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"id": 1121,
"title": "Leonardo Royal Hotel Tower Bridge, 45 Prescot Street and earlier houses on its site",
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"body": "<p>A large hotel of 2008–10 occupies the site of seventeen houses (45–61 Prescot Street). With origins in the late 1680s and much altered thereafter, sometimes rebuilt, these stood until the Second World War when most were damaged beyond repair by bombing. Generally of three storeys and attics over basements, gabled to the rear, sometimes raised a storey, refronted or stuccoed, the older buildings were described when investigated in the 1920s as having two-room, rear-staircase plans and staircases with straight strings, turned balusters and square newels. Typical of Prescot Street, these houses were substantial and well occupied, though none were so grand as the mansions on Leman Street, Alie Street and Mansell Street. The terrace was set back behind railed forecourts, with long gardens backing onto the Tenter Ground. By 1777 Edward Hawkins was the freeholder.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In 1773, the first house from the west, later No. 45, had been improved with marble chimneypieces, panelling and wallpaper. From the 1850s, the Jewish National Friendly Association for the Manufacture of Passover Bread took this as its headquarters, sharing the building with the Motza Association, founded in the 1880s to ‘destroy the virtual monopoly of the bakers’.[^2] No. 45 was rebuilt in 1899 to designs by Hyman Henry Collins, architect, for use as lodgings by the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women. Joseph Pyke paid for this in memory of his wife. Opened by Lady Rothschild in 1900, Sara Pyke House accommodated 236 ‘respectable’ Jewish girls and continued up to the Second World War. Bombs fell to either side in the Blitz, but No. 45 survived in splendid isolation and rag-trade use until the 1980s.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>No. 46 was also wholly rebuilt, with four storeys and a pedimental gable, probably around 1870 by and for Daniel James Knight, a builder. Nos 47 to 61 remained broad-fronted houses of the 1680s, with façades variously stuccoed, rebuilt and raised. Elizabeth Price died in 1780 leaving her household furniture at No. 56 with around 100 pots of greenhouse plants, perhaps in a rear glasshouse. The effects of Levy Solomon, next door at No. 55, had been sold in 1774, including ‘about 300 cards of very curious India shells, sorted, an exceeding brilliant garnet solitaire earrings and egret, set in silver, gilt, and an elegant chariot with harness for a pair of horses’.[^4] The occupants of Nos 54–56 in 1790 were representative of late eighteenth-century Prescot Street: Robert Wright, an engraver and gunmaker; Abraham Depaz, a merchant; and Robert Bygrave, a corn factor. By the 1840s, No. 56 was held by Samuel Pyke, a ‘black lead pencil maker’, later a sponge dealer. Two of his seven daughters, Clara and Ellen Pyke, ran a well-regarded ladies’ school from the house. By the late nineteenth century most of the houses at Nos 47–61 had gained substantial back warehouses or factories of several storeys. Nos 54–58 ended up in use by tailors and clothiers, Henry Friedlander rebuilding behind No. 56 in 1911.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>Two houses at Nos 60–61 were refurbished or rebuilt in the 1760s for John Coverly (d. 1778), an attorney, as one large house with four ground-floor parlours, six bedrooms, two kitchens and a large brick office and a three-stall stable to the rear. Isaac Bernal, a West India merchant, was resident here by 1787. He had a fractious relationship with the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue at Bevis Marks, and in retirement fell into debt after lending £40,000 to an Irish nobleman. He ended up in the Fleet, his house having been raided by bailiffs who removed his wife’s jewels and ‘his favourite peacocks’.[^6] The big house was redivided or rebuilt as two around 1815 when two vacant houses adjoining east were cleared to form St Mark’s Street (see p.xx). No. 61 on the new corner came to be occupied by Dutch diamond merchants, Morris Van Praugh by the 1840s, and Morris Barend Gomperts in the 1870s.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>Bomb damage resulted in the clearance of most of the buildings between Mansell Street and St Mark Street. A handful of sheds were erected in the post-war years and the rest of the vacant site was used as a car park.[^8] </p>\n\n<p>Proposals for a large hotel on the north side of Prescot Street were advanced in 2005 by City North Group PLC, locally active developers, with New Hall Properties Ltd. A year later Grange Hotels, a luxury-hotel group founded by Harpal, Raj and Tony Matharu, brothers, gained planning permission for a hotel of up to sixteen storeys with 252 bedrooms and 120 apartments, a health club, and a conference centre, all to designs by Buchanan Associates. This was built as the Grange Tower Bridge Hotel in 2008–10. It has three main blocks. Those of fifteen storeys to the east and eight to the centre opened as a 250-room hotel. The twelve-storey western block was the 120 serviced apartments. Lower levels accommodate restaurants, the health club, conference centre, and parking. The undemonstrative exterior presents large planes of cream brickwork, somewhat broken up by silver and grey metal panels and louvres. A low glazed conservatory to Prescot Street lights the extensive basements. The property was acquired by the Fattal Hotel Group in 2019 and renamed Leonardo Royal Hotel Tower Bridge, advertising 370 bedrooms.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, <em>An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London</em>, vol.5: <em>East London</em>, 1930, p.99: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), LMA/4673/D/01/004/002</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Jewish Chronicle (JC)</em>, 25 March 1853, p.200; 10 Jan 1879, p.2; 25 Jan 1884, p.4; 4 April 1884, p.13: <em>Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser</em>, 9 Jan 1773, p.2: <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 22 January 1773, p.4: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>JC</em>, 15 July 1898, p.11; 4 May 1900, p.9: 18 July 1902, p.10: POD: LMA, District Surveyors Returns (DSR): <a href=\"https://jewishmuseum.org.uk/2019/12/04/exploring-the-anti-trafficking-movement-in-twentieth-century-london/\">jewishmuseum.org.uk/2019/12/04/exploring-the-anti-trafficking-movement-in-twentieth-century-london/</a> Historic England Archives, EAW021447: <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1300/detail/\">surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1300/detail/#</a></p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 2 Dec 1774, p.4: <em>Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser</em>, 31 Oct 1780, p.4</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>JC</em>, 22 Sept 1854, p.48; 24 Jan 1896, p.8: <em>London Daily News</em>, 22 May 1863, p.8; 8 March 1887, p.8: <em>East London Observer</em>, 13 July 1878, p.5: LMA, Land Tax Returns (LT); DSR: POD: Census: Ordnance Survey maps (OS)</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: James Picciotto, <em>Sketches of Anglo-Jewish History</em>, 1875, p.210: <em>Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser</em>, 25 Dec 1778, p.8: LMA, LT; LMA/4673/D/01/004/002: <em>JC</em>, 10 April 1874, p.22</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Richard Horwood's maps of London, 1792–1819: Census: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: OS: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: THP: Google Street View: <a href=\"https://www.leonardo-hotels.com/press-releases/the-fattal-hotel-group-entres-central-london-market-with-the-addition-of-four-hotels\">www.leonardo-hotels.com/press-releases/the-fattal-hotel-group-entres-central-london-market-with-the-addition-of-four-hotels</a>: www.leonardo-hotels.com/leonardo-royal-hotel-london-tower-bridge</p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-04",
"last_edited": "2020-09-14"
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{
"id": 1016,
"title": "Virtual tour of 33 New Road",
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>In 2016 No 33 New Road was renovated by the fashion entrepreneur James Brown as a showcase for interiors products and opened as a short-stay rental. A virtual tour shows the interiors of several rooms: <a href=\"https://www.eyerevolution.co.uk/tours/33NewRoad/\">https://www.eyerevolution.co.uk/tours/33NewRoad/</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2020-05-01",
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{
"id": 1022,
"title": "House of a Thousand Destinies",
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"body": "<p>Extract from Stefan Zweig's reflections on the Jews' Temporary Shelter in 1935:</p>\n\n<p>\"Every morning the newspaper shrieks at us of war and murder and crime, and the frenzy of politics fills our minds. But we rarely hear of the good that is done unobtrusively. Yet this is what we most need in a time like ours, for each moral achievement by its example arouses valuable forces within us, and everyman is made better when he honestly knows how to admire the good.</p>\n\n<p>... And so I went to see the Shelter. It is situated in the East End, in an unpretentious street, but need has always found the way to its gates. Arranged on utilitarian lines, without any attempt at luxury, but singularly clean, it awaits with ever-open door the wanderer, the emigrant, who comes here to seek rest and respite. There is a bed prepared for him, a table laid for him, and more. Here he can have counsel and assistance in the midst of a strange world. ... In the midst of the vast and dread uncertainty that now hangs like a chill cloud of fog over the lives of thousands, he feels for a few days the warmth and the light of human kindness, and - real solace in his inconsolability - he sees, he feels that he is not alone and lost in a foriegn land, but that he is bound to the community of his people and to the higher community of mankind. ...</p>\n\n<p>Thousands upon thousands of people have, in the fifty years since it was founded, rested and gathered new strength in this Shelter, and have gone gratefully further on their way. No writer or poet could have adequate command of words to describe the variety, the poignant tragedy of these thousands of destinies. For no matter where a new wave of calamity arises in the world, in Germany, Poland or in Spain, it sweeps broken, shattered lives against this one House (unknown to the fortunate, the rich, the untroubled) that has till now gloriously withstood every assault, and whose guardians, with admirable devotion have gladly done their helpful duty...Wonderful, therefore, this House that saves and serves the exiles and the homeless! Gratitude to all who have created and maintained it, this unknown and incomparable monument of Jewish and human solidarity!\"</p>\n",
"created": "2020-05-06",
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{
"id": 1021,
"title": "61 Mansell Street",
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"body": "<p>The four-bay, four-storey plain brick-fronted office building of the early 1960s on this site somewhat echoes the fenestration of its eighteenth-century predecessor. That three-storey, basement and attic mansion had a narrow blind north bay in a flat five-window façade. In 1814 John Hunt held this house on a 61-year lease that had begun in 1772. Mercantile residents included Captain John Webber in the 1690s, Isaac Fernandes Dias in the 1730s, Isaac Mussapha, Harry Akerman from about 1766, John Le Coq and Asher Goldsmid into the 1790s. The ground floor accommodated an entrance hall, parlour and counting house and the first and second floors were laid out with four rooms each. A three-stall stable, coach-house and washhouse extended back on the south side of the plot. Another back building went up in 1849 when Israel Lazarus, a trunk-maker, was resident. Soon after the building was divided, a house (No. 61) to the north, and business premises (No. 61A) to the south that gained a shop over the forecourt and a long warehouse to the rear. Later nineteenth-century occupants were A. D. Posener, Polish-Jewish tobacconists.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Second World War bomb damage saw the building condemned and the site lay vacant until 1961 when plans for the site’s present office building were quickly enacted following two unexecuted schemes of 1958–9. After a few years a ground-floor garage was partially converted and given a shopfront. In 2002, a single-storey rear extension was enlarged in connection with the construction of 25 West Tenter Street, a four-storey office building developed by Michael Sherley-Dale’s City North Group that is architecturally deferential to its neighbour at No. 23.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Four Shillings in the Pound assessments, 1693–4: London Metropolitan Archives, Land Tax returns; District Surveyors' Returns; LMA/4673/D/01/004/002: Ordnance Survey maps: Goad insurance maps: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 14 Aug 1874, p. 308: London County Council Minutes, 25 Oct 1904, p. 2319: Land Registry, 11 Jan 1922</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online </p>\n",
"created": "2020-05-05",
"last_edited": "2020-05-05"
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{
"id": 1025,
"title": "Mint House, 77 Leman Street",
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"body": "<p>The south end of this side of Mansell Street from around the middle of this site almost to the Prescot Street corner appears to have been built up already by the 1670s before the street had been properly laid out. The character of this development is unknown, but it does seem clear that this section of frontage was in later times comparatively humble, presumably in part at least on account of constraints imposed by the presence of pre-existing buildings. There was an early double-fronted mansion on the north part of this plot, its most notable resident being William Scullard (d. 1792), a merchant who was here by 1770; it was divided in the nineteenth century. A smaller house adjoining to the south that was home around 1760 to Captain Richard Sanders had by 1800 been adapted to house Percival and Marsh, wholesale slop (second-hand clothing) sellers, a further indicator of the lower-status of this end of the street, and of the proximity of Rosemary Lane.[^1] These and two further modest houses southwards were demolished around 1880 and replaced by a block called Victoria Warehouses. Seven four-storey warehouses, raised a storey in 1888, were arrayed around a covered central yard accessed from Mansell Street through a bold arch in the central bay which was crowned with a round-headed pedimental gable. Victoria Warehouses was almost exclusively populated by tea merchants, including Walter Henry Whittard from 1904. Others including cork merchants, printers, the Anglo-Scandinavian Condensed Milk Co., and wholesale grocers were also tenants here.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>Bomb damage destroyed the warehouses. In 1953 the cleared plot was adapted to use as a car park then in the late 1950s a four-storey office building went up at Nos 75–79 and was occupied by the National Dock Labour Board. Thirty years later, following approvals in 1987, the whole site was redeveloped as Mint House, the present six-storey office block, built to designs by the Elsworth Sykes Partnership, architects. The façade echoes Mansell Court in its proportions and symmetry, but in a calmer register, less historicising and more futuristic, swathed as it is in reflective glass and brushed steel. A two-storey central oriel or pod projects to carry a superfluous balcony. The main entrance is unexpectedly located to the north of the central gesture. Since 2015 Mint House has been offices for the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accounting.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Ogilby and Morgan, map of 1676: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax Returns: The National Archives, PROB11/1213/325</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Ordnance Survey maps (OS): Goad insurance map, 1887: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 16 Jan. 1880, p. 109: Census, <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 6 May 1882, p. 2: LMA, District Surveyors' Returns: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: OS: POD: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 22670</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2020-05-06",
"last_edited": "2020-05-06"
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{
"id": 1029,
"title": "9 Alie Street (Robert Dolan House)",
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"body": "<p>Between the former Goodman’s Fields Theatre and Half Moon Passage eight houses at least partially built by William Kirkham in the 1730s replaced earlier front and back buildings. These had a 3:2:3 arrangement to the street, the houses punctuated by narrow passages for access to the tenements of Cleaver’s Court and Cleaver’s Rents, probably built by Thomas Cleaver, a bricklayer who was one of Kirkham’s executors in 1740. By the end of the eighteenth century, most of these houses were connected with a large sugar refinery behind. Sometime soon after 1819, the courts were replaced with four two-storey houses, parcelled as property pertaining to the sugarhouse on Half Moon Passage. In 1851, James William Bowman (1820–1857), who owned the sugarhouse, was recorded as resident in the westernmost of these houses which in general accommodated around a quarter of his 170 employees, including a manager, clerk, foreman, servants, and thirty-one German labourers. From the 1870s the houses came to be associated with Browne & Eagle and the Barnett gun factory on the northerly sugarhouse site. After the First World War there was use by boot repairers, grocers and small manufacturers and the houses were demolished around 1970. In their place a six-storey, four-bay office block designed by EPR Architects was erected in 1987. This has an absurdly gestural neo-Georgian elevation comprising a two-storey rusticated ‘basement’ below plain brick cladding and an attic. The block has passed into use as headquarters for the East London NHS Foundation Trust, which renamed the building Robert Dolan House in 2018 after its former Chief Executive.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Toewr Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/MIS/431/1/1; P/MIS/434/1/1/2: London Metropolitan Archives, MDR1739/2/493–4: The National Archives, PROB11/703/331: Census: Post Office Directories: Ordnance Survey maps: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: <a href=\"https://www.elft.nhs.uk/News/ELFTs-HQ-Named-in-Honour-of-CEO-Dr-Robert-Dolan\">www.elft.nhs.uk/News/ELFTs-HQ-Named-in-Honour-of-CEO-Dr-Robert-Dolan</a></p>\n",
"created": "2020-05-06",
"last_edited": "2020-05-06"
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{
"id": 1023,
"title": "63 Mansell Street (former Jews' Temporary Shelter, including 23 West Tenter Street)",
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"body": "<p>Four widely spaced bays in width, the early house on the site of No. 63 appears to have been slightly narrower than its late seventeenth-century neighbours north and south. Typically, it was set back behind a gated forecourt with heavy bollards, but unlike those of its neighbours, this area was not built over in the nineteenth century. First-floor windows had been cut down and given iron balconies and a parapet rose above a string course in front of attics. The first resident was probably Samuel Groome (1653–97), the son of a Quaker merchant who had plantations in Maryland and imported tobacco. Other early residents were Captain James Kettle (d. 1745) and Captain John Nickleson (or Nicholson), a merchant in the Carolina trade and one of Trinity House’s Elder Brethren. Aaron Jefuran and Son, Jewish merchants, were here in the 1770s and from the 1790s until the 1830s the house was associated with two generations of the Nathan family, quill and feather merchants. In 1818, an unusual insurance notation recorded a ‘room adjoining called The Tabernacle’. This may refer to a space for a private <em>minyan</em> (Jewish prayer group).[^1] In 1832 David Scott, a merchant selling ale from Leith, sold the lease of No. 63. By this time there was a coach-house and stable to the rear. For much of the rest of the century Andrew Loveys, a cooper, wine and bottle merchant, occupied the property using the house as offices and a family home while maintaining a two-storey workshop to the rear.[^2] The house was demolished in 1924. Some of its panelling and enriched cornicing were salvaged for the Geffrye Museum where until 2006 they were displayed as parts of a room deemed typical of the 1740s.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>The site was redeveloped in 1929–30 with the present building. This was erected as a hostel for the Jews’ Temporary Shelter, moving across from Leman Street. Designs were by Lewis Solomon and Son, which at this date would have been Digby Lewis Solomon, and Bovis Ltd were the builders. The solid neo-Georgian façade conceals a steel-framed building that extends back as 23 West Tenter Street. Long and deep, it had densely packed thirty-bed dormitories to accommodate 130 men and women. There were also substantial dining, recreation and reading rooms. On the top floor an isolation department accommodated those arriving with serious illnesses. The premises were intended to embody a shift in attitudes away from the preceding Shelter’s enforcement of scrupulous utility to deter long-staying. The Matron recalled, ‘we were determined to humanise the conditions’.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>Celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 1937, the Shelter claimed to have aided nearly 1,200,000 people since its establishment and to have accommodated over 100,000.[^5] Stefan Zweig visited and reflected: </p>\n\n<p>‘No writer or poet could have adequate command of words to describe the variety, the poignant tragedy of these thousands of destinies. For no matter where a new wave of calamity arises in the world, in Germany, Poland or in Spain, it sweeps broken, shattered lives against this one House (unknown to the fortunate, the rich, the untroubled) that has till now gloriously withstood every assault, and whose guardians, with admirable devotion have gladly done their helpful duty.’[^6] </p>\n\n<p>The Second World War brought the work of the Shelter to a virtual standstill as immigrants were interned as enemy aliens, and travellers slowed to a trickle. Local residents displaced by the Blitz were rehoused in the Shelter, and from 1943 the building was requisitioned by the US military. In the immediate post-war years the Shelter welcomed children liberated from concentration camps, but thereafter the scale of its work was greatly diminished. By the mid-1960s, the dormitories had been reduced in size and other Jewish causes were being accommodated. While the Shelter continued to accept a small number of Jewish refugees from around the world, other uses were sought, including the transitional housing of the elderly awaiting places in care homes. The Shelter sold up in 1973 and moved to a thirty-five bed house in Kilburn, which closed as a hostel in the 1990s, but from where the institution continues to provide social support and accommodation to vulnerable Jews.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>The building at 63 Mansell Street was taken in the 1980s as premises for J. H. Minet Agencies Ltd, part of an insurance group with strengthening tentacles in Goodman’s Fields – it had redeveloped sites on Prescot Street and Leman Street (see p.xx). In 2009, the building became the London base of a scoliosis clinic that provides specialist therapy for young female patients, many of whom live on site having travelled from overseas.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Four Shillings in the Pound Assessments, 1693–4: <em>Whitehall Evening Post</em>, 23 July 1754, p. 3: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em>: <a href=\"https://www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us/getperson.php?personID=I064718&tree=Tree1\">www.colonial-settlers-md-va.us/getperson.php?personID=I064718&tree=Tree1</a>: The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/447/8; PROB11/738/362: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax Returns (LT); CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/399/637675; /523/1105429; LMA/4673/D/01/004/002</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 22 Sept 1832, p. 1: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 10 May 1832, p. 1: Post Office Directories (POD): Census</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Country Life</em>, vol. 179, 1986, p. 137: <em>Homes and Gardens</em>, vol. 19, p. 34: information kindly supplied by Louis Platman</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 1 Oct 1937, p. 22; 24 June 1966, pp. 12–13: <em>Architects' Journal</em>, 25 June 1930, p. 975: LMA, District Surveyors' Returns; LMA/4184/02/04</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, LMA/4184/2/5/1/4</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Stefan Zweig, <em>House of a Thousand Destinies</em>, 1937, pp. 6-7</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: LMA, LMA/4184/02/03</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: POD: www.scoliosissos.com/london-clinic: site visit and interview with Erika Maude, 2 Oct 2018</p>\n",
"created": "2020-05-06",
"last_edited": "2020-10-23"
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{
"id": 1026,
"title": "83–85 Mansell Street (Tugu Building, formerly Insignia House)",
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"body": "<p>This is a rare example of a City-overspill speculative office block that has been roundly applauded by the architectural press. Built in 1990–1 as Insignia House, it is striking for its innovative glass curtain wall and High-Tech coolness, particularly given the polyester-suit Postmodernism of its immediate neighbours.</p>\n\n<p>This was not the best end of Mansell Street in the eighteenth century, but even so there was yet another wide-fronted mansion on this site. With proximity to Goodman’s Yard the location was attractive to merchants. John Eaton Dodsworth, a director of both the Bank of England and the East India Company, for which he had supervisory responsibilities in Persia (Iran), had a house on this site by 1733 until his death in 1759.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In the nineteenth century, the large house was principally a warehouse for cigars and cork, with apartments above. Its smaller southerly neighbour also functioned as a warehouse and dwelling. Numa Edward Hartog (1846–1871), a campaigner for Jewish rights, was born there. David Jameson and Baruch Jameson, pen and quill merchants, acquired its freehold in 1882, having been lessees for a decade. In 1890 they redeveloped No. 85 as a five-storey warehouse, designed by R. W. Hobden, architect, and built behind a single-storey forecourt shop. David Jameson, who was President of the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor, lent the new warehouse to the Jewish Working Men’s Club and Institute while its Alie Street premises were rebuilt in 1891. Already linked in use and occupation, Nos 83 and 85 were formally united in 1935 with openings formed in the party wall.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>The buildings were destroyed during the Second World War and a number of development schemes followed. A five-storey warehouse and office went up in 1964 to designs by Gilbert Laurie Cadell. Dean & Wood, refrigerating engineers, were occupants.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>After a failed proposal to convert the warehouse into offices, in 1988 Golbourne Developments put forward plans for a new six-storey building designed by Elana Keats & Associates and John Winter & Associates (Jonathan Ellis Miller, job architect). A plan to widen Mansell Street in the early 1960s had led to the stipulation that new buildings should be set back from the street line by three meters. The road widening had been abandoned, but developers were still required to leave the space fallow. The plans for Nos 83–85 responded to this constraint by arranging floor plates to meet the imposed building line, with independent office spaces on each level behind curtain glazing and a canted central setback. In front, this was all screened by a glass atrium out on the pavement that created a thermal and acoustic barrier. This was praised as a contribution to the public realm, a ‘technological <em>coup de théâtre</em> of a glazed box crisply enclosing the building like a six-storey display case’.[^4] Ove Arup & Partners, the project’s structural engineers, developed a customised glazing system and incorporated two trussed tubular-steel towers, visibly featured behind the clear glass façade. A top-storey glass conservatory is set back so as not to interfere with the effect of the main glass box. On the simpler West Tenter Street elevation, where the floor plates more conventionally meet flat glass walling, upper levels are also recessed. Internally, services are pushed to the south behind the lift and open floors are otherwise only interrupted by a row of cylindrical columns near the north wall. The lower levels were made a Job Centre in 2011, discreetly entered from West Tenter Street.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax Returns: <em>Universal Chronicle</em>, 12 May 1759, p. 151: British Library, IOR/L/PS/20/C227</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Post Office Directories (POD): Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/GRE/3: <em>London Daily News</em>, 17 Oct 1882, p. 8: LMA, District Surveyors' Returns:<em> Builder</em>, 8 March 1890, p. 184: London Ccounty Council Minutes, 10 June 1890, p. 494: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 19 Oct 1860, p. 1; 26 Dec 1873, p. 646; 17 April 1891, p. 17: <em>Oxford National Dictionary of Biography sub </em>Hartog</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): POD</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Architectural Review</em>, July 1991, p. 66: THP</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Progressive Architecture</em>, vol. 75/2, Feb 1994, p. 70: THP</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2020-05-06",
"last_edited": "2020-08-18"
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{
"id": 354,
"title": "Found Photograph, circa 1971 - Words by David Howells (2008/2009)",
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"b_name": "Maersk House",
"street": "Braham Street",
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"body": "<p> </p>\n\n<p><em>La forme d'une ville change plus vite, hélas, que le coeur d'un mortel.</em><br>\n-Baudelaire, Le Cygne.</p>\n\n<p>The identity of the photographer is unknown to me, nor his or her purpose in taking the picture. In terms of genre it would certainly be considered a documentary image, and its exact location is quite familiar to me. But no other information attaches to it; apart from the stall - which explains itself well enough - there are no obvious signs as to what it is I should be looking at, or why. My purpose is not so much to look at the photograph as to inhabit it, if only for a few moments, in which case the less I know of such things the better...</p>\n\n<p>In the background of the photograph, on the other side of the main road, a new office building is under construction, recognizable as Beagle House, a modernist design of Richard Seifert - 'the colonel' of London's post-war planning battles. It has recently been proposed for demolition, with approval from Tower Hamlets Borough Council. In 1971 the popular reaction to some of Seifert's more notorious projects - Centre Point, Euston Station - has not yet begun in earnest. The exterior is spanned by a technoid grid of interlocking modular cells; not inelegant, but the overall scheme is mediocre. For that reason Beagle House will probably escape the opprobrium but will not be missed, or even remembered, when it disappears again in forty-odd years' time.</p>\n\n<p>The middle ground between the whelk stall and Beagle House is empty, save for the traffic moving rapidly past along Whitechapel High Street, and what must be a car park on the other side; the new building is actually further away than it appears to be. In 1971 the Aldgate road junction has recently been converted to a gyratory system, the last word in town planning following the publication of the Buchanan Report in 1963. For a post-war economy that can't actually afford much modern architecture, urban traffic systems knocked through nineteenth century cities offer a kind of modernity on the cheap. In 1971 all this is still new, and for a while, it even seems to work; the traffic is moving, after all. The Aldgate junction will eventually be restored to two-way traffic - Corbusier's 'pack-horse way' - in 2009.</p>\n\n<p>Some things are more permanent than they seem to be. The shadows that fall forwards across the street from where I am standing are strangely familiar. I now realize that they are cast by some temporary hoardings immediately behind the camera. Behind them, just over my shoulder, is an empty plot, site of the original Aldgate East tube station that was abandoned in 1938, damaged by wartime bombing and demolished in the 1950s. In 1971 the site is still derelict, and will remain so. It will be briefly cleared of trees and undergrowth, as if for redevelopment, just before the economic concept of unlimited growth comes to an end in the global financial crash of 2008. The plot behind the hoardings will then gradually return to a state of nature, a Piranesian sump colonized by ferns, rosebay willow herb, ivy, and other self-seeded flora.</p>\n\n<p>I have now been staring at this scene for rather too long - possibly longer than any of the other human beings involved, including the photographer - and a strange thought has crossed my mind.I cannot be sure, but the mauve of the sky seems to have shifted again in hue - slightly further towards the red end of the spectrum. My memory for colour is unreliable, but I suspect the light in this photograph is still changing, slowing down. Like a receding galaxy, this and other colour photographs of the 1970s continue to send their light towards us, but with a marked colour shift that registers their distance and the velocity with which they retreat into the past. Eventually, as the generations die out that were still able to make contact with these images by an effort of imagination and memory, they will become history: still extant but invisible to the naked eye of a present tense.</p>\n\n<p>It is time to stop: the light is weakening now and this moment has come to an end.</p>\n\n<p>Full text and photograph available here: <a href=\"http://www.eastendarchive.org/Collections/FoundImages.aspx\">http://www.eastendarchive.org/Collections/FoundImages.aspx</a></p>\n",
"created": "2017-04-20",
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"title": "Aliffe House and 49–55 Mansell Street",
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"body": "<p>In the 1680s, the site now occupied by Aliffe House was divided into four plots addressing Mansell Street, two with large double-fronted mansions, and two to the south with smaller houses, all set back behind forecourts, and of three storeys, basements and attics. The house to the north, which became No. 49, was insured in the 1750s as having ten rooms, six of which were fully panelled and four half-panelled, with eight marble and two Portland stone chimneypieces. It had an attached two-storey coach-house and stable block on the Alie Street corner.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>This house was held by Captain William Tompson in 1693–4. John Shore (d. 1741) was present by 1733. He was a ‘husband to the shipping’ of the East India Company as its warehouse-keeper at Botolph Wharf, west of the Custom House. Shore left the house to Mary Dorothea Shepheard, the step-daughter of John Shepheard, a friend and another East India Company officer, until his son, Thomas Shore, returned from India in 1743 when Mary Dorothea and Thomas married, soon thereafter moving to Wanstead. Captain John Pelly, another East India Company servant, lived in the house until 1750 when it went to William Massa, who was Master of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries at his death in 1756. His daughter, Elizabeth Massa, stayed on, and then William Complin (1729–1808), another apothecary, was in the house from around 1774 to 1792. Soon thereafter, Nicholas Birch, Complin’s son-in-law and a surgeon, who had been round the corner on Alie Street, took the house, staying until his death in 1833; his son, George Birch, also a surgeon, may have followed.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>In the 1840s, No. 49 was occupied by David Abarbanel Lindo (1772–1852), a merchant and an influential member of Bevis Marks, and his wife, Sarah (née Mocatta). A qualified <em>mohel </em>who had circumcised his nephew Benjamin Disraeli in 1804, Lindo was known for his Orthodox inclinations as a prominent member of the Sephardi community. He had based his commercial activity in Goodman’s Fields since at least the 1790s, with property at Haydon Square, and a base at 86 Leman Street in the 1830s prior to his move to Mansell Street. Lindo’s third daughter, Abigail (1803–1848), one of eighteen children, was an innovative lexicographer, best known for publishing a Hebrew-English dictionary in 1846.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>From the 1860s until his death in 1881, Godfrey Jacob Fles, a Dutchman, ran a small but distinguished school for young Jewish gentlemen here. Then the German Hospital briefly used the building as their Eastern Dispensary, where it was noted that nearly all the patients were Jews. By the 1890s the house had been made a warehouse for Abraham Friedman, a cap maker, who relocated to Leman Street around 1900.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>Next door, what became No. 51 was another locally typical wide late seventeenth-century mansion. It became a notable Jewish social resort in the nineteenth century on account of a large hall in the garden. James Rutteer had the property in the 1690s. In the 1730s and ’40s, the house, as yet unimproved, was held by Ruth Collier (née Woodhouse, d. 1756), a Particular Baptist and the widow of Richard Collier (d. 1731), a grazier, with her son Nathaniel. They departed to Bloomsbury and from 1751 to 1755 the house was occupied by Sir James Creed, an East India Company director. In the 1760s and ’70s it was leased by Francis Benson, a silkthrower. The next two decades saw a changing roster of prosperous but short-term tenants, including Esther Nunes Sierra, Benjamin Dixon, a corn factor, and Solomon Barent Gompertz, a diamond merchant.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>Looking back to the 1750s, the <em>Jewish Chronicle</em> reported in 1887 the fable that Judith Levy (1707–1803), ‘the Queen of Richmond Green’, a widow and the daughter of Moses Hart, the founder of the Great Synagogue, owned this property and built an extensive hall and kitchens to host a party on the eve of the marriage of her only surviving child, Isabella Levy, to Lockhart Gordon in 1754. The story related that Isabella died that night, and that her heartbroken mother instructed the house to be immediately shut up. On Levy’s death in 1803, Dr Joshua Van Oven, founder of the Jews’ Free School, the Jews’ Hospital and Orphan’s Asylum, was said to have found, ‘everything, even to the bride’s wedding dress … as it was on that ill-fated night’.[^6] In fact, Isabella Levy had married almost a year before her death in 1756, and Judith Levy lived in a house on Wellclose Square and held another on the west side of Mansell Street, but not on the east side. That such a yarn should enter circulation and be published in the late nineteenth century belies a desire not only to connect the locale’s faded grandeur with its wealthy Jewish residents of the past, but also to explain what was an unusually grand hall behind 51 Mansell Street.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>There was a large building in the garden of No. 51 by 1813 when Hymen Cohen, a wealthy Jewish merchant, whose library included 500 books, was present, being resident here from 1807 to 1848. But this was not the hall of legend.[^8] After Cohen’s departure, probably around 1855, the Lazarus family, established merchants and manufacturers on Mansell Street, converted the existing ‘excellent suite of rooms’[^9] to use as assembly rooms, enlarging the premises with a long range over the whole southern part of the garden, probably what was reported as a ballroom with a capacity of 300. Known as Zetland Hall, these rooms were used for Jewish social gatherings. Around 1860, hospitality was handled by Asher Barnett, a Middlesex Street cook and confectioner, who also advertised a dancing academy here.[^10] For a few years after its formation in 1869, the Netherlands Choral Society, a long-running Jewish group that originally sang in Dutch, used the building as its base. Into the 1870s, the hall was also used by Elias Zuesman as coffee and dining rooms ‘for gentlemen’, with sections of the house converted into a hotel. Finally, the house was also associated with the East London Ragged School Shoeblack Society, some rooms functioning as the eastern of two Mansell Street refuges from the 1850s to the ’70s. By 1892, No. 51 had been renamed Clarendon Hall and attracted scandal, illicit gambling having been uncovered in a police raid.[^11]</p>\n\n<p>To the south there was a pair of smaller yet still commodious houses (Nos 53 and 55), inhabited by Thomas Howson and Bernard Codard in 1693–4 and Martha White and Jacob Wakeling by 1733. William Denman (1721–1788), a gun-stock maker, and John Everard (d. 1788), a citizen Skinner, had succeeded by 1770. Ann Denman, widow and heir, continued at No. 53 until after 1800. They were tenants of Edward Hawkins who had a sixty-one-year lease from 1772. No. 53 was said to be newly erected in 1814 suggesting rebuilding. Residents in the early decades of the nineteenth century included Asher Asher, a stationer, and Charles Isaacs, a solicitor, Jacob Abrahams and Kusel Meyer, both merchants, and Moses Phillips, a jeweller.[^12] From the 1840s to the 1870s, No. 53 housed Henry Samuel, a surgeon. During the later part of this period, Lansdowne Cottages, six tiny two-storey one-room-plan dwellings, were inserted in the gardens, facing a narrow court off Tenter Street West. On Samuel’s departure, No. 53 was subdivided into apartments, as No. 55 already had been.[^13]</p>\n\n<p>The house at No. 49 was cleared to make way for a large corner warehouse, erected in 1904 for Samuel and Henry Harris, harness-polish makers and merchants of 57–59 Mansell Street. The architects were Frank Selby and Arthur Vernon Kislingbury, the builder Henry Goldman of 25 Commercial Road. The principal tenant was Hammer, Theelen & Co., a wholesale clothing company also identified as Japanese silk merchants, founded in 1904 with a New York branch, Ellenberg, Theelen and Hammer, though this was dissolved in 1909. In that year Selby oversaw extension of the warehouse complex in two directions, along Mansell Street, replacing Nos 51–55, and along Alie Street, where it replaced another house (No. 2) and where the building line had been changed to allow road widening in 1905–7. Joseph Tetley took the east wing as a tea warehouse from around 1912 to 1946. The south wing housed Charles Pearson & Son, commercial stationers and printers, from the outset until about 1960. Founded in the late nineteenth century as Pearson, Son, and Hurran, this company had four City shops by 1901 when Charles Edward Pearson bought out his partners. From the 1960s the whole warehouse complex was in rag-trade use. </p>\n\n<p>Selby and Kislingbury’s warehouse group was dignified, grandiloquent even, classically embellished and with careful symmetry, swinging confidently round the corner where two storeys of rustication emphasised the curve below a two-storey Doric Order that fanned out along the wings. On Alie Street, a loophole bay marked the junction with the corner block. On Mansell Street shopfronts projected beyond a rusticated arch over a passage to a rear service yard. That was built over in 1926 by I. J. Galinski to form a motor garage.[^14] </p>\n\n<p>This large corner site was redeveloped in 1989 as Aliffe House. Planning permission in 1987 followed a failed proposal two years earlier. This was a speculation by Roy Sandhu, a textile entrepreneur, through Roy Properties (or Roy Developments Ltd), for which I. B. Mistry was the Group Architect. Aliffe House was designed by Trehearne & Norman Architects and built by Woolf Construction Management Ltd. The six-storey block was yet larger than its predecessor, extending back to replace the garage at the corner of North Tenter Street and West Tenter Street. The National Westminster Bank (later RBS) were tenants until after 2008, World Pay followed, then from about 2016 Sungard Availability Services, data-recovery specialists. The property was sold to a Middle Eastern investor for £40 million in 2017. Aliffe House parodies the <em>parti</em> of its predecessor. At the prominent corner three glass lift-shaft cylinders rise to an outsized rooftop plant-room and generator that loom over passers-by like a flying saucer. The almost symmetrical flanking stone-clad elevations have classicizing details that are neither less meretricious, nor as funny. The ‘triple test-tube’ external lifts have been cited as one of a handful of Postmodern gestures in ‘City’ office blocks that ‘still raises a smile’.[^15]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), CLC/B/055/MS8674/090/78393</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Daily Post</em>, 23 Oct 1741, p.1: Four Shillings in the Pound Assessments, 1693–4 (4s£): LMA, Land Tax returns (LT): The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/713/122; PROB11/826/202; PROB11/1473/282; PROB11/1811/123: blogs.bl.uk/untoldlives/2017/03/mary-dorothea-shore-a-life-brought-out-of-the-shadows.html: C. R. Booth, <em>The History of the Society of Apothecaries</em>, 1905, p.141: J. G. Burnby, ‘A study of the English apothecary from 1660 to 1760’, <em>Medical History</em>, supplement 3, 1983, p.36: <em>The Court Magazine and Belle Assemblée</em>, vol.3/6, Dec 1833, p.27: LMA, LMA/4673/D/01/004/002: Goad insurance maps: Ordnance Survey maps (OS): Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LT: POD: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) sub</em> Abigail Lindo: William D. Rubinstein <em>et al</em> (eds), <em>The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History</em>, 2011, p. 597: <em>The Critic</em>, 1 Sept 1848, p. 371: <em>Jewish Chronicle (JC)</em>, 6 April 1906, p. 6</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>JC</em>, 25 May 1860, p.8; 27 June 1873, p.223; 14 Oct 1881, p.7; 5 Dec 1884, p.7: POD: OS</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LT: TNA, PROB11/643/395; PROB11/821/369: LMA, P/69/ANA/A/001/MS06764; P/93/MRY1/061;CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/398/618594</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>JC</em>, 29 April 1887, p.1: <em>ODNB</em> <em>sub </em>Levy and Van Oven</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: LT: TNA, PROB18/67/1</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: LT: Richard Horwood's maps: POD: <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 7 March 1848, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: <em>JC</em>, 8 Feb 1850, p. 144</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>JC</em>, 14 and 21 June 1850, pp. 280,295; 11 Mar 1859, p.8: POD: OS: Goad</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>JC</em>, 13 Feb 1863, p.1; 17 Feb 1871, p.11; 17 June 1892, p.16: <em>Builder</em>, 11 Dec 1858, p. 840A: <em>East London Observer (ELO)</em>, 20 April 1878, p.3: <em>Jewish World</em>, 6 April 1888, p.3: POD: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 4 Nov 1891, p. 2</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: LT: 4s£: TNA, PROB11/1170/306: Horwood: POD: LMA, LMA/4673/D/01/004/002; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS 11936/464/885859; /551/1234921: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 26 Dec 1808, p. 4; 28 Dec 1832, p. 4: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 22 Jan 1821, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: POD: <em>ELO</em>, 22 June 1878, p.8: OS: <em>Builder</em>, 19 May 1888, p. 364: <em>Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Local Advertiser</em>, 5 May 1888, p. 4: Goad</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: LMA, District Surveyors' Returns: POD: Ancestry: <a href=\"http://www.stgitehistory.org.uk/goodmansfields3.html\">www.stgitehistory.org.uk/goodmansfields3.html</a>: <a href=\"https://www.europages.co.uk/HAMMER-THEELEN-LIMITED/GBR040118-00101.html\">www.europages.co.uk/HAMMER-THEELEN-LIMITED/GBR040118-00101.html</a>: <em>Trow Directory of New York City</em>, 1908, p. 244: London County Council Minutes, 23 May 1905, p.1830; 4 July 1905, p.267; 17 Oct 1905, p.1295; 20 March 1906, p.723; 22 Jan 1907, p.81; 20 Oct 1908, p.557; 24 Oct 1911, pp.881–2: <em>The Bookseller</em>, vol.6, 1901, p. 5: <em>The World’s Paper Trade Review</em>, vol. 35, 1901, p. 212: <em>Engineering</em>, 30 Jan 1920, p. 146</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: J. Jervis, ‘Is postmodernism really worth saving?’, <em>Icon Magazine</em>, vol. 156, 31 Sept 2016: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: <a href=\"https://eamonnmallie.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/1993648_1Signed-Dated-Lease-16-January-2007.pdf\">eamonnmallie.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/1993648_1Signed-Dated-Lease-16-January-2007.pdf</a>: <a href=\"https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/01084736/charges/lv4W9S0viHTGSDNU2fTnwh0ligM\">beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/01084736/charges/lv4W9S0viHTGSDNU2fTnwh0ligM</a>: <em>Property Week</em>, 19 May 2017: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 22619</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Found here: <a href=\"https://wheretheinternetlives.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/sungard-as/\">https://wheretheinternetlives.wordpress.com/2016/07/05/sungard-as/</a></p>\n",
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"body": "<p>This four-storey corner warehouse was built in 1872–3 for Edmund Richard Goodrich, an oilman whose premises had been taken for the westwards extension of Commercial Road through Whitechapel. Thomas Ennor was the builder of what was the first building to go up on the new road.[^1] </p>\n\n<p>Shutter painting of 2012 here was by Malarky, Chase and Billy.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The whole site at Nos 27–27A and 29–37 White Church Lane was redeveloped as a tower block in 2018–19 to a scheme prepared in 2012 and refined up to 2016 when the site was cleared. Reef Estates Aldgate Ltd built a twenty-one-storey tower as a 270-bedroom (178 serviced apartments) apart-hotel. The architects were Stock Woolstencroft (Stockwool), the work was carried out by Ardmore Construction Ltd, and the Gate Hotel, which has an entrance and five-storey podium facing White Church Lane, is operated by Portland Brown. A Section 106 agreement provided for a payment of £440,637 towards the upkeep of Altab Ali Park.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 10 Feb. and 11 Aug. 1871, pp. 272,791: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: Ordnance Survey 1873</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <a href=\"http://blog.globalstreetart.com/walls\">http://blog.globalstreetart.com/walls</a></p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets Planning</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>This site, which covers what were formerly ten and previously eleven small plots at 87–95 Mansell Street and 38–42 Prescot Street, lay immediately west of the only passage into the Tenter Ground for more than a century. Properties here were probably commercial in nature from the seventeenth century. It appears that there were warehouses to the rear by the 1740s.</p>\n\n<p>The house on the site of No. 87 was occupied by Abraham Elias Levy by 1750. Levy Isaac, a jeweller and merchant, had followed by 1770, with other Jewish merchants, Isaac Mocatta and Jacob Isaac, succeeding into the first years of the nineteenth century by when there was a back building that soon became a full-depth warehouse. For many years the premises also accommodated coffee rooms. Following redevelopment in 1880–2, Hugh Wood and Son, provision and then tea merchants, occupied a five-storey warehouse here up to its demolition in the 1960s.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Captain George Curling was at No. 89 around 1770 followed by John Hawes, a sugar refiner, in the 1780s. Richard and James Waller, father and son and gun-makers, were occupants of the three-storey and basement house at No. 91 by 1750 into the 1780s. By the 1790s Nos 89 and 91 flanked a covered passage that led to a factory on West Tenter Street. Catherine Lazarus, a wine merchant, occupied No. 91 around 1849 when a forge was erected behind No. 89 for Palmer, Field & Co., gun-makers. From 1870 until 1959, Farrow and Jackson, machinists, engineers, and workers of metal for wine merchants, held both properties as warehouses, workshops, and offices. The yard was roofed over in 1896.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>Small shophouses on the Prescot Street corner were occupied around 1740 by a cheesemonger and a cloth-worker with the Hoop Tavern sandwiched between. No. 95 on the corner later housed a goldsmith before the 1840s by when it had fallen to use as a restaurant, No. 93 was similarly used by the end of the century before being taken by David Lyons, outfitters. After rebuilding in 1907 when the corner was rounded off in connection with the southwards extension of Mansell Street, No. 95 continued to function as a café until Second World War bomb damage precipitated abandonment.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>In 1965, a brick- and mosaic-clad eight-storey block of shops, offices, warehouses, and workshops went up on the sites of Nos 87–95 and 38–40 Prescot Street, its entrance set back on the corner. This was replaced in 1998–2001 by a larger and mostly eight-storey stock-brick faced block that is pompously called Londinium Tower. Designed and developed as Prospect Tower by Berkeley Homes, who agreed to pay Tower Hamlets Council £1,207,900 in lieu of providing ‘affordable’ housing, it is significant that this was a residential development, eighty-four flats with a basement car park. A few years earlier it would have been offices. The south-west corner steps back to allow for a gaudy stack of balconies under a disc-like canopy, gracelessly acknowledging the building’s position on a busy City-side junction. The ground floor was made a Wetherspoon’s pub, the Goodman’s Field.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax Returns (LT); District Surveyors' Returns (DSR); CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/397/624123; /379/588973; /397/624123: Post Office Directories (POD): Richard Horwood's maps </p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LT: The National Archives, C108/367: Horwood: Ordnance Survey maps (OS): Goad insurance maps: DSR: LMA, MJ/SP/1848/DEC/036: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 1 Jan 1861, p. 8: POD: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/HMB/1/2: <em>London City Press</em>, 1 May 1869, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, LT; DSR; MDR1740/2/379: THLHLA, P/HMB/1/3: London County Council Minutes, 9 Oct 1906, p. 734: Goad: OS: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: LMA, Collage 119525–6</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>There were five houses (Nos 65–73) on the site of this office block. At No. 65 there was a broad five-bay three-storey late seventeenth-century mansion in the mould of its northern counterparts until its demolition in 1915. Adjacent to the south at Nos 67–73 stood four three-bay houses on half-width plots. Early occupants there in the 1730s and ’40s included Captain William Clarke (at No. 67), and William Fletcher and Henry Vandeuren (d. 1748), vinegar merchants (at No. 69). Later Georgian residents included Edward Nelson, a schoolmaster, Solomon Israel, a broker, and William Lovegrove, a salesman.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The big house at No. 65 was held by John Souther in 1693–4 and by Captain John Pelly from the late 1730s to his death in 1762. He was followed by Abraham Mocatta (1730–1800), from one of London’s leading Jewish families, a dynasty of silver and bullion brokers to the Bank of England, the East India Company and the Royal Mint. Mocatta lived here until his death, while working in partnership with Alexander Isaks Keyser from about 1777, joined by Asher Goldsmid around 1780. The next resident freeholder at No. 65 was Jacob Booth (d. 1820), a prosperous shoemaker, who appears to have put up a large warehouse facing West Tenter Street. Andrew Laughton, a Scottish wholesale shoe manufacturer, followed in the 1840s and ’50s.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>In 1872 the former house was extended back to fill almost the whole garden and the forecourt was covered by a single-storey shop. John Hudson, architect, oversaw these additions for J. Jacobs & Co., looking-glass manufacturers. Samuel Moses, a merchant dealing in second-hand military clothing on Alie Street, purchased No. 65 in 1885 when the premises consisted of ‘dwelling rooms, two show rooms, a large shop, offices and basement’, with a recently built five-bay three-storey warehouse facing West Tenter Street.[^3] Moses continued redevelopment, building two replacement warehouses on West Tenter Street in 1899 when Dunk and Bousfield were his architects, and as S. Moses & Sons Ltd entirely replacing Nos 65 and 67 in 1915–16. The shophouse at No. 73 had been rebuilt in 1847, and Nos 69–73 were altogether replaced in 1919–20 by a four-storey warehouse that was occupied early on by Shoe Retailers Ltd and Arthur Swain, a wholesale stationer.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>Joseph Tetley & Co. Ltd, who had been at the Alie Street corner since 1912, had taken the warehouse at Nos 69–73 by 1930, also acquiring Nos 65 and 67 by 1938, all for the storage of tea and coffee. Repairs and rebuilding followed substantial war damage and from 1958 Nos 65–73 were united as Mansell House and occupied by the Ministry of Works, later the Department of the Environment, for use by surveyors and engineers. </p>\n\n<p>The whole site was commercially redeveloped to designs by Covell Matthews Wheatley Architects following approvals given in 1988. The resultant six-storey building, offices with two top-floor flats and again called Mansell Court, has a Postmodern façade in which polished grey granite with red trim step ups from the largely glazed centre around a rocket-shaped entrance bay. That gives access to an atrium ‘rotunda’. The window proportions with pseudo-brick heads perhaps faintly recall Georgian forerunners.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/760/47: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/512/1069078; /379/589154; Land Tax Returns (LT): Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Four Shillings in the Pound Assessments, 1693–4: TNA, PROB11/873/262; PROB11/1337/205; PROB11/1633/277: <em>Oxford Dictionayr of National Biography sub</em> Mocatta: Lucien Wolf, <em>Sir Moses Montefiore: A centennial biography</em>, 1884, pp. 12–13: LMA, LT; LMA/4673/D/01/004/002; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/473/933412: Richard Horwood's maps: POD: Census</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 6 Mar 1885, p. 19: <em>Builder</em>, 19 Oct 1872, p. 834; 28 March 1885, p. 468: POD: Goad insurance maps: Ordnance Survey maps</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: POD: London County Council Minutes, 13 June 1899, p. 842: LMA, District Surveyors' Returns (DSR); Collage 118721: Historic England Archives (HEA), aerial photographs</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: POD: DSR: HEA, P/G0704/001: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>The area known as Goodman’s Fields since the sixteenth century extends west to east from Mansell Street to close to Gower’s Walk, and from north of Alie Street to south of Chamber Street. An estate of more than forty acres held by generations of Goodmans then Lemans was not much built upon until after 1680 when, under the ownership of Sir William Leman, the major roads were laid out. Houses quickly followed, some very large, with industries and trading mixed in, while significant open spaces survived into the nineteenth century. Railway interventions brought major change, and there have also been major late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century transformations.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p><em>Before development</em></p>\n\n<p>Until the seventeenth century, Goodman’s Fields was an enclave of open pasture. The fields were sandwiched between ribbon development along Whitechapel High Street to the north and Rosemary Lane to the south. Much of the western half of Goodman’s Fields had formed part of what has been denoted the Eastern Roman Cemetery, where thousands of Londoners were buried between the late first and the early fifth centuries. Evidence of burials and cremations was noted by John Strype, who recalled that building work in 1678 unearthed ‘vast quantities of urns and other Roman utensils’.[^1] Recent archaeological excavations across the cemetery site have confirmed and continued to reveal the extensive scope of Roman activity. Residual memory of the ancient burial ground may have staved off some early development, though limited road access to the fields more likely explains the lack of settlement up to the seventeenth century.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>The Franciscan abbey of St Clare without Aldgate was founded in or by 1293 on the east side of the Minories, which takes its name from the abbey’s nuns, who were known as Minoresses. Fields to the east, which came to be called Homefield, Homefield (described as forty acres in 1343 and fifty acres in 1472), pertained to the Manor of Barnes (or Bernes), a major part of lands held from the Bishop of London by the Trentemars family from the twelfth century, with a large house on the east side of the Minories south of the abbey that was called Bernes in 1395 when an interest in the property was inherited by John Cornwaleys who subsequently consolidated control of the manor. This land in Whitechapel is said to have been used by the Minoresses as a convent garden or farm, that is market garden, before the dissolution of the abbey in the 1530s. Sir John Cornwallis thereafter leased the fields to Rowland Goodman (d. 1544), a merchant and citizen Fishmonger, and his wife Anne. Thomas Goodman (b. 1528), a son and heir, followed with a new Cornwallis lease. It was later said by John Stow (1525–1605), who recalled fetching milk from Goodman’s farm in his youth, that the land was used for grazing horses. It seems that it was from 1574, under the watch of Rowland’s grandson, also Thomas Goodman (d. 1606), that northern and southern sections of the open fields close to Rosemary Lane (Hog Lane up to about 1600) and Whitechapel High Street were divided into parcels, leased and converted into garden plots, tenter yards, and bowling alleys. The manor of Barnes was conveyed from Sir Thomas Cornwallis to William Bromefield in 1560 and then from Catherine Bromefield, his widow, to Thomas Goodman in 1594 when it entailed fifty-four messuages, seventy-two gardens, twenty cottages, a windmill and seventy acres of pasture across Whitechapel, extending into the parish of St Botolph Aldgate. Referred to as ‘Mr Thomas Goodman, esq.’ at the time of his death in 1606, he had profited from development to the extent that he ‘lived like a gentleman thereby’; he had moved out of the City to West Ham, a favoured residence for wealthy City men.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Around five acres to the south of Whitechapel High Street and north of what later became Alie Street came to be held by Edward Gaunt (d. c.1619). Subdivided as gardens, this property descended to his daughter Katherine (d. 1624), and then to her husband Anthony Botley.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>The main manorial holding was settled on the children of Thomas Goodman the younger, though his widow Beatrice disputed her claim. Two of the children, William Goodman and Anne Carey, sold their lands in 1628 to a former Lord Mayor of London and Prime Warden of the Fishmongers’ Company, Sir John Leman (1544–1632). This estate, now called Goodman’s Fields, then consisted of ten messuages, forty cottages, and forty acres of pasture. It included the capital messuage of Barnes, on the west side of what would become Mansell Street. Leman was the grandson of a refugee from Flanders, whose surname was likely Le Mans. A merchant who moved from Suffolk to London, John Leman initially prospered in the capital as part of a cartel that cornered trade in butter and cheese. He later involved himself in the early ventures of the East India Company. His success enabled him to purchase several estates including Rampton, Cambridgeshire, and Warboys, Huntingdonshire. Unmarried on his death in 1632, Leman bequeathed his estates to his nephew William Leman, a Cheapside linen draper, whose marriage in 1628 to Rebecca Prescot, the daughter of Edward Prescott, a citizen Salter, was to be commemorated in the naming of Prescot Street. A plot of land within Goodman’s Fields was in fact also gifted to Christ’s Hospital, John Leman having acted as its President since 1618. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, rents from land west of Leman Street were used to fund the Hospital. With his uncle’s substantial inheritance, William Leman purchased the seat of Northaw, Hertfordshire, where he lived from 1632 until his death in 1667. Said to have financially supported the future Charles II during his exile, William Leman secured a baronetcy in 1665. This passed to his son, also William Leman (1637–1701).[^5] </p>\n\n<p>In 1655, this younger (Sir) William Leman married Mary Mansell, the daughter of Sir Lewis Mansel and granddaughter of Henry Montagu, Earl of Manchester. Mary’s pedigree was recognised in the naming of their only son, Mansel, and in the most westerly street to be laid out on Goodman’s Fields. Mansel Leman’s wife, Lucy Alie, the daughter of Richard Alie, an Alderman of London, accounts for a further street name. Mansel Leman died as a young man in 1687 and the Leman estate was equally divided in 1701 between one of his three sisters, Theodosia (who married Lewis Newnham of Maresfield, Sussex), and his son, Sir William Leman III (1685–1741). In 1715, William Perris, of St Dunstan in the West, purchased a copyhold interest in Goodman’s Fields, ‘alias Leman’s Fields’, having also involved himself north of Whitechapel High Street in relation to the Goulston estate in 1702.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>Goodman’s Fields were only lightly occupied for most of the seventeenth century, though use for the stretching of cloth on tenters was long-standing, spanning from at least the 1570s until the 1750s. In 1614 Goodman’s Fields was referred to in relation to the spinning of twenty tons of hemp intended for rigging a ship bound for the East Indies. In 1656, several inhabitants of Goodman’s Fields complained of the danger posed to their houses by proximity to the gunpowder stores of local ships’ chandlers. Sir Christopher Myngs, a buccaneering naval officer who had helped to secure control of Jamaica, is said to have died in 1666 at his seven-hearth house in Goodman’s Fields. </p>\n\n<p>Ownership of at least part of the five acres north of the line of Alie Street that were subdivided as gardens had passed by the 1670s from Anthony Botley to Sir Henry Hudson (<em>c.</em>1609–1690) of Melton Mowbray, who had a baronetcy created in 1660 and who held properties across London’s eastern suburbs. Matthew Penn, a nurseryman, occupied this land, known as Penn’s Garden. The Lemans had at least three other garden plots in this area that were leased ‘with premises thereon’ to William Kendrick, a citizen Cooper, in 1663.There were some buildings, notably an array of what were probably workshops and warehouses on the north side of what was to become Alie Street, to some extent occupied by silk throwsters. However, in the 1670s Goodman’s Fields was still for the most part open fields, gardens and ropeyards.[^7]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p><em>Framework of first development</em></p>\n\n<p>The second Sir William Leman, who inherited in 1667, was responsible for the first wave of proper development. The value of the land for building would have been obvious, with comparative evidence at hand in large mid seventeenth-century developments in Spitalfields and Shadwell, let alone smaller more local initiatives. Strype indicated that some building work at least was underway in 1678 and William Morgan’s map of 1682 shows that what were to become Mansell Street, Alie Street, Lambert (later Lambeth) Street and Chamber Street had been laid out around the margins of the property, with what would be Prescot Street an internal addition as an eastwards continuation of Goodman’s Yard. This layout indicates coherent estate planning on an impressive and ambitious scale. Leman aside, whose mind, energy and designs lay behind this overarching ‘Scheme’, as he referred to it, remains unknown, but it was recorded at the time that Leman, who was granting major building leases in 1682, intended ‘to make great Improvements … by many Houses and Erections to be built … by Lease to be Granted to other persons at long terms of years at small yearly rents under several covenants and agreements for building’.[^8] </p>\n\n<p>There were already some new houses on Mansell Street by 1682, when Leman leased large parts of the fields to John Hooper and John Price. By 1684 Sir Thomas Chamber had seen off and supplanted Price. Hooper laid out Leman Street and lesser streets to its east before his early death in 1685. His leases were taken over by John Bankes and Sir Stephen Evance. Chamber inveigled William Chapman into building Prescot Street’s houses in 1685–9, along with some on Chamber Street. Leman Street was slower to be built up, Alie Street even more so. Thomas Neale had initiated development of the gardens north of Alie Street by 1682, but he sold up and Edward Buckley saw through building on this land from 1683.</p>\n\n<p>John Hooper was a timber merchant and citizen Draper, probably from Devon. As the principal developer of the area east of and including Leman Street up to 1685 he undertook some work directly. He laid out Hooper’s Square, Rupert Street and Lambert Street. Lambert was his well-connected wife Margaret’s surname before their marriage in 1679. </p>\n\n<p>John Bankes (<em>c.</em>1652–1720) was another timber merchant, a major importer, probably of Scandinavian wood. From 1685 he had former Hooper property on both sides of Leman Street, also on Rupert Street and Hooper’s Square; he had directly overseen building under Hooper, contracting tradesmen at particular rates for brickwork and carpentry. Bankes is known to have worked with Nicholas Barbon in the 1680s on Duke Street in St Margaret’s, Westminster. After 1698 he was active as a builder in Holborn and he rose to become Master of the Haberdasher’s Company in 1717. However, his will recorded nothing more by way of property in Whitechapel than a leasehold estate at George Yard on the north side of Whitechapel High Street.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>Sir Stephen Evance (or Evans) benefitted from being a creditor of Hooper’s. He was assigned forty-five houses and much undeveloped land on the eastern side of Goodman’s Fields in 1686. Born in Virginia in 1652, Evance had amassed a fortune through finance, having arrived in London aged fourteen to serve as an apprentice in a goldsmith’s shop. From the 1680s he involved himself in a range of entrepreneurial schemes, as a banker, bullion dealer and Hudson’s Bay speculator, rising to be a prominent government financier after 1688. Evance’s political and Crown service led to a knighthood in 1690, and he was an MP from 1690 to 1698. He was also a director of the Royal African Company, and thus profited from the slave trade. His business exploits were not without controversy at the time. He was censured for the illegal importation of 100 bales of raw silk worth £14,718 in 1693, and accused of bribery by directors of the East India Company in 1695. A swift fall from grace ensued. Having been declared bankrupt in January 1712, Evance committed suicide in March, dying unmarried and childless. His involvement in developing Goodman’s Fields appears to have been his only activity in building speculation.[^10]</p>\n\n<p>John Price, a citizen Skinner, took several sixty-two-and-a-half-year leases from William Leman in June 1682, agreeing to pay an annual rent of £1,200 for four building plots on the south side of Prescot Street and two on the north side. He also took property on the west side of Leman Street and what had been Kendrick’s three garden plots north of the line of Alie Street where with Thomas Neale he formed and built on Red Lion Street. Price gained financial backing from Chamber, who then, despite further backing from John Methuen (probably the lawyer who was to become Ambassador to Portugal and prime mover of the treaties of 1703 that established Anglo-Portuguese alliance and free trade), forced Price into bankruptcy for non-payment of interest in 1683–4 and took over much of his property.</p>\n\n<p>Sir Thomas Chamber (sometimes Chambers, d. 1692) had been the East India Company’s Agent in Madras from 1658 to 1662, when he was dismissed for insubordination. He stayed on, gained exoneration in 1665, and returned to England to be knighted in 1666. He bought the manor of Hanworth in Feltham, Middlesex, in 1670. Having displaced Price, Chamber was substantially involved with development in Goodman’s Fields from 1685. He collaborated with, or rather manipulated, William Chapman, a carpenter, in the building of houses on Prescot Street and Chamber Street in 1685–9. Chamber is said to have contracted Chapman to build sixty-six houses on Prescot Street, working from west to east along almost its whole length in stages, promising to advance all money needed, and to buy the houses himself if Chapman could not sell them. Chapman got the first ten carcasses up, and was then obliged to reassign the properties to Chamber as a condition of a further loan to enable him to complete. Chamber let the houses and received the rents, while Chapman spent more than he had been loaned. Drawn in and in debt, Chapman was allegedly induced to repeat this several more times, always finding himself obliged to use his own money to complete, and giving up the rents to Chamber in what was recognised at the time as an extraordinary process. Chapman ended up with large debts to many creditors, which Chamber promised to settle in exchange for Chapman signing a general release. He did sign, but Chamber reneged and Chapman absconded. </p>\n\n<p>Around the same time Chamber was engaged in other property speculations, in Shadwell, Wanstead, Montgomeryshire, and on Cornhill in London. When he died in 1692 his only son, Thomas Chamber (usually Chambers, 1668–1736) inherited his extensive estate, large tracts in west Middlesex and property in the City, Westminster, Clerkenwell, Shoreditch, Goodman’s Fields, Shadwell, West Ham, Stratford, Barking and Yorkshire. His widow, Elizabeth, was given use of the manor house in Hanworth and a mansion on Prescot Street.[^11] The younger Thomas Chambers continued to prosecute development in Goodman’s Fields, including frontages on Leman Street, as well as on Rosemary Lane. He married Lady Mary Berkeley, the daughter of Charles Berkeley, the Second Earl of Berkeley. After his death at Hanworth, it was reported that his two daughters would inherit very great fortunes.[^12] </p>\n\n<p>Thomas Neale (1641–1699), the prominent courtier and speculator, was on the scene by 1681, around when he bought Penn’s Garden from Sir Henry Hudson and planned the laying out of streets and houses between Alie Street and Whitechapel High Street. Neale had acquired great wealth and lands in Shadwell through marriage in 1664, and it was in Shadwell that he cut his teeth as a speculative developer. He had no doubt caught wind of Leman’s intentions for Goodman's Fields and seen an opportunity. Through an agreement of April 1682 he combined with Price in forming Red Lion Street, crucial to the opening up of his Whitechapel property, and he may have started on other preparatory work. However, perhaps foreseeing difficulties, he bailed out later in 1682, prevailing on Edward Buckley, a wealthy citizen Brewer who had been a hearth-tax farmer, whose business was in Old Street and who had residences in St Giles Cripplegate and Putney, to buy his Whitechapel property. One of several brewers to invest in Nicholas Barbon’s Fire Office around 1681, Buckley acquired an estate in St Margaret’s Westminster in 1682 where he or his son became entangled with Barbon’s development of Charles Street and Duke Street. In Whitechapel it transpired that Red Lion Street could not be knocked through to Whitechapel High Street until about 1685, and litigation arising from Price’s debts that chuntered on thereafter led Grace Andrews, proprietor of the newly rebuilt Red Lion Inn, to erect posts and rails across the north end of Red Lion Street that were up to at least 1687, a blockage that must have dampened enthusiasm for investment at the north end of Goodman’s Fields. </p>\n\n<p>Buckley died in August 1683, his son and heir being Edward Buckley (1656–1730), whose inheritance included the brewery, residences and Whitechapel estate. Buckley consolidated the Penn’s Garden holding, seemingly with what had been Price’s garden plots and others perhaps, to permit the laying out of a close grid of roads that included Buckley (soon corrupted to Buckle) Street, Colchester Street (later Braham Street), and Plough Street, all largely built up by the 1690s. He granted long leases, including of ninety-nine years, as to Timothy Salter, a Whitechapel bricklayer.[^13] </p>\n\n<p>The paving of Goodman’s Fields’ roads was completed in 1691, with Red Lion Street (north) and White Lion Street (south) providing important links to Whitechapel High Street and Rosemary Lane as continuations of Leman Street. Archaeological excavations on what was the east side of Red Lion Street have identified a large seventeenth-century brickfield. By 1694 many frontages were built up with houses and occupied, the east side of Mansell Street solidly so with twenty-three mostly substantial houses, Prescot Street and Lambert Street very largely, with seventy-two and eighty houses respectively, and Buckley’s northerly lands extensively with well over a hundred mostly small houses. Leman Street and Alie Street were yet to fill up. Somerset Street connected Mansell Street to Aldgate High Street at the parish boundary.</p>\n\n<p>Edward Hatton remarked on the spaciousness of ‘Aly’, ‘Lemon’, Mansell and Prescot streets in 1708.[^14] These four main streets roughly formed a large square with houses addressing the streets on both sides, those on the inner sides concealing an unusually extensive central enclosure, not a garden square in the usual sense, but fashioned for both pleasure and for cloth-stretching as a tenter ground. It was to have been called Leman’s Quadrangle, but the name did not stick. The space was surrounded by a tree-lined carriageway entered by a single gate from Prescot Street and to some extent it functioned as mews. </p>\n\n<p>The development of plots backing onto the tenter ground was of a consistently high standard – these were Whitechapel’s best houses. Leases appear generally to have been for sixty-one years or thereabouts. They specified that houses should be brick-built, contiguous and built according to a ‘Scheme’, of which nothing is known. Heights, wall thicknesses and timber scantlings were to follow the specifications for houses of the second ‘Rate’ (‘Sort’) in the Act of 1667 for rebuilding the City of London, that is those fronting streets ‘of note’. Lessees were obliged to pave eight-foot wide footpaths and the streets in front of their takes. Little more is known of the particulars, the processes of estate development remain largely obscure. </p>\n\n<p>It is evident that Mansell Street’s east side and all of Prescot Street were systematically and speedily developed, exceptionally regular for their time, though not standardised, there being considerable variation from house to house. Many East India Company captains, traders with North America, cloth merchants, silk throwsters, and corn factors took up residence in double-fronted mansions on Mansell Street, Alie Street’s south side, Leman Street’s west side, and Prescot Street. Goodman’s Fields had good access to the Thames and the naval depot on the later Royal Mint site; a number of early occupants appear to have had connections to the provisioning of ships and the navy, though such residence was often brief if not transitory. The mercantile and international character of the area’s inhabitants was strongly represented in its early Jewish population, Sephardic and with strong roots in Bevis Marks Synagogue. Dr William Payne, the vicar of St Mary Matfelon from 1681 to 1697, based himself on Alie Street, where a Particular Baptist congregation appears to have gathered from 1698. In 1720 Strype characterized Goodman’s Fields as ‘fair Streets with very good brick Houses well inhabited by several Merchants, and Persons of Repute’.[^15]</p>\n\n<p>Development was far from complete and there was not uniformity. Close to the bustle of Whitechapel High Street, Alie Street lagged, many of its south-side frontages remaining open into the 1720s when Samuel Hawkins (see below) appeared on the scene. Alie Street’s north side remained in parts unreconstructed from the arrangements that antedated 1680. There was also a large gap on the east side of Leman Street until the early 1720s, with completion of that street’s west side perhaps coming no earlier. Buckley had kept an orchard off Red Lion Street. Elsewhere on his holding, open ground called Deans Garden, accessed via Buckle Street, was being used as a riding ground in 1714.</p>\n\n<p>Building work was gradual and ongoing. Gaps continued to be filled under the ownership of Sir William Leman III in the 1730s and beyond when there was work on the north side of Alie Street. Rebuilding at the expiry of first-phase leases was being undertaken on Prescot Street in the 1740s. Away from the prestigious frontages, sugarhouses began to appear in the first decades of the eighteenth century and some larger gardens were built over. There were a number of ‘disorderly’ or ‘Bawdy’ houses in Goodman’s Fields, keepers of which were made to stand in a pillory on Alie Street in 1753.[^16]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p><em>Descent of the Leman Estate</em></p>\n\n<p>Sir William Leman III died childless in 1741, survived by his widow Anna Margareta. His moiety of the Goodman’s Fields estate passed to Richard Alie, a nephew, who took the surname Leman by Act of Parliament in 1745. Richard Leman, however, suffered from gout and did not long survive his uncle, dying in 1749 with no direct heir. The estate fell to his unmarried sister Lucy Alie, who then died in 1753. These misfortunes led to the endorsement of John Granger (who was no relation) to inherit by Act of Parliament on condition he also take on the Leman surname. John Granger Leman’s marriage to Elizabeth Worth, the daughter of East India Commander Captain Philip Worth, was childless. He died in 1779 and two years later his widow Elizabeth married William Strode of Loseley House, Surrey, who assumed claim to the Leman estate. This marriage was also childless and Elizabeth died in 1790. Strode’s second marriage to Mary Finch (née Brouncker) also ended without issue, leading to sale of this half of the estate after Strode’s death in 1809 and consequent litigation. There were auctions of freeholds in 1814 and 1831 and legal complications regarding the remnants of this holding wittered into the 1850s.[^17]</p>\n\n<p>Strode’s portion constituted only half of the original estate. Rights to the other half had passed down through Theodosia (née Leman) and Lewis Newnham to their daughter, Elizabeth Newnham (d. 1767), and son, John Newnham (d. 1765), of Maresfield in Sussex, cousins of Sir William Leman III<em>. </em>Division of the estate between John Granger Leman and the Newnhams was confirmed by Act of Parliament in 1756. Following another Act of 1776 enabling a sale, Edward Hawkins bought half the Newnham moiety of the copyhold estate in 1779 and his brother and heir, Samuel Hawkins, bought the other half in 1787.[^18]</p>\n\n<p>Edward Hawkins (1723–1780) was the son of Samuel Hawkins (1690–1771), Master of the Carpenter’s Company in 1745 and a ‘Builder of Goodman’s Fields’ according to his will, who was a major figure in the last stages of the development of Goodman’s Fields. On Samuel’s marriage in 1721 it appears that he moved to Whitechapel, taking a house in Chamber Street, and responsibility for the construction of a number of houses nearby, including on the south side of Alie Street where a row datable to the 1720s survives. He was also active in Spitalfields. He moved to a large house on Leman Street in the 1750s, from where his sons, Edward and Samuel Hawkins (1727–1805), extended their local reach and influence. Edward was another carpenter who became surveyor to the London Hospital, and Samuel, who was in business as a silk throwster, was a magistrate, treasurer of the parish charity school, and chairman of the pavement commissioners for Whitechapel’s Church Lane from 1783. Edward married Ann Schumacker, from a prosperous Leman Street family of German sugar refiners. They had no children so when Edward died in 1780 his brother Samuel took control of the Goodman’s Fields property.</p>\n\n<p>Meanwhile, Major Rohde (1744–1819), another local sugar refiner, had married Mary Hawkins, of Newnham, Gloucestershire, in 1776. She appears to have been the granddaughter of the elder Samuel Hawkins’s brother, Thomas Hawkins (d. 1776), also of Newnham, who had a coalyard on the Severn shipping coal to London. On Samuel Hawkins’ death in 1805, his Goodman’s Fields properties descended, in trust via his sister-in-law Ann (née Schumacker) Hawkins (d. 1812), to his cousin and Thomas’s son, Edward Hawkins (1749–1816), a banker in Neath, Glamorganshire, and then to his son, Edward Hawkins (1780–1867), a keeper of antiquities at the British Museum, who married Eliza Rohde in 1806. The next heir was their son, the architect Major Rohde Hawkins (1821–1884). Parts of the Hawkins’ estate not already sold off were auctioned in 1919.Edward and Samuel Hawkins were lessees of the tenter ground from 1775. Their purchases of the Newnham moiety of the estate thereafter gave them full control of the northern half of this undeveloped land. The southern half had been acquired by the Scarborough family after Strode’s death in 1809. Access roads were formed in 1814–15, which led to the creation of St Mark’s Street, but development that included St Mark’s Church did not follow until the 1830s. The former tenter ground had been built up with rows of humble terraced houses by 1851.[^19]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: John Strype, <em>A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster</em>, vol.2/4<em>, </em>1720, p.23: Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England), <em>An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London, vol.3: Roman London</em>, 1928, p.157: Agas map, <em>c.</em>1561: Faithorne and Newcourt map, 1658</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: www.lparchaeology.com/prescot/journal/: P. Thrale, ‘Goodman’s Fields, London E1: An archaeological evaluation report’, Museum of London Archaeology unpublished report series, 2008: G. Hunt, C. Morse, ‘Archaeological Evaluation Report, Prescot Street, London E1’, 2006</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: John Stow, <em>A Survey of London</em>, 1603, C. L. Kingsford (ed.), 1908, vol.1, p.126; vol.2, p.288: E. M. Tomlinson, <em>A History of the Minories, London</em>, 1907: G. S. Fry (ed.), <em>Abstracts of Inquisitiones Post Mortem For the City of London: Part 1</em>, 1896, pp.95-110: The National Archives (TNA), C78/4/51; C8/11/36; CP25/2/262/36; CP25/2/526/4: <em>Calendar of the patent rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, Edward VI</em>, vol.5 (1547–53), 1926, p.332: T. F. T. Baker (ed.), <em>A History of the County of Middlesex</em>, vol.11:<em> Stepney, Bethnal Green</em>, 1998, pp.13–19: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/SLC/1/17/20: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), P69/BOT2/A/015/MS09222/001: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: TNA, WARD5/26: James Bird and G. Topham Forrest (eds), <em>Survey of London</em>, vol.8: <em>The Parish of St Leonard, Shoreditch</em>, 1922, p.10</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: TNA, C8/11/36; PROB11/161/375; PROB11/325/275; PROB11/133/638: Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies (HALS), DE/X22/28978: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) sub</em> Leman: www.londonroll.org: LMA, Land Tax Returns (LT); Middlesex Deeds Registry (MDR): History of Parliament Online (HoPO) <em>sub</em> Leman: Henry Stevens, <em>The Dawn of British Trade to the East Indies as recorded in the Court records of the East India Company 1599–1603</em>, 1886, p.254: Rosemary Weinstein, ‘The Making of a Lord Mayor, Sir John Leman: The integration of a stranger family’, <em>Proceedings of the Huguenot Society</em>, vol.24/4, 1986, pp.316–24: A. Wright and C. P. Lewis (eds), <em>A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely, vol.9: Chesterton, Northstowe, and Papworth Hundreds</em>, 1989, pp.212–14: W. Page, G. Proby, S. Inskip Ladds (eds), <em>A History of the County of Huntingdon, vol.2</em><em>,</em>1932, pp.242–6: W. Page (ed.), <em>A History of the County of Hertford, vol.2</em><em>, </em>1908, pp.357–60: D. J. Keene and Vanessa Harding, <em>Historical Gazetteer of London Before the Great Fire Cheapside; Parishes of All Hallows Honey Lane, St Martin Pomary, St Mary Le Bow, St Mary Colechurch and St Pancras Soper Lane</em>, 1987, pp.270–5</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: MDR1715/2/32–3: Parliamentary Archives (PA), HL/PO/JO/10/6/102/2266: THLHLA, P/SLC/1/17/20: Page <em>et al</em> (eds), <em>Huntingdon</em>, pp.242–6: Page (ed.), <em>Hertford</em>, pp.357–60</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: TNA, C2/Jasl/L11/35; C7/58/2; C8/404/37; PROB11/401/31: LT: Ancestry: W. Noel Sainsbury (ed.), <em>Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies, China and Japan, </em>vol.2, <em>1513</em><em>–</em><em>1616</em>, 1864, pp.279–89: M. A. E. Green (ed.), <em>Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Interregnum, 1656–7</em>, 1883, pp.146–79: W. A. Shaw (ed.), <em>Calendar of Treasury Books</em>, vol.3,<em> 1669–1672</em>, 1908, pp. 927–38: M. A. E. Green (ed.), <em>Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles II, 1664–5</em>, 1863, pp.288–304: <em>ODNB sub</em> Myngs: T. F. T. Baker (ed.), <em>Victoria County History, A History of the County of Middlesex</em>, vol.11:<em> Stepney, Bethnal Green</em>, 1998, p.173</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: TNA, C11/49/29; C10/544/6</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: British History Online, Four Shillings in the Pound Assessments, 1693–4 (4s£): TNA, C5/79/43; C7/569/9; PROB11/452/437: haberdashers.co.uk/our-vaults: Frank Kelsall and Timothy Walker, <em>Nicholas Barbon 1640–1698</em>, forthcoming 2021, pre-publication typescript</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: HoPO <em>sub</em> Evance: <em>ODNB sub</em> Evance: Ancestry: 4s£: TNA, PROB11/573/418: <em>Journals of the House of Commons</em>, 12 Feb 1699, p.197: <em>British Mercury</em>, 5–7 March 1712: William A. Shaw, <em>Calendar of Treasury Books</em>, vol.7,<em> 1681–1685</em>, 1916, p.939: Stephen Quinn, ‘Gold, silver, and the Glorious Revolution: arbitrage between bills of exchange and bullion’, <em>Economic History Review</em>, n.s., vol.49/3, 1996, pp.473–90: Agnes C. Laut, <em>The Conquest of the Great Northwest</em>, 1908, pp.193,289–91</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: TNA, C5/187/11; C5/148/42; C7/58/2; C7/58/14; C7/58/2; C10/225/21; C10/213/24; C7/58/50; C7/64/2; PROB11/408/402; PROB11/490/348: LMA, MDR1715/2/32–3; LMA/4245/01/034: <em>Victoria County History: A History of the County of Middlesex</em>, vol.2, 1911, pp.314–9: Henry Davison Love, <em>Indian Records Series: Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800</em>, vol.1, 1913, pp.199–204</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: <em>London Evening Post</em>, 17–20 Jan 1736, p.1: <em>General Evening Post</em>, 17–19 July 1735, p.1: LMA, LMA/4245/02/010</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: TNA, C5/99/23; C7/58/2; C8/404/37; C10/225/21; PROB11/638/2; PROB11/374/202: LMA, ACC/0349/301: Joseph Morgan, <em>The New Political State of Great Britain</em>, 1730, p.326: <em>ODNB sub</em> Neale: Ancestry: Frank Kelsall and Timothy Walker, <em>Nicholas Barbon 1640–1698</em>, forthcoming 2021, pre-publication typescript</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: <em>E</em><em>dward</em><em> Hatton</em>, <em>A New View of London</em>, vol.1, 1708, pp.2,46,51,65</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: Strype, <em>Survey</em><em> of London</em><em>, </em>vol.2/2, p.28: W. J. Hardy (ed.), <em>Middlesex County Records. Calendar of Sessions Books 1689–1709</em>, 1905, pp.26–105, passim: 4s£: <em>Universal Spectator</em>, 12 April 1732: Historic England, Greater London Historic Environment Record, ELO10294</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: LMA, ACC/0349/302: 4s£: Mawer: Church of England Record Centre, MS2724, MS2750/68, MS2716: TNA, P/CRV/9: MDR: THLHLA, cuttings 022</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: TNA, PROB11/771/375; PROB11/805/33; PROB11/1502/116: HoPO <em>sub </em>Strode: HALS, DE/X22/28997; DE/X22/29006: THLHLA, P/SLC/1/20/34/1–2; P/SLC/1/21/1; LC10995: PA, HL/PO/PB/1/1807/47G3s2n207: <em>The Jurist</em>, vol. 8/1, 1845, pp.14–15: Page <em>et al</em> (eds), <em>Huntingdon</em>, pp.242–6</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: East Sussex Record Office, SAS/AB/1098: TNA, C13/652/9;C13/920/9; C13/986/29; C13/987/1</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: West Sussex Record Office, SAS-F/346: MDR: LMA, P93/MRY1/092, p.19: TNA, C13/920/9; C13/986/29; C13/987/1; PROB11/1026/83; PROB11/1062/209; PROB11/1436/196; PROB11/1531/180; PROB11/1579/122; PROB11/1760/55; PROB11/1803/193; D2957/215/16; IR58/84815/3245; /84816/3207–20; /84823, /84829–31, /84834, /84839–40, <em>passim</em>: THLHLA, L/SMW/C/4/1: Richard Horwood's maps of London, 1792–1819: Ordnance Survey maps: <em>Estates Gazette</em>, 25 Oct 1919, p.558: F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), <em>Survey of London, vol.27: Spitalfields and Mile End New Town</em>, 1957, pp. 245–51: LT: Ancestry: Electoral Registers</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>It is often assumed that 57 Mansell Street was built as a pair with No. 59. Pointing out that ‘the real wealth of Georgian England derived from trade’, Giles Worsley regarded the two houses as ‘lone witnesses to the City’s wealth, and for this reason they are among the most important surviving early 18th-century domestic buildings in London’. [^1] Though it does not consider the kind of trade that is being witnessed, this is a fair assessment of significance, but it should apply in singular form to No. 57 alone, which is more than a century-and-a-half older than No. 59, which, most surprisingly, is a copy of the 1880s. </p>\n\n<p>No. 57 stands alone as an extraordinary survival from the early eighteenth-century development of Goodman’s Fields. While it and its copycat pair do provide welcome relief in terms of the character of the street scene, the early building is unusually fussy in its unscholarly classicism, a baroque style that evokes continuities with the late seventeenth-century City.</p>\n\n<p>A mansion standing on this site by 1694, occupied by Katharine Clarke, a widow, had a rental value equivalent to that of the street’s other big houses. At some point in the 1710s Clarke sold this house to James Edmundson (1674–1729), a vicar’s son from Market Deeping in Lincolnshire, who was a director of both the South Sea Company and the Royal African Company, the principal business of which was the slave trade. Even so, he was one of the poorest of the South Sea Company’s directors and had bought the sinecure position of Purser on HMS <em>Royal Anne</em>, a naval frigate launched at Woolwich in 1709, for an income of £100 a year. He lived at 29 Prescot Street, a smaller two-room plan house, from around 1708 to at least 1722, with his wife Rachael (d. 1739) and four daughters. By 1720 Edmundson had pulled the Mansell Street house down and begun rebuilding to form an even grander mansion for his family to inhabit. He had to stop work with only the outside walls constructed when South Sea stock collapsed in August 1720, having spent around £1,000 and owing another approximately £2,000. ‘Almost ruined’, the Edmundsons nonetheless evidently did make the house habitable, probably later in the 1720s. In 1733 the widowed Rachael Edmundson was living in what was now the largest house on the street by rateable value.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Isaac Dias Fernandes (<em>c.</em>1687–1759) took this house in 1739. He had been a neighbour since at least 1733, in a house on the site of No. 61, having previously held premises at Angel Court, Throgmorton Street. Another increase in the rateable value of the Mansell Street house in 1741 suggests the finishing off of works that the Edmundsons had never completed, or, less plausibly, the addition of a garden building. Dias Fernandes, who was an immigrant, was granted denizen status in 1742. Whatever hand he had in its fashioning, his house proclaimed him as an established and wealthy London merchant.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Dias Fernandes was a Sephardic Jew, born in Spain, who lived in Lisbon until 1706 when he fled the Inquisition with his father, Abraham (1657–1743), and brothers, Daniel and Moses. His mother had suffered an <em>auto-da-fé</em>, burnt alive on account of Jewish observance. Sentenced to death,the rest of the family fled to London with nothing, their goods confiscated. Abraham Dias Fernandes established himself as a merchant, using the pseudonym Miguel Vianna, trading between England, Portugal and Brazil from a base on Fenchurch Street, exporting wool and importing diamonds. His sons became prosperous merchants with interests in Barbados, Jamaica and North America. Isaac Dias Fernandes lived at No. 57 until 1755.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The mansion of 1719–20 at 57 Mansell Street, perhaps not properly completed until 1741, was opulent even by the standards of Goodman’s Fields. But it was also conservative in architectural terms, a late flourish of the baroque for which design responsibility remains obscure. Constructed of brown brick with red-brick trim, the house has a five-bay front, three storeys, a basement and an attic. The central slightly projecting entrance bay is much embellished with Portland stone dressings. A rusticated arch to double doors, once topped by a fanlight, has engaged and fluted Doric columns supporting an open segmental pediment, so open as to embrace awkwardly the panelled apron of the architrave to the first-floor window. There is a similar architrave on the second floor and another stone panel above in the parapet. Moulded stone stringcourses of increasing weight rise to a cornice and the façade is framed by channelled stone quoins. The windows have prominent keystones. Those on the ground floor are reinstatements of the 1980s (see below). </p>\n\n<p>The earliest documentation relating to the interior of the house comes from 1814 when the ground floor was said to comprise a handsome entrance hall, two parlours, a counting-house, and a kitchen. Among the first-floor rooms, a small dressing room nestled between a showroom and a silvering room. Five bedrooms and a further dressing room were on the second floor. The attic, basement and a two-storey coach-house and stable at the back of the garden on its south side supplied service accommodation. The house was large enough to have two staircases, the grandest being against the front wall and rising only to the first floor, an arrangement common in early-to-mid eighteenth-century houses of this stature in the West End.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>By 1756 Captain John Barker (1707–1787) had taken up residence in the house, moving from Wellclose Square. Barker was the son of John Barker (d. 1733), a Lowestoft merchant. He pursued a mercantile shipping career, but was a captive in North Africa in 1730 when his father wrote his will; provision was made for him to receive an inheritance once released. He returned and became one of the Younger Brethren of the Corporation of Trinity House in 1741, one of the Elder Brethren in 1750, and warden in 1762. From 1771 Barker was the governor of the London Assurance Company, marine insurers. He maintained a close interest in the Russia Company and from 1749 was involved with the development of Ramsgate harbour. As his wealth grew, he became increasingly involved from the 1750s in charitable activities, as a governor of the Royal London Hospital, a director of the Royal Hospital for Seamen at Greenwich, and from 1758 to 1773, through close involvement with the Magdalen Hospital for Penitent Prostitutes. Barker commissioned a portrait by Joshua Reynolds in 1786. In keeping with the house he had occupied for thirty years, it was stylistically conservative. He died in his Mansell Street home in 1787.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>After a short period lying empty, No. 57 was occupied in the 1790s by Henry Tickell (1753–1803), the proprietor of the King’s Arms brewery on Old Castle Street (see p.xx). Isaac Goodman, the son of Henry Goodman who held the mansion at 18–20 Alie Street (see p.xx), followed until around 1821. He was a merchant, a warden of the Hambro Synagogue and the sometime business partner of his brother, Philip Goodman, at the Alie Street house. From 1804, Isaac Goodman lived controversially with Charlotte Geering (d. 1832), a Christian of modest background. The couple moved to Brussels in 1819, while keeping a foothold in London. On Isaac’s death in 1856, their ‘marriage’ proved not to have been solemnised, nor had it ever been recognised by Goodman’s family, which led to a court case that disputed the legality of his will and the status of their children.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>The house was divided into two tenancies in the 1820s, before being acquired in the early 1830s by Samuel and Henry Harris, brothers and harness-polish manufacturers. After Henry died in 1844, Samuel made No. 57 his home as well as business premises for a time, but the property appears to have been fully converted to factory use around 1850. The Harrises had family ties to the Bahamas, which led Augustus John Adderley, a Bahamian merchant, to use 57 Mansell Street as an address for London correspondence in the 1870s. Plants from the Bahamas for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew were also sent via Samuel Harris & Sons on Mansell Street. Around 1880 a three-storey warehouse (31 West Tenter Street) replaced the stable and coach-house behind No. 57. This survives, with twin inner loopholes in a four-bay stock-brick front. A glass roof linked the warehouse to the former house.[^8] </p>\n\n<p>Another large double-fronted late seventeenth-century mansion had once adjoined No. 57 to the south. It had been occupied by Thomas Jordain in 1693–4 and then successively by John Hollis (d. 1736), a citizen Draper, Sir Clifford William Phillips (d. 1754), a Justice of the Peace for Tower Hamlets, Captain James Sanders (d. 1778), a Turkey merchant, Francis Benson (see above), and David Samuel (d. 1798), a prosperous Jewish merchant who moved here from Leman Street, his widow staying on alongside David Samuda & Son. A pair of smaller houses replaced it in the 1820s or ’30s. By 1851, Samuel Harris occupied the house nearest No. 57 and by 1887 the Harrises had acquired the further house. The firm then redeveloped, erecting a five-bay warehouse as 59 Mansell Street. Wigg, Oliver & Hudson were the architects, the elderly Harry Oliver and John Hudson probably delegating much to John Charles Hudson. Consett Bros put in the lowest tender. The Harrises had respectability and wealth and perhaps, to judge from the later warehouse to the north, a penchant for classical architecture. Oliver had long been the District Surveyor for Whitechapel, and may have had some concern for streetscape, but all that is hardly sufficient explanation for the fact that this harness-polish warehouse was so carefully made, even unto stone dressings, to look like an early eighteenth-century mansion, almost matching No. 57 in its external appearance, different only in being executed with yellow-stock bricks and inferior stone, and without a columnar porch and double-door entrance.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>Harris and Sons continued at both properties into the 1900s, but by 1921, No. 57 was subdivided and in use by cork merchants, while No. 59 was the base for the Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls and Women, which had leased the premises from 1914. This organization had been formed in 1885 as the Jewish Ladies’ Society for Preventative and Rescue Work in response to reports of a slave trade in Jewish girls from Eastern Europe who were being pressed into prostitution in places as far flung as South America, South Africa and Turkey. In 1896, championed by an elite Anglo-Jewish group led by Constance Flower, Lady Battersea, the Society changed its name. Four years later, Joseph Pyke gave the Association the freehold of Sara Pyke House on Prescot Street, which he had built in memory of his wife for use as a lodging house.[^10] But 59 Mansell Street was the first building to allow all of the Association’s functions to be unified under one roof, accommodating ground-floor offices, first-floor clubrooms and workrooms, and living quarters above for unemployed vulnerable girls who had arrived in London without means or connections. The First World War significantly accelerated the Association’s activities. Annually, hundreds of unaccompanied girls were met at the port’s arrival points and offered support and refuge. The Association relocated and in the 1920s No. 59 became a Club for the Jewish Deaf.[^11] </p>\n\n<p>From the 1930s to the 1980s, Nos 57 and 59 were both used by various short-lived rag-trade businesses. They were Listed in 1971 around when the ground and basement floors of No. 57 were converted to be a ‘tandoori’ restaurant. In 1986–8 both buildings were extensively refurbished for office use in connection with the Aliffe House development. Trehearne and Norman, Preston and Partners oversaw the project, which received plaudits for creative reuse. Anthony Millar, the job architect, picturesquely deemed No. 57 ‘in the real pot belly and roast beef Georgian tradition’.[^12] Shopfronts having been inserted in the early twentieth century, the ground-floor windows of No. 57 were reinstated. The north wall was rebuilt beside a newly formed foot passage. The pavement-side stone piers with bold ball finials and linking railings, possibly all late nineteenth century, were restored, as were rainwater hoppers, bearing the dates 1720 and 1888. The warehouse at 31 West Tenter Street was also refurbished and reconnected to No. 57 via a curved glazed atrium roof. No. 59 gained a mansard attic, and a link back to a new four-bay neo-Georgian block at 29 West Tenter Street. As offices for the Royal Society for Public Health since around 2009, No. 59 has been named John Snow House.[^13] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Country Life</em>, vol. 179, 1986, p. 137</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Post Boy</em>, 19–22 Jan 1717: <em>Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer</em>, 4 Feb 1721, p.3: <em>Journals of the House of Commons</em>, vol. 19, 1718–1721, pp. 516–17: <em>Journal of the House of Lords</em>, vol. 21, 1718–1721, pp.480–90: <em>A Particular or Inventory of the Real and Personal Estate of James Edmundson Esq; One of the Late Directors of the South Sea Company</em>, 1721: Four Shillings in the Pound assessments, 1693–4 (4s£): London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Land Tax returns (LT); P93/MRY1/061: The National Archives (TNA), C11/673/21; PROB11/696/357: John Eyton Bickersteth Mayor and Robert Forsyth Scott, <em>Admissions to the College of St John the Evangelist in the University of Cambridge</em>, vol.1, 1893, p.125: P. G. M. Dickson, <em>The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688–1756</em>, 1967 (2016 edn), p.116: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: TNA, SP36/20/173: LT: Rocque's map: W. R. Samuel, R. D. Barnett, & A. S. Diamond, ‘A List of Jewish Persons Endenizened and Naturalised 1609–1799’ in <em>Transactions & Miscellanies (Jewish Historical Society of England)</em>, vol. 22, 1968–9, p. 126</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: TNA, SP100/40; PROB11/726/145: Richard Barnett, ‘Diplomatic Aspects of the Sephardic Influx from Portugal in the Early Eighteenth Century’, in <em>Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England</em>, vol. 25, 1973–5, pp. 210–21: M. Rodrigues-Pereira, C. Loewe (eds), ‘The Burial Register (1733–1918) of the Nuovo (New) Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, London (with some later entries)’, <em>Bevis Marks Records</em>, vol. 6, 1997, p. 14: LT: nationbetweenempires.wordpress.com/vindos-de-portugal/dias-fernandes-lopes-pinheiro/</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, LMA/4673/D/01/004/002: Horwood's maps: Historic England Archives, London Region historians’ file TH10</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LT: Ancestry: TNA, PROB11/659/73: <em>Gentleman’s Magazine</em>, vol. 58/1, Jan 1788, p. 52: J. H. Appleby, ‘Joshua Reynolds’s Portrait of John Barker, Chairman of Ramsgate Harbour’, <em>Metropolitan Museum Journal</em>, vol. 41, 2006, pp. 133–9</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: LMA, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS 11936/418/700788; /426/745769: LT: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 12 April 1815, p.1: TNA, PROB11/2238/295: <em>Law Times and Journal of Property</em>, vol. 33, 16 April 1859, pp. 70–1</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: TNA, PROB11/1991/281: <em>Supplement to the London Gazette</em>, 26 Feb 1870, p. 1148: Royal Botanic Gardens Archive, Directors’ Correspondence, letter from J. Gurdon to Daniel Morris, 23 June 1890: Ordnance Survey maps: Goad insurance maps</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: LT: 4s£: Post Office Directories (POD): TNA, PROB11/675/76; PROB11/1039/80: LMA, LMA/4673/D/01/004/002: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 30 Sept 1887, p.437: <em>Builder</em>, 17 Sept 1887, p. 415</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: L. P. Gartner, ‘Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Traffic in Prostitution, 1885–1914’, <em>Association for Jewish Studies Review</em>, vol. 7/8, 1982–3, pp. 129–78: jewishmuseum.org.uk/2019/12/04/exploring-the-anti-trafficking-movement-in-twentieth-century-london/</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: POD: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 29 May 1914, p. 27; 20 Nov 1914, p. 27; 7 Nov 1924, p. 27</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: <em>Architects' Journal</em>, 13 Sept 1989, p. 10: POD: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: Derek Latham, <em>Creative Re-use of Buildings</em>, vol. 1, 2000 (edn 2015), p. 27: THP</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Few buildings in Whitechapel hold such a strong place in public imagination as does Leman Street Police Station in its late nineteenth-century incarnation, this being principally due to its role in dealing with the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. The Metropolitan Police had a presence on Leman Street from its beginnings and the creation of H Division (initially Stepney, later Whitechapel) in February 1830, when the new organisation took up occupancy of No. 64. H Division relocated in 1849 to two big houses (Nos 74 and 78), with a warehouse formerly a brewhouse at the back on East Tenter Street. A covered passageway between the houses led to a yard that gave access to the former warehouse, which was fitted out with cells. In 1851 there were sixty-four policemen and nineteen prisoners living on the site. The station grew in importance, becoming the headquarters of H Division in 1864. The adapted houses came to seem unfit for purpose, and a report of 1882 concluded that the ‘cells are bad and deficient in number’.[^1] </p>\n\n<p>At a time when a swathe of police stations was being commissioned across London, a new and larger station was planned and authorisation to purchase the freehold of the site of the Garrick Theatre was obtained in December 1886. The Ripper murders followed and the redevelopment was carried out in 1890–1 to designs by John Butler, Surveyor to the Metropolitan Police. The imposing front block was of red brick with chromatically matching Mansfield stone dressings. It contained offices and examination rooms on the lower floors, quarters for married officers above. Adjoining, and directly behind the Garrick Tavern, there was a modest cellblock. Across a yard and parallel to the front block along East Tenter Street was a four-storey range providing living quarters for single constables. This dormitory accommodated sixty men, with a mess room, billiard room, library and sergeant’s room on the ground floor. A flat concrete and asphalt roof allowed for the drying of laundry.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>In 1933, H Division’s area of oversight expanded to cover Limehouse, the Isle of Dogs, Bow Road and Poplar police stations, with Leman Street remaining the divisional headquarters until 1947, when a station at Arbour Square took precedence. Boundaries were redrawn again in 1965 and the ‘Old Lady of Leman Street’ was deemed ‘old fashioned, out-dated and too small’.[^3] The station closed in December 1967 and a new ‘shining jet-age’ headquarters for Tower Hamlets took its place on a site extended southwards to Nos 80–82.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>Built in 1968–9, the new Leman Street Police Station opened on 9 March 1970. It comprised a monolithic six-storey range to Leman Street, faced with Portland stone above a ground floor of dark brick with channelled rustication. Strict and understated, only a projecting canopy intervenes to mark the entrance. To the rear there is more variation in a tripartite elevation the middle section of which rises to seven storeys. At the opening, the ground floor accommodated a public inquiry office, interview rooms, a surgeon’s room, charge room and separate cellblocks for male and female prisoners. Women Police and the Criminal Investigation Department had offices on the first floor, with special constables and traffic wardens assigned the second. Floors three and four were dedicated to divisional operations, including the ‘vice fighting’ department, a conference room, map room and a training centre. The top floor was fitted out for use as a major-incident suite. The basement was a car park. A two-storey block along East Tenter Street housed a ‘five-star’ restaurant. The ‘luxury’ station accommodated 200 officers and civilians with air-conditioning, central heating and other up-to-date technology.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>The station’s architect was Amelia Ethel Catherine Dunand (1913–2007), of the Metropolitan Police’s Architects and Surveyors Department. Dunand, the daughter of an architect, Claude Dunand, trained at the Regent Street Polytechnic in the early 1930s, thereafter working as an assistant to a number of architects including Walter Cave, W. C. Mangan and the German Jewish émigré Modernist Eugen Karl Kaufmann (aka Eugene Charles Kent). She then went into service for the Metropolitan Police, working under G. Mackenzie Trench in the early 1940s.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>In 1994 the Leman Street and Bethnal Green police divisions were amalgamated, with a new combined station planned for Bethnal Green. The Leman Street building stopped functioning as a public-facing police station in November 1995. In 2020 it remains in use for police operations as a base for firearms officers and specialist teams, though it is earmarked for sale pending the construction of new headquarters in Limehouse.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), LC8036, 340.1, commemorative brochure, pp. 37–9, quoting ‘Report to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police’, 1882: Richard Horwood's maps: Post Office Directoriest (POD): London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks (THCS): <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 15 Dec 1967: Census</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: THLHLA, 340.1, commemorative brochure, p.39: <em>Building News</em>, 4 April 1890, p.476: <em>South Wales Daily News</em>, 13 Jan 1890, p.3: Goad insurance maps: The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84830/4798</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: THLHLA, cuttings 340.1–2, <em>East London Express</em>, 5 Dec 1967; <em>Evening News</em>, 9 Jan 1969; commemorative brochure, pp.37–9</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Job</em>, 8 Dec 1967, p.2: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Ordnance Survey maps: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/17/077204: <em>Hackney Gazette</em>, 17 March 1970: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 6 March 1969; 20 March 1970: Bridget Cherry, Charles O’Brien and Nikolaus Pevsner, <em>The Buildings of England, London 5: East</em>, 2005, p.436</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>1939 England and Wales Register</em>: University of Westminster Archives, RSP/4/2/2/40: <em>RIBA Directory</em>, 1985, p.101: <em>RIBA Journal</em>, vol. 114/3, March 2007, p.82: RIBA/British Architectural Library, Amelia Ethel Catherine Dunand, RIBA Nomination Papers, 12 Feb 1944: Ancestry: Charlotte Benton, <em>A Different World: Émigré Architects in Britain 1928–1958</em>, 1995, pp. 173–5</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Metropolitan Police Archives, Leman Street file: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 11 Sept 2017</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Until 1987, when this drab office block was erected on this ‘City Fringe’ site, the west end of the north side of Alie Street retained traces of an early eighteenth-century Nonconformist chapel and its burial ground. Immediately to the chapel’s east was where the short-lived but celebrated Goodman’s Fields Theatre stood. The return to Mansell Street (formerly Somerset Street) had a row of small houses, rebuilt at its south end around 1814 to open up the corner as a crescent, and comprehensively replaced after the widening of Mansell Street in 1910.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The <strong>Great Alie Street Presbyterian Church</strong> appears to have been built in 1746–7, probably to designs by Joel Johnson, who recorded working on an Alie Street chapel at this date. It was established by a congregation founded in 1688 that was moving from Gravel Lane, Houndsditch. Elias Keach’s Particular Baptist congregation has also been associated with this Alie Street site, possibly from its move to Whitechapel in 1698, but it had gone to Angel Alley by 1714. The Presbyterian chapel, a sober brick building, was built during the ministry of the Rev. Joseph Denham (d. 1756), who lived at several addresses on Alie Street’s south side (see below), and under whom the congregation was said to remain ‘respectable both for numbers, and opulence’.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Decades of doctrinal schisms whittled the congregation down, and it is said to have become Unitarian towards the end of the eighteenth century. It was dissolved in 1804, and in 1807 a lease was taken by John Bailey, a Particular or Strict Baptist minister of Greenfield Street, and the building was renamed Zoar Chapel. Editors of the conservative <em>Gospel Standard</em> were leaders of this congregation. A section broke away in the mid-1840s, establishing the short-lived Jireh Chapel in Spitalfields. The chapel on Alie Street is said to have been the model for Charles Dickens’s ‘Little Bethel’ in <em>The Old Curiosity Shop</em>.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Plain inside and out, the chapel was similar in scale and proportions to Johnson's St George’s Lutheran Church, which survives further east on Alie Street. It had a three-bay pedimented front with a central doorway and round-headed windows. Box pews and three galleries addressed a fine hexagonal pulpit with a bold tester attached to the north wall, behind which were the vestry and office. A concrete floor was inserted above extensive vaults in 1901, but the chapel was condemned as unsafe in 1909. Before the congregation moved to Varden Street in 1921, James Kidwell Popham, editor of the <em>Gospel Standard</em>, preached the last sermon on Isaiah 6:5: ‘I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.’[^4] After remodelling to the extent of rebuilding in 1909–10, by Barlow and Roberts, Southwark builders, the property was used as a warehouse by Warden Salip & Co., cork merchants, until demolition in the 1980s. The pulpit appears to have been salvaged, possibly transferred to the Art Institute of Chicago, though it seems not to be there any longer.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>An enclosed burial ground that lay behind the chapel was principally accessible from Somerset Street via St John’s Court (later John’s Court) in its early years. A plate on the chapel’s north wall marked the ground there as within the City’s Portsoken Ward, Whitechapel’s boundary having meandered hereabouts, irregularity that has been said to have Roman origins. Excavation here in 1986 recovered evidence of eighty-five Roman inhumations and seventeen cremations. Richard Horwood’s map of 1813 marked the site as ‘Dutch Church & Burial Ground’, possibly relating to use by the Dutch Church, Austin Friars, which had lost its churchyard. The Alie Street ground had been cleared and unified with an open frontage east of the chapel by 1873 (see below).[^6] The chapel was buffered by a house to its west, presumably once pertaining to the minister, though part came to be used as a whitesmith’s shop. This house was rebuilt in 1854 then demolished in 1910 when Mansell Street was widened. Barlow and Roberts redeveloped the larger corner site as warehousing in 1911–13.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>The <strong>Goodman’s Fields Theatre</strong> adjoined the chapel to the east. It was a conversion of an antecedent building that had been silk-throwing premises, so probably a workshop–warehouse; it evidently had a triple-storey loophole or loading bay, though that might have been a later alteration. In 1729, Thomas Odell (1691–1749), a playwright, set up what was only the fourth theatre in London in this low-slung ‘throwster’s shop’.[^8] Regulation of theatres protected the interests of a few patent holders, unlicensed premises flourished briefly, here and there, and theatrical activity had creatively to avoid directly flouting the law. There was therefore immediate opposition to Odell’s initiative, which forced temporary closures. In 1732 Odell sold the theatre to Henry Giffard, an actor in his company who proved a more competent theatre manager. Peter Prelleur (c.1705–1741), the musician and composer and Spitalfields-born son of a Huguenot immigrant weaver, was involved with the theatre from Odell’s time up to his death.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>Relying on subscriptions, Giffard enlarged the theatre in 1732. Edward Shepherd was his architect and was doubtless responsible, <em>inter alia</em>, for the elaborately rusticated entrance at the east end of the building’s street frontage. William Oram, a carpenter–architect who was also a landscape painter, decorated a ceiling with representations of Apollo and the Muses, and of the heads of Shakespeare, Dryden, Congreve and Betterton. The stage was at the east end of the building, storage and dressing rooms to the north. An inclined pit to the west could hold about 120. Benches curved around the orchestra well, and further west there were boxes of varying sizes arranged radially or in a fan-shape, that is wider at the front than the back, this a first, making room for around 280 more. A gallery probably accommodated another 250.[^10] </p>\n\n<p>The Goodman’s Fields Theatre catered for a growing public appetite for political entertainment. Spoken drama was buttressed with benefit performances for which the charge of an entrance fee or subscription was legal. However, the Licensing Act of 1737 tightened restrictions, increased penalties and limited theatrical performance in London to Westminster. Giffard, who had anyway moved on, was thus unable to sell his Alie Street property. In 1740 he secured permission to re-open it, though unlicensed. On 19 October 1741, Giffard staged a free performance of <em>Richard III</em> following ‘A Concert of Vocal and Instrumental Music’ for which a fee was charged. Shakespeare’s play was the London debut of David Garrick (1717–1779), in the title role. He performed at Goodman’s Fields with huge impact until May 1742, giving the unorthodox establishment a claim to great influence on the history of British theatre. Such was Garrick’s popularity that it was said that people of all classes and parts of London flocked to the unlicensed theatre. There were reports that ‘every night the house was crowded with wives, daughters, apprentices, journeymen and servants, who, to secure good places, stole thither at four o’clock in the afternoon’ and also that ‘coaches and coronets soon surrounded that remote playhouse’.[^11] </p>\n\n<p>The Goodman’s Fields Theatre proved to be a victim of this success, such visibility leading to determined prosecution. Giffard staged a final performance, <em>The Beggar’s Opera</em>, and closed the theatre on 27 May 1742. It is said to have been used sporadically under the oversight of others until the 1750s, after which time the building functioned as a warehouse until gutted by fire in 1802.[^12]</p>\n\n<p>Samuel Johnson’s biographer, Sir John Hawkins, writing nearly half a century later, attributed considerable local impact to the theatre, alleging that ‘adjacent houses became taverns, in name, but in truth they were houses of Lewd resort, and the former occupiers of them, useful manufacturers and industrious artificers, were driven to seek elsewhere for a residence.’[^13] A coffeehouse- and bagnio-keeper next door to the theatre was indeed prosecuted for keeping a disorderly establishment in the 1740s. Another bagnio-keeper, Dorothy Bean, lived at the other end of Great Alie Street in 1791.[^14] </p>\n\n<p>By 1814, F. Bowman and Sons, sugar refiners, were on the site of the theatre in substantial premises, presumably a sugarhouse, somewhat set back from the road. Some rebuilding was forced in 1848–50 following the fall of an 80ft chimney. After a transfer to Kirkpatrick & Balguy, also sugar refiners, a larger site taking in the former burial ground to the north was cleared and redeveloped in 1874 by Browne & Eagle, wool importers. Holland and Hannen put up a six-storey wool warehouse and a two-storey engine house. Brick-built and with timber floors on iron stanchions, this warehouse was one of a number of Browne & Eagle buildings in Whitechapel. To the east, separated by an access passage, Browne & Eagle added a single-storey extension. Much later, the firm became Butler’s & Colonial Wharves Ltd, which sold the Alie Street warehouse to Kennedy Leigh Commercial Properties in 1963 after which the east extension was cleared. Thereafter the surviving six-storey warehouse was known as Swan House and put to a variety of commercial and storage uses. By 1982 it was vacant, awaiting demolition.[^15] </p>\n\n<p>The present corner office block at 1 Alie Street was constructed in 1987 to designs by EPR Architects. Clad in polished red stone and with the upper of seven storeys stepped back, both bland elevations are broken up by round-headed glazed bays as if for atria, though only Alie Street is privileged with an entrance. This building soon became known as Bank of America House on account of its principal tenant, though it is also associated with the Corporation of London and is now in mixed occupation. The Alie Street entrance was reconfigured by Artillery Architecture in 1997, and in 2011 ground-floor offices were converted to accommodate a shop, restaurant, and clinic.[^16]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), LMA/4673/D/01/004/002: Richard Horwood's maps: Robert Wilkinson, <em>London Illustrata</em>, vol. 2, 1825, p. 297</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Walter Wilson, <em>History and Antiquities of the Dissenting Churches</em>, vol. 1, 1808, p. 397: Waltham Forest Archives, Acc.10199: William Thomas Whitley, <em>The Baptists of London, 1612–1928</em>, 1928, p. 123: Dr Williams’s Library, Wilson MSS, ‘The Outlines of An Essay Towards An History of Dissenting Churches In London and Its Environs’, p. 38: The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/821/97</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/SLC/2/16/40: <a href=\"http://www.stgitehistory.org.uk/media/dissenters1.html\">www.stgitehistory.org.uk/media/dissenters1.html</a>: F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), <em>Survey of London</em>: vol.27,<em> Spitalfields and Mile End New Town</em>, 1957, pp. 189–93: <em>The Dickensian</em>, vol. 9, 1913, pp. 233–5; vol. 49, 1952, p. 92</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: J. H. Gosden, <em>Valiant for Truth: Memoir and Letters of J. K. Popham</em>, 1990, p. 163: LMA, District Surveyors' Returns (DSR)</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Post Office Directories (POD): Historic England Archives (HEA), London Region Historians’ file, TH70 file; Survey of London notes: DSR: THLHLA, P10539</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: TNA, RG4/4353/3670: W. H. Black, ‘Observations on the recently discovered Roman Sepulchre at Westminster Abbey’, <em>Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society</em>, vol. 4/1, Jan 1871, pp. 61–9 (p.65): S. S. Frere, M. W. C. Hassall, R. S. O. Tomlin, ‘Roman Britain in 1987’, <em>Britannia,</em> vol. 19, 1988, pp. 415–508 (p.464): Ordnance Survey map (OS), 1873: Isabella (Mrs Basil) Holmes, <em>The London Burial Grounds: Notes on their history from the earliest times to the present day</em>, 1896, p. 166 </p>\n\n<p>[^7]: LMA, LMA/4673/D/01/004/002: DSR: POD: OS: London County Council Minutes, 19 Oct 1909, p. 689</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: John Hawkins, <em>The Life of Samuel Johnson</em>, 1787, p. 73</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Wilkinson, <em>London Illustrata</em>, p. 297: Peter Cunningham, <em>A Handbook for London: past and present</em>, vol. 1, 1849, p. 345: F. T. Wood, ‘Goodman’s Fields Theatre’, <em>The Modern Language Review</em>, vol. 25/4, Oct 1930, pp. 443–56 (p.445): <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) sub</em> Odell and Prelleur: Derek Morris, <em>Whitechapel 1600–1800</em>, 2011, pp.79–81</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 12 Sept 1732: <em>London Merchant</em>, 27 Sept 1732, as quoted in Wood, ‘Goodman’s Fields Theatre’, p. 445: Hawkins, <em>Johnson</em>, p. 75: Wilkinson, <em>London Illustrata</em>, p. 297: <em>ODNB sub </em>Giffard and Oram: A. Nicol, <em>The Garrick Stage: Theatres and audience in the eighteenth century</em>, 1981, pp. 47–51</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: Anon., <em>The Case of the Stage of Ireland</em>, 1758, p. 30: B. Victor, <em>History of the Theatres of London and Dublin</em>, 1761, vol. 1, p.62: Julia Swindells, David Francis Taylor (eds), <em>The Oxford Handbook of the Georgian Theatre, 1737–1832</em>, 2014, p. 102: S. Massai, <em>Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing identity in performance</em>, 2020, pp. 106, 109: Joseph Donohue, ‘The theatre from 1660 to 1800’, in Joseph Donohue <em>et al</em> (eds), <em>The Cambridge History of British Theatre</em>, vol. 2, 2004, pp. 3–52 (p. 16): <em>ODNB sub</em> Garrick: J. Benedetti, <em>David Garrick and the Birth of Modern Theatre</em>, 2001, pp. 58–61: M. Caines, ‘Part 1: David Garrick’ in M. Caines (ed.), <em>Lives of Shakespearian Actors</em>, vol. 1, 2008, pp. xix–xxii</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: Victoria & Albert Museum, drawing S.531-1997: G. McGrath, <em>Cinemas and Theatres of Tower Hamlets</em>, 2010: <em>East London Observer</em>, 4 Sept 1915, p. 7: Cunningham, <em>Handbook</em>, p. 345: Wood, ‘Goodman’s Fields Theatre’, pp. 455–6</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: Hawkins, <em>Johnson</em>, p. 73</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: LMA, Land Tax Returns; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/375/579307: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: DSR: <em>Builder</em>, 10 July 1847, p. 331: LMA, CLC/B/017/MS15627/024; CLC/B/017/MS14944/019; LMA/4673/D/01/004/002; Collage 116958: POD: HEA, London Region Historians’ File, TH70: Southwark Local History Library and Archive, A119/181</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Among the early residents of the houses towards the east end of Prescot Street’s north side was (Sir) Clifford William Phillips (d. 1754), a distiller and a Justice of the Peace for Tower Hamlets. He moved from Leman Street to the house on the site of No. 64 where he lived from 1735 to 1739. Phillips came to prominence for quelling an anti-Irish riot at the south end of Leman Street on 30 July 1736 when, as he reported, ‘I heard the Hollowing at my House, and the Cry in the Street was, down with the Irish, down with the Irish’.[^1] He entered the fray, drew his sword, and, with the assistance of soldiers from the Tower, took control. Two years later Phillips defended Mary Bryan, a local woman convicted of selling gin, for which he was subsequently removed from office as a magistrate. Even so, he moved to a larger house in Mansell Street around 1740 and gained a knighthood in 1743.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>After the formation of St Mark’s Street in 1815, fifteen houses remained along the eastern stretch of Prescot Street’s north side (later Nos 62–76). There were further occasional unifications and rebuildings leading to some four-room plans. The Sailors’ Female Orphan Home was at No. 66, and several schools were here. There was a schoolhouse behind No. 64 in 1814, and academies were at: No. 58, run by John William and Louisa Coxford from the 1840s to 1880s; No. 67, run by Thomas and Elizabeth Chapman then Thomas Gibbons in the 1840s and ’50s; and No. 72, run by Andrew Wartog Wolff in the 1870s.[^3] John Edward Barnett, another eminent and wealthy gunmaker, was at No. 69 around 1817, and No. 70 was inhabited from the 1830s to around 1850 by the Rev. Dr John Gerhard Tiarks, the author of <em>Practical German Grammar and Exercises</em> – he offered German classes from his home. Thereafter No. 70 became the Widows’ Home Asylum, established in 1843 to provide food, clothing and accommodation for elderly Jewish widows, and continuing to around 1880.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>In the late nineteenth century Prescot Street claimed a small ‘synagogue’, likely behind No. 71. Said to have had its origins in a congregation that gathered on Rosemary Lane from 1748, to have been of pleasing appearance and evidently used for worship, it was not a formally consecrated synagogue. It was present before 1871, when it was altered and rededicated. In 1873, Morris Gomperts at No. 61 presented ‘a handsome Ark of mahogany … and a handsome silver gilt pointer inlaid with diamonds’.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>Close to the junction with Leman Street and lacking space to the rear, Nos 73–76 were smaller than most other Prescot Street houses. No. 76 was occupied in the 1840s by P. I. Samuels & Co., lapidaries and opticians to Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex, followed by Simchi Harris & Co., also lapidaries.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>The Co-operative Wholesale Society expanded westwards from its Leman Street base, acquiring Nos 73–76 in 1886 for its Tea Department, built in the 1890s (see p.xx). The rest of the Prescot Street frontage to St Mark Street (Nos 62–72) was taken by the CWS from the 1920s and redeveloped in the 1930s as tea office and coffee works blocks. Following closure of the CWS’s London Tea Department in 1967, the tea offices were sold to and refurbished by Minet Holdings Ltd in 1969–70 as 66 Prescot Street.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>The coffee works adjoining (Nos 63–65) stood empty. The CWS sought consent for office development on a planning-gain basis, but the GLC was opposed because this was not a Preferred Office Location. Resistance to increasing office accommodation in the locality was defeated after an inquiry in 1984. Minet Properties redeveloped the larger site, demolishing both CWS blocks around 1990 when Lister Drew Haines Barrow, architects, lodged plans for a replacement. The resultant seven-storey office block of the early 1990s, formerly known as Minet House, is clad in bands of light and dark pink with green glazing, corner turrets and other postmodern styling in a manner influenced by James Stirling. Its loud disregard for its setting is in marked contrast to Minets’ preceding and adjacent building of the 1970s at 100 Leman Street, which occupies the site of Nos 70–76.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: oldbaileyonline.com/t17361013-5; t17400416-25; t17420224-57; t17470429-30; t17720429-36</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: John Warburton, <em>London and Middlesex Illustrated</em>, 1749, p.115: Jessica Warner and Frank Ivis, ‘Informers and their Social Networks in Eighteenth-Century London: a Comparison of Two Communities’, <em>Social Science History</em>, vol.25/4, winter 2001, pp.563–87 (568–9): Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, <em>London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of a Modern City, 1690–1800</em>, 2015, p.178</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 18 Dec 1778, p.4: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 29 Oct 1881, p.8: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/SLC/1/21/1: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/474/934700: <em>The Examiner</em>, 12 April 1835, p.13: POD: <em>Jewish Chronicle (JC)</em>, 22 Dec 1865, p.1: <a href=\"https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/london-metropolitan-archives/the-collections/Pages/jewish-collections.aspx\">www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/london-metropolitan-archives/the-collections/Pages/jewish-collections.aspx</a></p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>JC</em>, 28 Feb 1873, p.696; 4 Aug 1871, pp.8-9; 15 Sept 1871, p. 8; 3 Aug 1885, p.1; 28 Dec 1900, p.15</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Aris’s Birmingham Gazette</em>, 27 Jan 1840, p.3: Ordnance Survey maps: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Goad insurance maps: THLHLA, photograph by Clara Ely, Jan 1990: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Linda Carole Johnson, ‘Planning Gain in Tower Hamlets’, PhD thesis, Brunel University, 1988, pp.252–4: THLHLA, Building Control files 23306 and 23315–6: THP</p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-04",
"last_edited": "2020-08-04"
},
{
"id": 1031,
"title": "White Swan public house, 21 Alie Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 34,
"type": "Feature",
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"properties": {
"b_number": "21",
"b_name": "The White Swan",
"street": "Alie Street",
"address": "The White Swan, 21 Alie Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
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"body": "<p>The White Swan has operated on this site from at least 1825 when Claus Helmcken (1781–1839) became the licensee. An earlier public house may have been rebuilt around this time, to a greater depth and rising to four full storeys. The pub stayed with the Helmcken family until 1864 and German proprietorship continued into the twentieth century. Dr John Sebastian Helmcken (1824–1920), founding president of the British Columbia Medical Association, grew up here, his parents being the landlords. He described the Alie Street of his childhood in memoirs, deeming it ‘highly respectable’, with ‘a number of houses that at some distant period had been occupied by grand people’.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The White Swan was reconstructed in 1988 when it came to be linked to Central House, the adjacent office building to the east. The front wall was rebuilt in crude but conservative form, rear parts were demolished and a second entrance was formed in the office block into which a ground-floor bar extends.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Dorothy Blakey Smith (ed.), <em>The Reminiscences of Doctor John Sebastian Helmcken</em>, 1975, p. 11: Post Office Directories: Richard Horwood's maps: Ordnance Survey maps (OS): Ancestry: Dictionary of Canadian Biography online, John Sebastian Helmcken: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 4 Aug 1832, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: OS: Goad insurance maps: London Metropolitan Archives, Collage 116948: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2020-05-06",
"last_edited": "2020-05-06"
}
]
}