>\n\n<p>[^58]: <em>New History of the C.W.S.</em>, 1938, p. 343.</p>\n\n<p>[^59]: ‘The New Warehouse in Pictures’, <em>Co-operative News</em>, supplement, 6 December 1930, p. 7.</p>\n",
            "created": "2019-03-29",
            "last_edited": "2020-09-11"
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        {
            "id": 30,
            "title": "Lodging house & the bombing of the Tower 1885",
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            "body": "<p>\"This is a quiet thoroughfare leading out of Leman-sreet, and the houses are chiefly tenanted by business people and lodging-house keepers. No. 30 is a tenement of four floors, kept by Miss Cannon, proprietor of a Book Depository, pamphlets, &amp;c, being displayed in the windows of the apartment on the ground floor, which is also used as a sitting-room by  the lodgers. Of these there are several, but, owing to the exclusiveness which the inhabitants of London cultivate, very little attention is paid to one another's movements.\" <em>The Daily Telegraph</em>, 28 January 1885, 5.</p>\n\n<p>The paper was interested in the lodging because one of its residents, a man who gave his name as \"James Gilbert Cunningham\" was a lodger there when he was arrested in connection with the Fenian bombing of the Tower of London that year. In their search, the police also found three copies of <em>United Ireland</em> stuffed up the chimney along with an article from a London paper about the attempted assassination of a Captain Phelan in New York.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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            "body": "<p>A digitised colour slide (from the Tower Hamlets Archives collection) of the frontage of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, with No 36 Whitechapel Road and 1 Fieldgate Street, soon to be demolished, visible at the left:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/821306684056498177\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/821306684056498177</a></p>\n",
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            "title": "Nigel Taylor, the Tower Bell Foundry Manager at the time of its closure, recounts its working life",
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            "body": "<p>My name is Nigel Taylor. I was born in Hampstead. I'm from London although my family is from Warwick. We moved out to Harrow Weald when I was fairly small, and we lived there until I was six. After that, we moved up to Oxfordshire, and that's where I think things started to happen. Because when I was a schoolboy, a friend of mine said, \"The bells are being taken out.\" They hadn't been rung for some years at Chinnor in Oxfordshire, and they were rehung. As a result of that, we both went and learned to ring.</p>\n\n<p>My paternal family comes from Warwick. I used to listen to the bells at St. Mary's, and St. Nicholas Warwick ringing when we were staying there at weekends. I already had an interest in bells before I even learned to ring.</p>\n\n<p>Once I learned to ring, I would never really look back. I used to cycle all over the Oxfordshire countryside. I used to knock at vicars’ doors and ask for the key to go on up to the tower and look at the bells, which in those days, of course, was not an issue. They just said, \"Well, it was at your own risk\", and that was it. I used to scramble around all these belfries making sketches and notes and so on. Then, of course, eventually, I decided that I would try the bell industry.</p>\n\n<p>I applied for and was accepted in two different posts in the civil service. That's always what I think I thought I was going to do and certainly what my father thought I was going to do. I joined the Bell Foundry on the basis that I would join the civil service if I did not like it [in 1976 aged 18 years] and 40 years later I left it.</p>\n\n<p>Because my interest went beyond bell ringing – I'd already become a well- established bell ringer, but because of my interest in the history of bells and the bell frames and bell fittings, I think it was quite natural that I would say to myself, \"I ought to try the bell industry.\" Because I was especially interested in tuning, the tuning of bells which is a scientific art, I opted to aim at tuning bells. Eventually, that's exactly what I did. I spent some years when I joined the foundry in the moulding shop making bells. Then I started tuning, and then eventually, when the head moulder retired, I took over his job as well, and I did all the inscriptions.</p>\n\n<p>I used to inscribe all the damp clay moulds with the inscriptions as required for clients and decorative friezes. Because I very much liked decorative borders, I used them far more extensively than they had been used before.</p>\n\n<p>Living in Oxfordshire in those days when commuting wasn't really practical; it was a long journey to work, so I moved back into London. I lived in Stamford Hill and then Islington and Rotherhithe, and finally, Bow until I got married. When I got married, I bought a house in Essex.</p>\n\n<p>I started off as a moulding shop labourer. I made up the loam bricks that are used for packing out the coats or the flasks. I made up the loam. I did all general duties, I suppose. Then I started building moulds as well. To start with, I think I was building cores, the inner moulds, then I started doing the outer moulds. Then, of course, at that point, I moved into the tuning shop and started learning how to tune. I spent a long time tuning, in fact from 1985 until the Foundry closed.</p>\n\n<p>Then when the head moulder retired in 2003, I started doing all the inscriptions as well. As a result, I became the tower bell production manager because I oversaw the entire production of tower bells from start to finish. Not the fittings, but the bells themselves. Making the moulds, making the moulding templates for making the moulds, casting the bells, and tuning them.</p>\n\n<p>When I joined the foundry, [the number of staff] was certainly in the high 30s. Over the years, partly because we improved our mechanization, we bought more modern machines, we required fewer people. Of course, in the last few years, as the foundry began to dwindle, I think we were down to about 25 in total including all the other staff.</p>\n\n<p>I was sent on some most useful courses about moulding. They were mainly about moulding sands and scrap reduction and all this sort of thing. Quite interesting courses. Most of training of staff was in-house because loam moulding is very rare nowadays. It used to be widely used in iron founding, [but] there’s now only the Loughborough Foundry in England that uses loam moulding.</p>\n\n<p>It was all in-house and the same with the tuning. The tuning is a very specialized thing. There's no college course for it. A piano tuning course wouldn't really teach you anything about bell tuning. I learned to tune under the auspices of a chap called Wally who used to work for Gillett &amp; Johnston. They were a large bell foundry in Croydon, and they were extremely active from about 1910 to 1952/53 when their activities went into sharp decline and they closed.</p>\n\n<p>He'd joined the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. He brought his knowledge from Gillett &amp; Johnston. I had the advantage of having their knowledge of tuning and Whitechapel's knowledge on tuning, which was actually quite useful.</p>\n\n<p><strong>The process of bell making</strong></p>\n\n<p>Well, it begins with the customer's purse and the size of the tower. That's the first things, so let's do a simple one. They have a small turret, the aperture is let's say, 24 inches wide, so we're looking at a bell of about 22 inches in diameter because we would always talk in inches and hundredweights. We would then quote a price for the bell and its fittings. We would almost certainly have a 22-inch gauge to make the bell with, and if we didn't, we could design and make one. We would cut it out of plywood or order an amount of steel or stainless steel if we knew it was going to be a gauge that we were going to be using again and again.</p>\n\n<p>Having produced the template and attached to it was a vertical post. A central post. We inverted that into an iron flask. The flask looked rather like a bell, and it has lots of vent holes in it.</p>\n\n<p>You built the outer mould first and you used the loam bricks, which was simply dried. It's loam that's formed into moulds, just for flat brickwork effectively, dried in the drying oven, and then you lined the flask with that. Applied layers of loam until you struck up the mould, which is the effect you will get - that nice smooth finish. Then you dress it with graphite and sleeking tools to get a nice smooth finish. Stamped in all the lettering while the mould was still damp, and any decoration that you fancied putting in. Then you stoved that mould and used the inner profile of that template you made to make the core.</p>\n\n<p>On both the outer and inner mould there was a step that corresponds to the outside and the inside step. When we lowered the outer mould over the inner mould, these two steps met, and you just rub the two moulds gently together. You used to just rub the outer mould from side to side a few times to form a seal, because you don't want the molten metal leaking out the bottom. Then you formed a pouring basin at the top of the mould, poured in the metal, and then the next day or two, you'd open it up from there. There was your bell.</p>\n\n<p>We made bells in batches. We'd make six, seven, eight bells at a time. Generally for smaller bells, three weeks – a three week cycle. You could just about do a bell in a week and a half. You could make the bell quickly enough. It's the drying time, because loam needs a lot of drying. You couldn't really make a small bell in much under a week and a half.</p>\n\n<p>[Bells were cast in] high tin bronze. It's nominally 80% copper and 20% tin, but in practice, it tended to be more tin, which was 22/23% tin. Quite often on a Friday, we would do one melt at about midday and another one about half-past three in the afternoon. Each melt would be perhaps a ton each. You set the moulds in two rows on the floor. You cast one side in the morning, one side in the afternoon. We would invite visitors associated with the bells being cast. We had a maximum of twelve, donors and people interested in the project would come along and witness their bells being poured.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Famous bells</strong></p>\n\n<p>I joined Whitechapel several years after Westminster Abbey’s bells were cast, but was involved in the making of St. Martin-in-the-Fields and Canterbury Cathedral. We made 58 bells for the Riverside carillon in New York.</p>\n\n<p>Big Ben is the famous one….it's our epitome because the people say, \"You must be very proud of it.\" I say, \"Well, no, actually. It's a typical product to me of its time, it's a Victorian bell. It's the wrong shape. It has errant partials. It doesn't sound very nice, it's just famous.\" Back in the 1920s, Gillett &amp; Johnston's proprietor, Cyril Johnston, who was a very much go ahead modern businessman, tried desperately hard in the 1920’s to get the authorities to recast it because, I think, once it started being broadcast on the radio, it's a sound that's known all over the world.</p>\n\n<p>Once you reached that stage, there was no question of recasting though because it's become so famous, but up to that point it could've been, and he tried hard to have all five bells (Big Ben and the four quarter bells) recast because he said, \"It's tonally very deficient.\" It never was even before the surface crack appeared soon after the bell was hung. Now, we have this enormous great gong that clangs away every hour, but it's world famous. It's almost the voice of England.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Working conditions</strong></p>\n\n<p>I was in the front part of the building. There's a long but narrow shop, and that is the moulding shop and the drying oven at the front. That's, obviously, where I spent quite some time. Adjacent to that was the sand foundry where they made all the small bells, the handbells, the clock bells, the little bells that they sell within the shop. It was equipped with a 60kgs capacity, oil-fired furnace.</p>\n\n<p>The large tuning machine was situated in the sand foundry which wasn't ideal because it meant that the large tuning machine was adjacent to the furnace, so when we were tuning bells if the furnace was running, you couldn't test them. You just have to wait for the furnace to be turned off or idled. That wasn't ideal; in an ideal world, you always put your tuning shop completely on one side of the building and in a fairly soundproofed environment.</p>\n\n<p>Once you've made the bells, you just roll them up through the sound foundry. They'd either go straight around the corner to the tuning shop, for the larger bells had cord holes, so they already have a centre hole cast in the bell. The smaller bells went out to the back foundry and they'd drill a centre hole. We used to machine the heads flat for the belt, then turn them over and invert on the vertical boring machine to start tuning.</p>\n\n<p>I spent most of my time either in the moulding shop or in the tuning shop and not very much time out in the back foundry except some measuring of bells and things like that.</p>\n\n<p>My official title was Tower Bell Production Manager but you could say, Master Founder.</p>\n\n<p>[I managed the process of] the making of the bells themselves. Once you finish tuning the bells, they went to the back foundry where they made all the fittings and trial assembled all the frames, the fittings, and the bells. That wasn't my domain; I sent a tuned bell, together with all the dimensions required for making some of the fittings, such as the clappers and clapper staples.</p>\n\n<p><strong>History of the Bell Foundry and the Hughes family</strong></p>\n\n<p>It's had quite an interesting history. It traces itself back to Chamberlain who's in Aldgate around 1420. There are still a few of his bells extant. Next year, had the foundry existed, it could've been in effect celebrating 600 years of bell founding in this area. The Reformation, of course – there was a break. There were clearly not many if any bells being made during the Reformation. I think some of the bell founders in England just cast guns instead because it was quite lucrative and it kept them in business. There are cannons still extant that were cast by Robert Mot when he was at Whitechapel in the late 16th century.</p>\n\n<p>By 1568, 1570, the foundry was up and running again in Whitechapel High Street on the north side of the road. It remained there until 1738 when it moved to the site where it was until two years ago. It is certain that there was an overlap where there were some reduction on both sides in as far as they were gradually moving all the equipment from the old foundry which I think was in – must be in Essex Road, yes, it might have been Essex Road – whilst it was being moved from the old site into the Whitechapel Road site. It must've been over a period perhaps of two years; perhaps in 1736–1738. After that, it remained on that site until 2017.</p>\n\n<p>[The Hughes family go] back to 1884, ... when Arthur Hughes took on the role as general manager. Then, in 1904, he bought the company from Robert Stainbank's widow. There is still documentary evidence to that effect, before he became the owner of the business. Arthur had three sons: Albert, Leonard, and Robert. Eventually, Leonard and Robert disappeared off the scene and left Albert alone to run the business. Albert had two sons, that was William and Douglas. There was a daughter, Kathleen. She wasn't actually involved in the business but William and Douglas were.</p>\n\n<p>Then, after the war, they joined their father in the business. I think, William, in 1945 and Douglas, about five years later. Albert died in 1964, William died in 1993 and Douglas in 1997. William had two children – that was Alan and his daughter, Margaret. Alan joined the business in the 1970s. He became effectively the owner until about 1997/98 when his wife Kathryn joined the business as a director.</p>\n\n<p>[Alan Hughes] had been there for ten years. In a sense, he and I, we operated – in a sense of moving the foundry forward because he was already up and running and ..., by the 1970s he was obviously having some influence on what was done. Then I came in on the scene….</p>\n\n<p>I think from day one, I was making suggestions. I used to say things like, \"Why do you do it like this?\" Typically, the staff said, \"Well, we've always done it that way.\" I said, \"Why?\" \"Well we always have.\" \"Yes, but where is the logic? Why? Why do it like this?\" They didn't know. They just did it because that's how they've been taught. It was I who used to question everything which must've driven them nuts. I said, \"Well, I think, this idea is better. Let's do this.\" Eventually, I was able to implement some of my ideas and most of them were very successful, whilst some of them weren't!</p>\n\n<p>We moved the foundry forward. Technically, it got better and better. The product improved. I look at jobs at Whitechapel in the 1950s and 1960s and they're fine but certainly, by the 1980s and 1990s, we were producing bell installations which were of higher quality.</p>\n\n<p><strong>People of the foundry</strong></p>\n\n<p>The foundry has its fair share of memorable characters. There were people to whom it was just a job. They came and went, some of them might only stay weeks, months, perhaps a few years. It was just a job. There were staff members from the bell ringing fraternity. There were always people at the foundry who could ring or would learn to ring subsequently if they took – really became interested in the subject.</p>\n\n<p>We did have some interesting people. One of the most notable ones was Bill Theobald. He was a bell hanger. He joined the foundry, I think in 1947/48. He died in 1992. He's commemorated at a nearby pub in Spitalfields. I think there's a photograph of him there because he was a regular visitor there at lunchtimes. He used to go to the pub almost daily and have his lunch. He was a larger than life character. He was quite merciless with people. He would torment people to the point where I'm amazed actually he survived, but that's just the way he was, so he was a notable character.</p>\n\n<p>Most other people sort of blended in. We had a blacksmith called Peter Trick. He now makes decorative ironwork, pokers, bird tables, and things like that, so he's gone off and formed his own business. There were quite a number of interesting characters. It's Bill Theobald, the one I tend to think of as the most extraordinary.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Other foundries</strong></p>\n\n<p>At the beginning of the 20th century, there were quite a number of bell founders still left. Whitechapel's big rival was Warners, and Warners, in fact, made the first Big Ben and they also made the four quarter bells. But, the first Big Ben cracked, and they broke the terms and conditions of recasting it. Because they thought at that stage nobody else would take on the job, they demanded a much higher price to recast the bell, and they lost the contract to Whitechapel. After that, they were bitter rivals.</p>\n\n<p>Warners had a foundry at Cripplegate in the Barbican, but the Spelman Street foundry was a five-minute walk from the Whitechapel foundry. There was some movement of staff between the two companies, but they were the big rivals. Then there was Gillett &amp; Johnston, the big foundry in Croydon that built more carillons, sets of bells hung to play tunes than any other foundry. Then there was Llewellyn’s and James of Bristol, Bond of Burford, Barwell’s of Birmingham and there was Blews of Birmingham, although in fact they had already closed by 1900. Carr’s of Smethwick ceased bellfounding in the 1920s, Bowell of Ipswich closed in 1939/40.</p>\n\n<p>Certainly by the beginning of the Second World War, Bowell and Bond were just about disappearing. All the other firms had stopped founding bells except Gillett &amp; Johnston, John Taylor and Company in Loughborough, who still exist, and the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. After the war, Gillett &amp; Johnston closed in 1957. There was a big sort of upheaval with management because although the firm made money, it never really made enough to satisfy its creditors. It declined sharply and closed, so that then left Taylor's and Whitechapel.</p>\n\n<p>In the late 1970s, Taylor's was a family business, and the last generation, Paul Taylor started to make overtures and said, \"Well, what happens once I have gone?\" They formed a new company, and that company kept going and then amalgamated with a bell hanging company, and then it closed in 2009 but reopened because a group of bell ringers and other interested parties financed the business and reopened it and it's still thriving today.</p>\n\n<p>It was the Whitechapel Bell Foundry which was Mears &amp; Stainbank, which became a limited company in about 1968 or 69, Whitechapel Bell Foundry Limited. Then, of course, it traded up until 2017.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Rate of production</strong></p>\n\n<p>In its day, certainly back in the 90s and early part of this decade we would make typically up to a hundred bells per year. I think by about – certainly 2008 or 2009 was a very busy period because I think we produced seven completely new rings of bells in the space of just over a year, which was almost unheard of in the family's history since the 19th century. So that was a very busy period, and of course, that was the period where Taylors [John Taylor and Company of Loughborough] previous business closed, and they've reopened.</p>\n\n<p>Taylors amalgamated with a bell hanging company which already had orders on its order book. It started off with work. Then, I think it began to struggle a bit partly because after the 2010 election there were spending cuts. What happens in the bell industry is it lags behind everything else. So, for instance, back in 1930–31, during the Great Depression, all the bell factories were busy because bell projects tend to be long term projects, so if you get hit at all it happens two or three years down the line.</p>\n\n<p>But, back in the '30s, there was so much work, it didn't affect the industry really at all, but this time it did. By about 2013, there was a drop off in bell production, both for Taylors and for Whitechapel. I think the problem was, this was misinterpreted by Whitechapel at the time as a permanent decline in bell founding.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Bell ringers</strong></p>\n\n<p>There are something like 40,000 bell ringers, but most of them are elderly. There's this feeling that because you have all these elderly bell ringers and not large numbers of young ringers, that bell ringing will decline. As bell ringing declines, then it follows that the bell foundry industry will also decline because there will be fewer projects. But actually what's happened is a lot of these older ringers have said, \"Well, while I'm alive, I want to get the bells restored\". So, by about 2014 the work was actually picking up quite considerably. What Taylor's did was to adopt very aggressive marketing, very competitive prices, free quotations, and as soon as they heard a whisper that a job might be going, they were writing to say, \"We'd like to quote for it\".</p>\n\n<p>So what happened, was they simply, as the market was taking off again, creamed off the big jobs and Whitechapel went into quite a sharp decline. Its marketing strategy didn't change, and it simply lost the ability to sell its own product. It was a very good product, and I know the Taylor fanatics would argue against my comments, but what Whitechapel was producing, was better than in many ways than that of Loughborough.</p>\n\n<p>The bells look better, nicer castings, more solid castings, the inscriptions are much nicer, and they're very nice bells, producing very fine rings of bells in the last years. But despite this, Whitechapel lost the ability to sell its product and went into decline, and of course, eventually, it closed. That was that as they say. It still exists on paper because the Hughes family kept the Whitechapel Bell Foundry company. It will take in enquiries, and it passes onto bell hanging companies or the Westley Group to quote for new bells.</p>\n\n<p>Taylors still has plenty of work. They're very, very busy. In fact, they've taken on extra staff. They do well because they believe in themselves, and this is evident in their marketing and excellent website.</p>\n\n<p>[Whitechapel Bell Foundry employed] around 25, but of course, in the last few months it started shedding people until we had really only a skeleton staff. The last few weeks we must have been down to about ten.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Local changes</strong></p>\n\n<p>In my time in Whitechapel from 1976 onward, of course, the area has improved enormously. When I first went there, there was lots of down and outs. There were people obviously living in extreme poverty, and I know that there still are, it's just it's not as visible anymore. But, there were people that lived at Booth House and other Salvation Army houses that had nothing, and these were the hardened meths drinkers.</p>\n\n<p>I remember once somebody said to me, \"You'll notice that the Irish and the Scots are really – they're the hardened down and outs. With the English, you get a better class of down and out.\" I said, \"I don't really think it works like that,\" [laughs] but it was quite an interesting comment somebody made to me back in the 1970s when there was no such thing as being politically incorrect. But these people had nothing, and they used to beg, and with that that they gained sometimes, they would buy themselves a meal or their next bottle of cheap wine or whatever.</p>\n\n<p>Of course the whole area was run down. There were lots of decayed buildings, and there was very little for many people. But of course, what we did have was the Jewish community, we had Bloom's, and we had all these Jewish shops which gradually disappeared, dwindled over the years. We had a synagogue, which I think still exists, it’s almost next door to the mosque. Of course, the jewish community virtually all moved out, they seem to have all disappeared into the suburbs.</p>\n\n<p>It's history repeating itself because this is an area which used to be noted for immigrants moving in, settling, making some money, and then moving out. We've had the Huguenots, we've had the Jews, and I think we've had some Eastern Europeans, and I think a lot of people have established themselves. It's almost like a centre for people to meet, form their own communities, get themselves up and running, form their own businesses, then off they go. That's all history repeating itself. I dare say in thirty years or so, most of the Muslims living here will move out to the suburbs, and we'll have another group moving into the area instead. That's just the way it is.</p>\n\n<p>Certainly, the period that I was at the foundry, the area improved quite considerably. The bomb sites, even in the 1970s, had been built on since. The only thing that actually made life difficult in the foundry was that it – when you turn off the Whitechapel Road, you go in towards Fieldgate Street on Plumbers Row. It used to be just a clear road, and then they put this large triangle in with a garden and shrubs, and it made it very difficult for lorries doing deliveries because they had to go around it and then reverse into the foundry. The same problem exists at Tesco which is on the opposite side of the road. That's something the Council did that didn't help the foundry one little bit, it was really quite awkward.</p>\n\n<p>Of course, over the years, more and more cars – although there were car parking restrictions, people used to park their cars outside the main foundry gate, even though it said \"No Parking\". So a lorry would come along to deliver some bells or collect something, and you had to wait till you found the person who owned the car and remove it. So from that point of view, it became more inconvenient. I suppose you could say although the building did its job, it did it with some difficulty.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Working in the building</strong></p>\n\n<p>Well, it was always a question of making do. Back in the 19th century, it was mainly a foundry, it didn't do much else. It was Thomas Mears who had the frame building or the erecting shop built in about 1810 or perhaps 1820. Because, prior to that, what the Foundry tended to do was just make bells and sell them to bell hangers. It did make some of the fittings, but eventually, it started to produce a complete product. It built its own frames, it provided all the fittings. Of course, by the 20th century, it was becoming quite a struggle. They made quite some large bells, not just Big Ben, the big bell of Montreal, and the Great Peter of York has obviously been recast.</p>\n\n<p>It had a large pit where they used to cast bells, but in those days, all they did was make the bell moulds underground in a pit, bury them in the ground, cast the bells, dig the bells out, and take them out into the works. A crude tuning machine enabled the strike note to be tuned. Along came the 20th century, harmonic tuning and the introduction of modern fittings, so we couldn't just make the bell, we had to tune the bell as well, so a new tuning machine was required</p>\n\n<p>There was always a lack of height. It wasn't so much a lack of lifting equipment, it was a lack of height. The moulding shop really was quite awkward, and as soon as you started making bells much over one and a half tonnes, you had to start using the pit. You had to put them down in the pit to cast them, and if you made anything much over two tonnes, the best thing to do was to build the core in the pit and to lower the cope down because it gave you a little bit more headroom.</p>\n\n<p>There was a very dingy shop where they used to build the frames. Of course, that was rebuilt in 1980. It had more height, it had two decent cranes, and had good lighting and better heating as well. The heating was something that improved gradually over the years, and actually, in the last few years, it was quite a comfortable place to work. The roof leaked, but not badly, it was something that we sort of kept on top of.</p>\n\n<p>The building did need work done to it, there's no doubt about it, but it was quite habitable. There was plenty of light, we had decent heating, so you didn't tend to boil too much in the summer, and you didn't tend to suffer too much in the winter, so it wasn't an unpleasant environment to work in. The other thing that improved was the dust extraction. They installed a series of extractors in the late 1970s, and that immediately made the environment very much better.</p>\n\n<p>If you went up to the carpenters’ shop, there's a whole range of memorial boards. I don't know if you've ever been there, but you'll find photographs of them on the web, A whole series of boards from about the 1880s or 1890s, up to perhaps the late 1990s – members of staff who have worked at the foundry.</p>\n\n<p>Some of them had retired, some of them had died, some of them had died in harness. Lots of these people died at a fairly young age, in their 40s, 50s, 60s. There were a few exceptions, but not many.</p>\n\n<p>The thing that we became aware of, as we were going through our careers, was that we were living longer, we were fitter, we ate a better diet. Formerly, most of these people lived in poverty, in social housing, in dank tenement buildings. We were starting to live more comfortably, moving out to the suburbs, buying our own homes, centrally heated, eating a good diet, plenty of exercise, so we were living longer. And that's something that we've thought of, became aware of, subconsciously at the start, but then we actively spoke about it, certainly in the last few years, and it must've applied to other factories as well.</p>\n\n<p>I remember people who used to work in heavy industry, and often if they did make it to retirement, they don't even last a year or two, because they didn't have any money apart from their old age pension. They'd sit in front of the TV all day, and within a year or two, they're dead. But we were much more active, not just bell ringing, but all sorts of other things. And we lived better lives, in a better environment, and the foundry itself became a much better environment to work in. As a result of that, we haven't suffered nearly as badly.</p>\n\n<p><strong>The end of the foundry and the future of the site</strong></p>\n\n<p>[Alan Hughes] might possibly have found a buyer. When the foundry was a going concern, I expect he could've found somebody to buy it. My guess is, what would've happened, is that he would've sold the business, not the building. Because what they could've done, is to sell it to a new group of directors to run the business, but the Hughes family would have retained ownership of the building and charged rent. Being so near to the city, they would've made quite a decent living out of that. So that's one way out of it.</p>\n\n<p>I think their problem was they had this very strong, almost obsessive belief in it being a family business, and despite the fact that it changed families so many times – we had single generations as well as families, we had the Mears family, and the Bartlett family, but lots of people were a one generation owner. I don't think previously people had thought of it much as a family business, and William and Douglas never really thought of it as a family business. I think the last generation reached a state where they couldn't see beyond that, it was a family business or nothing.</p>\n\n<p>I just don't think they could see beyond that to the bigger picture, that they were just part of this enormous, great history. They had two daughters that weren't interested in the business, and exactly the same thing happened with Paul Taylor, of the Taylors. He had two daughters that were not interested in the business, but he had a son who died of leukaemia when he was eight, and I think at that point he decided that was the end of it. But in fact, what did happen was there was a rescue package. When Paul Taylor retired, the company continued, albeit under a new name with some new directors. It could've happened at Whitechapel, it just didn't.</p>\n\n<p>[Alan Hughes] ran out of steam and he wanted to retire, so I think that he couldn't see a way forward. It was a declining market as far as Whitechapel were concerned, and I think he was worn out. He'd slogged away at the foundry, working long long hours day after day, since he was about 18, 19 years old. I think he had done enough.</p>\n\n<p>Well, of course at the moment we have Raycliff, that owns the building and is seeking a change of use, turning it into a boutique hotel and themed cafe and a small foundry. What I'm hoping for is something on a larger scale. I mean at this point, what I do need to say is that there is this campaign to save the bell foundry building for continued use as a foundry.</p>\n\n<p>The bell foundry is gone and most of the equipment has gone. It's been sold to other companies, factories. The Westley group have the moulding equipment but don't use it. They use modern moulding techniques, they use bonded sands and patterns to make the bells. None of the old equipment is now being used, it's just sitting out in Westleys yard, slowly deteriorating. We would use modern moulding techniques and source modern equipment, so we do not require the redundant Whitechapel moulding equipment.</p>\n\n<p>What I'm hoping for is that we can reopen it as a bell and art foundry. \"Save the bell foundry\" is just that: save the building for continued use as a bell and art foundry. We want to make it into a more diverse foundry. Art foundry work is very lucrative. The Westley Group do art castings and there's an awful lot of art commissions, some of them small scale, some of that repetitive work. We already have several potential orders, some on a large scale.</p>\n\n<p>I can see a success for the building as an art foundry that will also make small and medium sized bells. What I was thinking of was to make small-scale Liberty Bells, Big Bens and other famous bells to sell. And another thing we were planning to do was to digitally record famous bells. It's quite interesting that Raycliff have taken up on this because they've told me that's one other thing they would like to do, to digitally record bells. They too think that's a good idea.</p>\n\n<p>[In the alternative proposal] we are proposing to use most of that front building as an art foundry. We would have a museum but it would mean a much smaller scale than that proposed by Raycliff. It's going to be mostly foundry work. One of the proposals made to Raycliff, which they've rejected thus far is that we have the front of the building for the foundry work and they demolish the 1981 building and build their boutique hotel.</p>\n\n<p>I thought that was a reasonable compromise, but clearly, they don't. That would work because they don't have to try and come up with some solution for the old building, which is listed anyway, they can just get on and build their Boutique Hotel.</p>\n\n<p>But there is work to be done. There's damp proofing to do, the roof needs heavy repair if not replacement. There is a lot of work to do, but what would be quite practical is to sort out the roof first and the damp proofing and then once the building is all up and running to carry on with restoration work thereafter.</p>\n\n<p>The plan is apprenticeships, because there are not many opportunities for people to learn the art of moulding and casting, but a superb opportunity presents itself with a revitalised Whitechapel foundry.</p>\n\n<p>Upstairs where the shops were for assembling hand bells and the carpenter’s shop, the plan was to let those out for artists. ... I think that the way that the foundry can continue into the future and also be profitable is going to be art casting as well as bells. Bellfounding will continue as an important feature of the revitalised foundry but we will diversify. We've got Taylors at Loughborough making bells and the Westley Group at Newcastle-Under-Lyme are now casting bells, and I think now that we cannot be especially profitable by just manufacturing bells, but combined with an art foundry, there is no reason why it can't be very successful.</p>\n\n<p>Nigel Taylor was interviewed on 25 April 2019 by Shahed Saleem, and contributed this edited transcript.</p>\n",
            "created": "2019-05-30",
            "last_edited": "2021-07-21"
        },
        {
            "id": 794,
            "title": "Before Commercial Street: Essex Street and Catherine Wheel Alley up to the 1830s",
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                "id": 2,
                "username": "surveyoflondon"
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            "body": "<p>Commercial Street roughly follows the line of Catherine Wheel Alley which ran between Whitechapel High Street and Wentworth Street. Catherine (sometime ‘Katherine’ before the eighteenth century) Wheel Alley took its name from the Catherine Wheel Inn on or near Wentworth Street, and formed a boundary between two landholdings which had probably formed parts of the Trentemars estate from the thirteenth century: the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/353/detail/#wentworths-and-woodlands\">Woodlands estate</a> to the west, held by William Meggs from the 1570s, and a part of the Bernes estate to the east, held by various members of the Cornwalyes or Cornwallis family in the fifteenth century, but fragmented by the sixteenth.[1^] Catherine Wheel Alley was built up in the later sixteenth century. A number of substantial houses were there by the mid seventeenth century, especially on either side of the central portion.</p>\n\n<p>A large part of the east side of the alley, including property in Wentworth Street, was held in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by members of the Garrad family, beginning with Sir Jacob Garrad (c. 1586−1666), the son of Thomas Garrad, saddler and Sheriff of the City of London (d. 1632), and created baronet of Langford in 1662. Sir Jacob, also a City alderman, amassed a fortune as a linen draper and East India Company adventurer, importing calicoes from India in the 1640s and 50s. As well as his Whitechapel property, he left substantial property in London, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk and notably Ireland, a result of investments in the repression of the Irish rebellions of 1641−2, which yielded land for loans.[^2] The Whitechapel properties passed through his son Thomas (who adopted the spelling Garrard), second baronet, and great-granddaughter Sarah Downing to her son Sir Jacob Garrard Downing (c.1717−64), who disposed of them in the 1750s.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The long plots running east and west from the central portion of the alley were occupied in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries principally by those involved in the silk trades – weavers and, especially, throwers. Some plots included substantial houses, such that of John Fromanteel (c.1586−1665), previously in the Minories, and his son Mordecai (1642-98), and his heirs, held of the Garrads on the east side (the southern half of the site of Toynbee Hall) from 1656 to 1707.[^4] With eight hearths in the 1660s and 70s it was almost certainly the large, supposedly Elizabethan, house (reputedly a residence of the Earl of Essex) described just before its demolition for the creation of Commercial Street in 1844, as ‘at the rear of the houses forming that street. It is three stories high. The attic windows are latticed, and the rooms on the first and second floors are 14 feet square. There is a part of the spacious staircase remaining, and the joists and girders are in as good preservation as when originally placed in the brickwork’.[^5] By the time of John Fromanteel’s death in 1665 the site contained this large house, with warehouse and garden, another smaller house adjoining fronting Catherine Wheel Alley, in the occupation of his daughter Mary and her silk-thrower husband, John Lakins, and two smaller houses, probably those to the north evident on Ogilby and Morgan’s map of 1676. At the time that Mordecai Fromanteel’s nephew John leased the house to Roger Smith in 1701, the house boasted twelve rooms including a Great Room ‘wainscoted all over’ with paintings above the chimney piece and doors, a Great Parlour and Drawing Room similarly fitted, a ‘Blew Room’, ‘hung with blew (fabric)’, the ‘staires case lined brest high from the top to the bottome’, a summer house, two warehouses, a counting house, a shop, a back yard with chicken coops and horse pond, and a garden with four stone pedestals, a sundial and a fountain.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>The Fromanteels’ house was unusual both in its size and in surviving till the 1840s. While other large buildings appear on the west side of the 1676 map, hearth tax returns suggest most of these were largely commercial rather than domestic, most likely sheds for silk-throwers who, until mechanisation of the trade, required long spaces for their work. The accompanying houses were less grand than Fromanteel’s, many with only three or four hearths in the 1660s and 1670s.</p>\n\n<p>Mechanisation and the shift to larger throwing enterprises outside London from the early eighteenth century both hit the small throwers in Whitechapel and Spitalfields and reduced the need for large spaces. It thereby led to the development of these sites as alleys and courts of small houses.[^7] The first to be so developed was Sugar Loaf Alley or Court, on the east side near the High Street, already a long narrow court of fourteen houses by the 1670s. In the early eighteenth century these were held by Richard Arters ‘clothworker and Citizen of London’ (d. 1736). In 1719 and 1730 he was also advertising plots of land on the west side with an 80ft frontage to the alley and more than 100ft deep, each to be let on building leases, ‘whereon are now some old tenements and other buildings’. These were developed as Martin Street, and New Martin Street, connected courts of small houses of two and three rooms, known later all as Martin or Martin’s Court.[^8] </p>\n\n<p>By the mid eighteenth century, there were four courts or alleys on the west side – from south to north: Rose and Crown Court, present by the late seventeenth century and historically an extension of Nag’s Head Yard, Martin’s Court and Moor’s Court. On the east side, from the north, were George’s Buildings, later Griggs Court, Catherine Wheel Court (a small square of fourteen houses entered from the southwest corner), and Sugar Loaf Alley.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>Though it lacked the presence and exposure offered by the High Street, Catherine Wheel Alley, as a much-used cut-through to Spitalfields, developed a character of a secondary shopping street, with the usual small grocers and bakers, and a number of long-standing hostelries, mostly on the west side. One of the earliest was Bland’s Coffee House, documented between 1695 and 1730.[^10] </p>\n\n<p>The Catherine Wheel itself originally seems to have stood near the north end, though by the time of its demolition, when the licensee was Christian Sohnge, furrier, it was at the south end of the west side.[^11] A few doors to the north, flanking the entrance to the extensive Rose and Crown Court, was the Rose and Crown, present by 1730.[^12] By the time of its sale for the building of Commercial Street, it was owned by James and Charles Goding of the Lion Brewery in Lambeth.[^13]</p>\n\n<p>The Throwster’s Arms was at the corner of Martin Street, in the middle of the west side by 1787 and remained till demolition for Commercial Street.[^14] During the tenure of the licensee Edward Dyke (d. 1835) and his widow, Jane, the pub was used regularly for inquests and, appropriately perhaps, in 1833 the Friendly Burial Society was founded there.[^15]</p>\n\n<p>In the second half of the eighteenth century the area around Catherine Wheel Alley grew ever denser, both with housing and industry. Essex Court, north of Moor’s Court was created on the west side, and, adjoining Catherine Wheel Court on its east side, the optimistically titled Land of Promise.[^16] The name Essex Street began to be used for Catherine Wheel Alley from the 1790s, exclusively so by c.1805, and by 1820 most of its west side was held freehold or on lease granted by James Livermore (d. 1801), a Tottenham Court Road draper, and his heirs, and by John Elger (1757−1821), who had built Elger Square and Elger Place, near the north end of the Street.[^17] </p>\n\n<p>The final developments in Catherine Wheel Alley were Chapel Court and Cobley’s Court, two at the north end of the east side reached by narrow adjoining alleys. Chapel Court possibly records the presence from c.1718 in Catherine Wheel Alley of a meeting house used by General Baptists previously part of a congregation in Dunning’s Alley, Bishopsgate, though it was out of use by 1729.[^18] Cobley’s Court, eleven mean houses adjoining it to the south, was created in the 1830s by Thomas Cobley, carman, leaseholder of Fromanteel’s house at the time of its demolition, possibly in anticipation of compensation that might be forthcoming from the Commissioners for the new street.[^19] </p>\n\n<p>As more housing was built, the remaining pockets of unbuilt land and some of the most egregious housing were replaced by industry and commerce. The Land of Promise was rebuilt in 1786-7 as a warehouse, wine vaults and yard by William Quarrill (1721-98), a JP and colourman with premises at 37 Whitechapel High Street, who had leased the adjoining plot to the north, south of Fromanteel’s house, in 1776. [^20] </p>\n\n<p>Along with one or two other properties at the south end of Essex Street, Quarrill’s yard survived the creation of Commercial Street becoming by 1844 the John Bull brewery yard, the brewery, in Quarrill’s wine vaults at the rear of the yard, run until the 1870s by Frederick and George Bye, with bacon stoves elsewhere in the yard.[^21] The brewery yard was finally demolished c.1899 for the building of <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/399/detail/\">Commercial Street schools</a>. </p>\n\n<p>Fromanteel’s house and yard had been taken by Benjamin and John Titford, dealers in hay, chips and sawdust, by 1802, succeeded in a similar line by William Turner (d. 1830), the premises leased after his death by Thomas Cobley, carman, until demolition in 1844.[^22] </p>\n\n<p>Catherine Wheel Alley and its courts became a byword for overcrowding, crime and general squalor during the century before Commercial Street swept it away. To take just three examples, a trial in the winter of 1792, of a lodging-house keeper accused of dragging a critically ill lodger (‘John Dollin, a black man’) into the street where he died, gives a flavour, with the deceased sharing the room with four other men and women, including a ‘girl of the town’.[^23]  In 1829 three houses in Sugarloaf Court were condemned and sold off for their materials.[^24] In 1832 and 1833 two separate bands of coiners in courts of Essex Street were convicted for making counterfeit sixpences and shillings.[^25]</p>\n\n<p>By the early nineteenth century other markers of poverty were evident. William Waldegrave, MP for Bedford, who had campaigned among the poor of the East End to attend school reported on a visit to one house in a court off Essex Street where he found nine people ‘generally very dirty’ and ‘in a miserable condition’ occupying one small room, and reckoned that around 360 people lived in the court of thirty houses. The reluctance of the parents, a high proportion of whom were Irish, to send children to school he found was due to lack of clothing and that ‘the priests have such an effect upon their minds’ that they were reluctant to send children to Protestant schools.[^26] There were frequent outbreaks of disease in the crowded conditions, including typhus in 1817.[^27] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: ‘Stepney: Manors and Estates’, in <em>A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11, Stepney, Bethnal Green</em>, ed. T. F. T. Baker, London, 1998, pp. 19-52: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/SLC/1/17/8: The National Archives (TNA), PROB 11/30/155</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: TNA, PROB 11/162/728; PROB 11/322/210: Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, <em>The Court Minutes, etc, of the East India Company, 1640-43</em>, Oxford 1909, pp. 262, 331, 353: Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, <em>The Court Minutes, etc, of the East India Company, 1644-49</em>, Oxford 1912, pp. 32, 99, 113, 153, 210, 223, 276, 332: Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, <em>The Court Minutes, etc, of the East India Company, 1650-54</em>, Oxford 1913, pp. 49, 83, 84, 111, 177, 182, 241, 251, 328: Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, <em>The Court Minutes, etc, of the East India Company, 1655-59</em>, Oxford 1916 p. 37: Karl S. Bottigheimer, ‘English money and Irish land: the “Adventurers” in the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland’, <em>Journal of British Studies</em>, 7/1 (Nov 1967), pp. 12-27: R.P. Mahaffy, ed., <em>Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland… 1647-1660</em>, London 1903, pp. 449, 453, 461: Robert Brenner, ‘The Civil War politics of London’s merchant community’, <em>Past and Present</em>, 58 (Feb 1973), pp. 53-107</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), ACC/0311/096</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: East Sussex Record Office, FRE/659: <a href=\"https://www.londonroll.org/\">Londonroll.org</a>: <a href=\"https://www.ancestry.co.uk/\">Ancestry</a>: TNA, PROB 11/448/358</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Evening Mail</em>, 14 Aug 1844, p. 7: <a href=\"https://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-hearth-tax/london-mddx/1666/whitechapel-hamlet-1\">Hearth Tax: Middlesex 1666, Whitechapel, Whitechapel hamlet (1 of 3)</a>: TNA, E179/143/370, rot.32v</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: East Sussex Record Office, FRE/659</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>Post Man and the Historical Account</em>, 19 to 22 July 1707: <em>Daily Courant</em>, 29 Jan 1712; 14 Sept 1714: <em>Public Advertiser</em>, 2 June 1761</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>Daily Courant</em>, 27 May 27: <em>Daily Journal</em>, 20 March 1730</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Rocque map of London, 1746: Land Tax returns (LT)</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>London Gazette</em>, 11 to 14 Nov 1695: <em>Daily Journal</em>, 20 March 1730: John Ashton, <em>Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne</em>, London 1882, p. 262</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: Post Office Directories (POD): LT: <em>Twenty Third Report of the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Etc, London 1846</em>, p. 64: Census. </p>\n\n<p>[^12]: LMA, MR/LV/05/026: LT]</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: POD: <em>Twenty Third Report of the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Etc, </em>London 1846, p. 67</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: POD: LT: LMA, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/343/528007</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: Parliamentary Papers (PP) 1837, vol 51, p. 16: TNA, PROB 11/1856/141: <em>John Bull</em>, 28 Feb 1822, p. 8: <em>Globe</em>, 29 Aug 1834, p. 4: <em>Bell’s Weekly Messenger</em>, 10 Dec 1842, p. 5</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: LT</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: TNA, PROB 11/1357/118; PROB 11/1643/5: LT: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 15 Sept, p. 4: <em>Twenty Third Report of the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Etc</em>, London 1846, p. 65</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: W.T. Whitley, ed., <em>Minutes of the General Assembly of the General Baptist Churches in England, vol. 1: 1654-1728</em>, London 1909, pp. lii, 133, 134, 138, 145</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: <em>Twenty Third Report of the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Etc</em>, London 1846, p. 65: LT</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: LMA Acc/0311/096: LT: POD: <em>Monthly Magazine and British Register</em>, March 1798, p. 236: Ancestry: TNA, PROB 11/1305/234</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: Census: Goad insurance plans: Ancestry: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 23 April 1844 p. 1: LT</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: LT: <em>Twenty Third Report of the Commissioners of Her Majesty’s Woods, Forests, Land Revenues, Etc</em>, London 1846, p. 65</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: <em>London Chronicle</em>, 7-10 Dec 1792</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 14 July 1829, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: <em>Morning Post</em>, 7 Sept 1833, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: <em>The Philanthropist</em>, 1816, pp 260-1</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: <em>The British Review</em>, 12, 1818, p. 412</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
            "created": "2018-12-12",
            "last_edited": "2021-01-25"
        },
        {
            "id": 812,
            "title": "Venables department store",
            "author": {
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                "username": "surveyoflondon"
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                "properties": {
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                    "b_name": "2c to 4a Commercial Street",
                    "street": "Commercial Street",
                    "address": "2c to 4a Commercial Street, London E1 7PT",
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            "body": "<p>This imposing four-storey range in stock brick was built in 1862 for the drapers Thomas Venables &amp; Sons, based at <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/373/detail/#t-venables-sons-ltd-buildings-102-to-105-whitechapel-high-street\">102-105 Whitechapel High Street</a>. The designer was the City architect Isaac Clarke (1800-85), a friend of the Venableses since the early 1850s.[^1] It features Italianate stucco surrounds to the windows (similar were added to the existing High Street frontage, since rebuilt, as a stab at visual uniformity), those on the first floor tall and round-headed. The building, along with the High Street buildings, because a branch of F.W. Woolworth followng Venables closure in 1928, and was severely damaged during the Second World War, the upper floors burnt out and its frontage partly destroyed. Essential repairs were carried out in 1948-51 and the frontage was reinstated in 1955.[^2] Since Woolworth's closed this branch in 1960 the upper floors have houses a variety of small offices and educational establishments. In 2018 Alliance Property Asia Inc, incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, submitted a radical planning application to demolish this building and the adjoining Nos 6 and 6a Commercial Street, and replace the whole site with 40,000 sq ft of offices in a 12- to 19-storey glass building, the altered façade of the 1909 building retained at the corner. The architects are Foster + Partners.[^3]The proposal includes landscaping the car park on the site of Spread Eagle Yard as a public garden. In December 2018 the Victorian Society pointed out that the Whitechapel High Street Conservation Area Appraisal specifically states that this conservation area should be “seen as a definable boundary between the commercial development pressures encroaching from the City to the west, and the historic communities of the east”,' and stated that if granted the application would 'set a very dangerous precedent for future developments in the historic East End of London'.[^4] A revised scheme reduced to fourteen storeys at its tallest was submitted in 2020–1.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>The Builder</em> (<em>B</em>), 4 Feb 1860, p.80: Census: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: THP</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <a href=\"https://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/whitechapel-scheme-sets-dangerous-precedent-for-historic-east-end\">https://www.victoriansociety.org.uk/news/whitechapel-scheme-sets-dangerous-precedent-for-historic-east-end</a></p>\n\n<p>[^5]: THP</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
            "created": "2018-12-16",
            "last_edited": "2021-01-25"
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        {
            "id": 843,
            "title": "1 Dock Street and 2 Cable Street",
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                "username": "surveyoflondon"
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                    "street": "Dock Street",
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            "body": "<p>This three-storey group, six bays in all, with a recessed quadrant corner, cornice intact, was built in 1853–4 by Joseph Clever of Haggerston for Nathaniel James Powell of Mead &amp; Powell, wholesale stationers. John Loane, a druggist and a churchwarden at St Paul’s, was the first occupant of the larger corner and Dock Street shop, followed from the 1870s by Joseph and Thomas Loane, surgeons, until after 1910 – Joseph Loane was John Liddle’s successor as Whitechapel’s Medical Officer of Health. Manuel Galdeano then Joseph Cenci had a café here from the 1940s to the 1980s. 2 Cable Street was coffee rooms in the years either side of 1900.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives, WORK6/144/1,9; IR58/84822/3956: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
            "created": "2019-03-04",
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        {
            "id": 1119,
            "title": "31–33 Prescot Street (with 99 Mansell Street)",
            "author": {
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            "body": "<p>There were five houses of around 1685 to the west of the site of No. 30, the two to the west knocked together by 1693 for John Topham at what had come to be known as Topham’s Corner. This end of Prescot Street had industry and warehousing from an early date. In 1731 ‘the corner of Prescot Street nearest the City [had] a house of three rooms on a floor, in good repair, with large warehouses, yard, stable, and other conveniences, fit for a Merchant or large Trader’.[^1] The large house at the end was divided in the late 1740s and, with a warehouse, stable and yard to the rear along Chamber Street, occupied from the 1750s to ’80s by Sarah Harris and her successors, including John Harris, a glass cutter, who in the 1790s also held leases of 8 and 9 Magdalen Row (Nos 23 and 24), as well as four houses on Chamber Street.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>Solomon Kick, a chiropodist, was at No. 31 by 1841, followed in 1844 by Abraham Coronel, a cigar maker and the manager of Emanuel Jonas’s Leman Street factory, and then around 1850 by Lammert Van Praagh, a Dutchman. Joseph Aaron Spyer, an importer of antiquities, passed through and gave way in 1870 to Samuel Abensur (d. 1883), a merchant from Essaouira in Morocco. No. 31 was rebuilt in 1907–8 as a four-storey shophouse in red-brick Domestic Revival guise by Chambers, Giet &amp; Ford, architects, with Crisp, Fowler &amp; Co. as builders. This survived to 2015.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Building plots towards Mansell Street were compromised by Chamber Street slicing off to the south-east. This was exacerbated by the encroachment of the Haydon Square goods depot railway spur in 1851–3. By 1870 John Israel Lazarus, a packing-case maker, had a sawmill at Nos 32 and 33 which gave way to a four-storey warehouse held by George Rice, a furrier, in the 1880s. Nos 34 and 35 were in long-standing use by Henry Gadson &amp; Sons as a deep-plan oil and colour warehouse that was rebuilt in 1895. The Commercial Co-operative Society occupied the small corner property beyond by 1870. The widening of Mansell Street in 1905–7 precipitated the loss of Nos 34–36. A five-storey red-brick warehouse was erected in 1912 by J. Greenwood Ltd, builders, on a narrow slip of land left over from the road improvement and given the address 99 Mansell Street. It was tenanted by Eggo Ltd, egg merchants, in the 1920s and came down in 2016.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>The Blitz accounted for the warehouse at Nos 32–33. In 1953, a utilitarian three-storey office block was built on the site to serve as offices for the National Dock Labour Board and a Lighterage Call Stand. Linked to the Shipping Federation’s development at 20–22 Presot Street, it came to be called Prescot House. Applications for redevelopment were approved in the 1970s and ’80s but not implemented. </p>\n\n<p>Efforts to redevelop the site were renewed in 2014 by Marldon, an architecture and property company based in Clapham. The scheme as initially approved entailed the replacement of Nos 31–33 with six- and eight-storey blocks for offices and serviced apartments. Consent for a third block at 99 Mansell Street followed in 2016 and the railway viaduct at 55–56 Chamber Street was incorporated into the project in 2019. Marldon employed Simon Smith &amp; Michael Brooke Architects and Waldo Works, interior designers. The Prescot Street elevation of what emerged as a fifty-seven unit aparthotel called Rockwell East, a reference to a Kensington forerunner, is divided into three blocks, corresponding to the buildings they supersede. While respecting the dimensions and brick colours of the demolished buildings, the blocks step up substantially towards the corner, from six storeys at No. 31 to nine at 99 Mansell Street. Double-height windows ground the base, which accommodates offices and a café.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 22 July 1731, p.2: The National Archives (TNA), C5/148/42</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Four Shillings in the Pound Assessments, 1693–4: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax Returns: TNA, PROB11/940/100; PROB11/1315/76: <em>True Briton</em>, 16 April 1796, p.8</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Kentish Independent</em>, 25 July 1846, p.5: <em>Stroud Journal</em>, 27 Jan 1855, p.7: Post Office Directories (POD): Goad insurance maps: Census: Ancestry: LMA, District Surveyors Returns (DSR); Collage 119456</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: POD: Ordnance Survey maps: Goad; TNA, IR58/84828/4563: DSR: London County Council Minutes, 14 Feb 1899, p.179; 20 Jan 1903, p.64; 4 July 1905, p.266</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: POD</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
            "created": "2020-08-04",
            "last_edited": "2020-09-14"
        },
        {
            "id": 311,
            "title": "Tewkesbury Buildings",
            "author": {
                "id": 114,
                "username": "julie"
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            "body": "<p>I am researching my family history. Samuel Joseph Cohen and his wife Frances lived here with their family c. 1881. They would have been in the midst of Jack the Ripper's murders in 1888. The building was split up into dwellings numbered 1 to 15.  Samuel was a cigar-maker and his wife a fur sewer. They lived at 13 Tewkesbury Buildings. Prior to this, in 1871, Samuel lived at 8 Tewkesbury Buildings with his mother Sarah.</p>\n",
            "created": "2017-03-29",
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        {
            "id": 1015,
            "title": "Midland Bank, Eastern Branch",
            "author": {
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                "username": "DaveAlger"
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            "body": "<p>I was the Branch Manager of the Midland Bank branch at 101, Whitechapel High Street between 1990 and 1993. The Branch was called ‘Midland Bank, Eastern branch’, and was the closest Midland Bank branch to the City of London.</p>\n\n<p>The building had one basement, which was around 100 feet long, and the Branch occupied the basement and ground floor. The remaining floors were occupied by the Bank’s training facilities, with one floor being the home of the Bank’s Archivist.</p>\n\n<p>The branch re-located to a site opposite the Whitechapel mosque around 1995.</p>\n\n<p>A great area to work in, with many interesting characters locally - some who had been in the area all their lives.</p>\n",
            "created": "2020-04-21",
            "last_edited": "2020-09-18"
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        {
            "id": 962,
            "title": "George Yard Council Depot",
            "author": {
                "id": 2,
                "username": "surveyoflondon"
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                "properties": {
                    "b_number": "3",
                    "b_name": "3 Gunthorpe Street",
                    "street": "Gunthorpe Street",
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            "body": "<p>In 1885 the Whitechapel District Board of Works acquired the City Saw Mills site on the west side of Angel Alley with a Wentworth Street frontage, and a building to the south giving access to George Yard. There William La Riviere, the Board’s Surveyor, oversaw the erection of a ‘destructor’ – a furnace or incinerator for turning household rubbish into clinker. Manlove, Alliott, Fryer &amp; Co. of Nottingham, who had patented ‘destructors’, were the suppliers. It was at the back of the site, approached from Wentworth Street by a sloping ‘creep’ for horse-drawn vans. A tall thin free-standing chimney stood alongside in the middle of the site.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In 1891 the Board acquired the site of three George Yard houses and put up a small Coroner’s Court to La Riviere’s designs. The ground floor housed a coach house, office, disinfector and stores. On the first floor, reached by a rear lift and central stairs, there was a small court-room, witness and coroner’s rooms, post-mortem room, mortuary and infectious mortuary, and ‘catacombs’, for the storage of bodies. A special feature was an additional ‘Hebrew mortuary’ with a small connected ‘watching room’ for the Jewish practice of <em>shemira</em>, whereby the dead are watched over during the time, ideally only twenty-four hours, between death and burial.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>Within the decade the Board held all but the south end of the east side of George Yard. From 1898 to 1902 the depot was transformed, extended to the south and east across the north end of Angel Alley, now stopped up. Upon the reorganisation of London local government, the site passed to the Works Department of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney. Robust new buildings, finished in hard red brick, were put up to the designs of Matthew William Jameson, the Whitechapel Board’s last Surveyor and, from 1900, the first Stepney Borough Engineer. A large new destructor or furnace house of 1899–1900 on the south-west part of the site survives as 3 Gunthorpe Street. Essentially a long shed to cover another Manlove, Alliott &amp;Co. patent destructor, it was open on three sides on cast-iron columns, with lattice girders separating transverse roofs and six gables with oculus vents. Smoke was carried away by twelve steel chimney-pipes, stayed by wires. Elsewhere on the site there was a well, and water tanks were built over stoker’s cabins north of the destructor house. In 1902–3 Wentworth Street between George Yard and Angel Alley was slightly widened and the frontage redeveloped for a lodge, cart shed and smithy, the George Yard corner smoothed with a bastion-like curve, red brick banded with stone.The mortuary closed in 1901 and the Coroner’s Court in 1903, inquests moving to the London Hospital. Those buildings were adapted for storage and further stores, a carpenters’ shop and a foreman’s house were added to the south on George Yard. Finally, a clinker crusher, an open steel-girder structure about thirty feet high, was erected south of the chimney with a conveyor link to the destructor.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Alterations between 1928 and 1937 included the addition of several garages and, with the destructor out of use, the removal of all the chimneys. A former Ind Coope beer store on the east side of what had been Angel Alley, was acquired along with a narrow yard giving access to Osborn Street and altered for the Borough’s public cleansing department. The depot, unscathed by the war, was used increasingly for storage and garaging and gradually fell into dilapidation. The former beer store became part of 17–25 Osborn Street and the northern half of the site was acquired around 1990 by Providence Row.[^4] </p>\n\n<p><strong>Sherrington Mews (No. 3).</strong>The shell of the former destructor house of the George Yard council depot was adapted in 1984 for use by Toynbee Hall as training workshops, named Toynbee Workshops. These were largely reconstructed in 1996–7. The retained six-gabled brick west wall determined the roof form. An upper storey was inserted and the east side given a neo-Victorian Postmodern elevation with full-height glazed doors, clusters of cast-iron columns and panels of beige reconstituted-stone blocks with recessed red-brick courses. Early occupants came from the voluntary and care sectors, along with radical publishers and printers (Aidis Trust, Red Pepper and Aldgate Press). Since about 2014 the workshops have been known as Sherrington Mews and occupancy has passed to largely commercial architectural and design studios.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>The Builder</em>, 19 Sept 1885, p.414: <em>Tower Hamlets Independent and Eeast End Advertiser (THIEAA)</em>, 23 Oct 1886, p.5; 29 Jan 1887, p.4: Historic England Archives (HEA), Aerofilms EPW005770</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>East London Observer</em>, 19 March 1892, p.5: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors' Returns (DSR): HEA, RCHME file BF079953: <em>The Builder</em>, 7 Feb 1891, p.11</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/WBW/12/1; L/SMB/D/4/1; P03579–80; P19120; Building Control file 15608: <em>Morning Post</em>, 4 April 1853, p.7: <em>Islington Gazette</em>, 27 July 1892, p.3: DSR: The National Archives, IR58/84803/2021–3: London County Council Minutes, 20 Nov 1900, p.1540; 22 July 1902, p.1140: <em>THIEEA</em>, 31 Jan 1903, p.2: information and photographs kindly supplied by Gary Hutton and Dave Bregula</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: DSR: HEA, Aerofilms EPW045403; EPW055307: THLHLA, L/SMB/D/4/8;P19164; P19179: Goad insurance maps: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: THP: THLHLA, P19179: <em>The Stage</em>, 27 June 1996, p.34; 22 May 2003, p.9: <a href=\"https://www.theworkplacecompany.co.uk/2730/sherrington-mews-gunthorpe-street-london-e1?conversion=1\">www.theworkplacecompany.co.uk/2730/sherrington-mews-gunthorpe-street-london-e1?conversion=1</a>: <em>Independent</em>, 4 May 1994, p. 25: <a href=\"http://jump-studios.com/\">jump-studios.com/</a>: <a href=\"http://www.jackrenwickstudio.com/\">www.jackrenwickstudio.com/</a>: <a href=\"https://www.smithery.com/\">www.smithery.com/</a>: <a href=\"http://www.andrewphillips.co/\">www.andrewphillips.co</a>: information kindly supplied by Jack Renwick</p>\n",
            "created": "2019-09-12",
            "last_edited": "2021-03-30"
        },
        {
            "id": 678,
            "title": "4–14 Fieldgate Street",
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                "properties": {
                    "b_number": "14",
                    "b_name": "",
                    "street": "Fieldgate Street",
                    "address": "The Curve, 14 Fieldgate Street",
                    "feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
                    "count": 2,
                    "search_str": "The Curve, 14 Fieldgate Street"
                },
                "tags": []
            },
            "body": "<p>The Prince of Hesse public house on Fieldgate Street's Plumber’s Row corner was rebuilt in 1891–2 with blocks of dwellings with upper-storey workshops adjoining on both sides, all by Abraham Davis. These buildings were cleared in the mid 1960s and the site was thereafter used as a car park. By 1856 John Frederick Brinjes was at the next site to the east, later 14 Fieldgate Street. Brinjes was an engineer, millwright and ironfounder, who moved here from Backchurch Lane, and in 1858 patented an apparatus for making animal charcoal (calcined bones), used in sugar refining. His works extended to the south and the business continued into the twentieth century as Brinjes and Goodwin, engineers and ironfounders. The site was redeveloped with a long steel-framed two-storey workshop range in 1933–4 for S. &amp; J. H. Tym &amp; Sons, ladies’ underclothing manufacturers of Whitechapel High Street. A succession of different garment-making, textile and fur-trade firms kept this factory going and it stood into the twenty-first century.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The Curve, so named for its bulky profile to Whitechapel Road, is a student-housing block of 2010–12. It was a Chancerygate and Bridges development, designed by Burland TM Ltd, architects, and is operated by CRM Ltd. Clad in grey brick and metal grilles, it has nine storeys for 339 student rooms and nine private flats above a supermarket.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 40633: https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/John_Frederick_Brinjes: Post Office Directories: Ordnance Survey maps: Goad insurance maps, 1953 and 1968: Historic England Archive, NMR 21763/20­23</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Tower Hamlets online planning applications</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
            "created": "2018-07-02",
            "last_edited": "2020-08-26"
        },
        {
            "id": 260,
            "title": "Before Hooper Square",
            "author": {
                "id": 72,
                "username": "eric"
            },
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                "properties": {
                    "b_number": "83 and ",
                    "b_name": "Hooper Square, 31–83 Back Church Lane and 32–52 Hooper Street",
                    "street": "Back Church Lane and Hooper Street",
                    "address": "83 and entrance to 31 to 81 Back Church Lane and 32 to 52 Hooper Street",
                    "feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
                    "count": 4,
                    "search_str": "Hooper Square, 31–83 Back Church Lane and 32–52 Hooper Street"
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            "body": "<p>Before the building of Hooper Square in the mid-1990s, at least a small part of Hooper Street where Hooper Square is now contained the main façade of the firm of Browne &amp; Eagle, wool importers. This façade was visible when, as a child in the 1940s and early 1950s, I walked down Gower's Walk to go shopping with my mum. When clean, the façade made a pleasant change from the dreariness of Gower's Walk, and I always looked forward to seeing it. I knew that just beyond and above it were the railway sidings leading in to the Tilbury Warehouse.</p>\n",
            "created": "2017-01-15",
            "last_edited": "2020-06-05"
        },
        {
            "id": 423,
            "title": "Davenant Foundation Grammar School",
            "author": {
                "id": 179,
                "username": "harry"
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                "properties": {
                    "b_number": "179",
                    "b_name": "Davenant Youth Centre (former Davenant School)",
                    "street": "Whitechapel Road",
                    "address": "Davenant Youth Centre, 179 Whitechapel Road",
                    "feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
                    "count": 18,
                    "search_str": "Davenant Youth Centre (former Davenant School)"
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            "body": "<p>I attended Davenant from about 1957 - 1961, leaving at age 15 before taking any GCEs. My dad had got me a printing apprenticeship at St Clements Press (opposite St Paul's Cathedral).  We lived in Clapton so were not Whitechapel people (originally lived in Dalston) and I had a long daily bus ride (on the 53) to get there and back.  I chose Davenant in preference to the brand new Woodberry Down Comprehensive.  The  formal culture of Davenant was a bit of a shock after the very caring atmosphere at Southwold Primary and I never really took to it. Several of the teachers wore gowns but others were more human. Although founded as a Christian school, by the 1950s there was a large Jewish contingent who had to endure Christian hymns and prayers at morning assemblies. Many of us were already atheists so that side of things just washed over us! I enjoyed physics with Mr Fyson, PE with Mr Page, and chemistry with Mr Newton.  The woodwork lessons have proved a boon throughout my life of DIY and I've even occasionally made use of the schoolboy French inculcated by the hated Mr Hughes.  Geoff Clark (of the Stepney &amp; Wapping FB page) has photos of the school and staff of the era.</p>\n",
            "created": "2017-07-31",
            "last_edited": "2021-09-14"
        }
    ]
}