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"id": 1083,
"title": "109–129 Back Church Lane (on the site of the People's Arcade, later Premierland)",
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"body": "<p>Nos 109–129 Back Church Lane of 1994–6 are the private development sibling of 43–47 and 49–58 Gower’s Walk. The ten houses at 109–127 Back Church Lane are similar to those on Gower’s Walk, but No. 129 is a four-storey block of thirty-two flats that is more assertively postmodern, with four stock-brick staircase towers lit by circular windows framing more polychromatic elevations incorporating second-floor balconies on spindly white columns. The set-back upper storey has gablets to parapets as on the houses. To the rear there is car parking, a garden and a tennis court. The plain brick-fronted three-storey nineteenth-century predecessors of the houses at the south end of this development at Nos 109–117 included the Cherry Tree and, behind, Mundy’s Place.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Nos 119–129 are on a site that had a notable early twentieth-century history of institutional use. Around 1897, when T. M. Fairclough was the freeholder, an array of early nineteenth-century courts – Providence Place, Brunswick Place and Williams’s Rents, and larger properties along Back Church Lane were cleared to make way for five-storey blocks of industrial dwellings with shops in a scheme by Frank Moss of Walthamstow working with John Robert Smith, architect.[^2] That came to nothing and the site remained empty. In 1904 an alternative scheme proposed a <strong>People’s Arcade</strong>, or covered market, designed by Crickmay & Heath, architects. This was withdrawn, but something closely similar was built in 1905–6 for the East London Friendly Trading Society, a body of Jewish traders whose promoters were Mark Patchik, J. Logoff, J. Eichenbaum and M. Fernbach. C. G. North of Stratford was the builder. An irregular rectangle with single-storey stock-brick outer walls had a glazed roof in three light steel-trussed sections. Two stone-dressed entrances on Back Church Lane had some presence, with pediments, channelled pilasters and voussoirs. Within, there was granolithic paving and the perimeter was lined with brick-built stalls and stores for dry trades (including grocers, drapers, tailors, bakers, boot makers), and there were two inner islands of back-to-back units for wet trades (butchers and fishmongers, for whom there were tanks for fish to be sold live), with an office and general storage over one block, giving a total of 145 stalls. A passage westwards to 49 Gower’s Walk (see above) provided for deliveries, WCs and a poultry slaughterhouse, that entryway being topped by caretaker’s accommodation. Much was expected of the People’s Arcade, which attracted support from the Mayor of Stepney, the Rector of St Mary’s and the two local MPs, Stuart Samuel and William Wedgwood Benn. The Trading Society’s promoters proposed a limited company on co-operative lines so that stallholders might become their own landlords. It was suggested that such projects might replace street trading. Of several similar initiatives, the longest lasting was on Cannon Street Road.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>To judge by the advertising of stalls, the market struggled from the outset. In 1909 the Alexandra Hall Ltd took a twenty-one year lease from Fairclough, applying to the LCC in 1910 for permission to adapt the premises to be a vast roller-skating rink, soon reduced in scale by the notional insertion of a 1,000-seat cinema on the south side, all to designs by Henry Smith of Smith and Churchward, architects. Rinking crazes were invariably short-lived, and this scheme was not put into effect. The following year and despite objections a more modest plan was implemented by the insertion of cross walls to form a smaller cinema in the central part of the building that could also be used as a boxing arena; the slaughterhouse was repurposed as dressing rooms.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>The venue was dubbed <strong>Premierland </strong>after a competition in <em>The Sporting Life</em> found that to be the most popular name. Harry Jacobs, a boxing promoter, promised it would be ‘like a miniature Olympia’.[^5] Under Jacobs, Premierland’s first great period as a boxing venue made it (with Wonderland on Whitechapel Road) one of ‘the major nurseries for Jewish boxers … boxing halls that attracted a broad cross-section of fight fans’.[^6] A key attraction was ‘Kid’ Lewis, the Aldgate Sphinx, who won the European featherweight title at Premierland in 1914. Premierland closed in 1917 under wartime restrictions, but reopened in 1923 after alterations overseen by J. Stanley Beard, architect. A second period of boxing acclaim ensued under Mark Littlestone and Victor Berliner. Among their stars was another highly successful Jewish boxer, Jack ‘Kid’ Berg, the Whitechapel Windmill, world light welterweight champion in 1930. Meanwhile there was also sporadic use as a cinema, with screen and orchestra at the west end, as well as for other events including a Jewish trade union and friendly society meeting in 1920, and a concert with Judah Rosenfeld, the ‘wonderful Cantor from Palestine’, and orchestra in 1925. All this came to an end in 1930 when the lease expired, Littlestone and Berliner bankrupt owing arrears of rent. Fairclough reclaimed the property.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>The building fell to mundane storage, the northern and southern rows of stalls from the People’s Arcade having survived. It served as garaging for T. M. Fairclough, which was nationalised in 1950 as British Road Services. The Jewish Board of Shechita added a kosher slaughterhouse to the rear in Fairclough’s yard, to designs by Philip Lebor, architect. </p>\n\n<p>North of Premierland, Nos 149–153 was a block of dwellings in front of a courtyard of warehouses, built by Bryan Corcoran, engineers, in the 1890s, and Nos 157–159 was a brass foundry. Like Premierland, they survived until about 1990 when the site was cleared pending redevelopment.[^8] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives, IR58/94917/2439–48: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyors' Returns (DSR): Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P00513: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/010064; GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/025509: <em>The Builder</em>, 17 Feb 1897, p. 205</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>East London Observer (ELO)</em>, 30 June, 1906, p.8: DSR: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/025509</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>ELO</em>, 12 Dec 1908, p. 8; 2 Jan 1909, p. 8: <em>Jewish Chronicle (JC)</em>, 18 Feb 1910, p. 26: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/025509: DSR</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Sporting Life</em>, 23 Sept 1911, p. 7; 3 Nov 1911, p. 8</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Arne K. Lang, <em>Prizefighting: An American History</em>, 2008, p. 75</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/19/0410: <em>JC</em>, 25 July 1919, p. 31; 5 Nov 1920, p. 21; 13 Feb 1925, p. 38; 26 June 1931, p .26: <em>Daily Herald</em>, 3 Aug 1930, p. 13: Bernard Vere, ‘“BLAST SPORT”?: Vorticism, Sport, and William Roberts's Boxers’, <em>Modernism/modernity</em>, vol. 24/2, April 2017, pp. 349–70</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: DSR: Post Office Directories: THP: Goad insurance plan, 1959: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/025509</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2020-06-05",
"last_edited": "2021-02-10"
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{
"id": 774,
"title": "Old BT or Post Office Garage",
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"id": 153,
"username": "danny"
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"street": "Chamber Street",
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"body": "<p>I'm pretty sure that as a kid in the mid-1960s, going to school at Tower Hill School further along Chamber Street, that this building was a garage used by Post Office Telephones, the forerunners to today's BT. </p>\n\n<p>For a number of years now, it has been a car wash.</p>\n\n<p>Records in the London Metropolitan Archives relating to the Sun Insurance Office show that in 1807, number 14 Chamber Street was occupied by William Hegley who carried out the trade of Gun Maker. Research on Hegley indicates he was a manager at the gun-making business of Daniel Goff, who had been Master of the Gunmakers Company, London. It appears that when Goff died in 1840, Hegley took over the contract for the supply of guns to the East India Company.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-11-13",
"last_edited": "2020-08-04"
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{
"id": 334,
"title": "Hopetown Estate (now part of the Chicksand Estate)",
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>This housing estate, named after the Salvation Army's women's hostel that stood on the south side of Chicksand Street from 1931 to 1980, was built by the Greater London Council to designs by its own architects in 1980–3 and subsequently transferred to Tower Hamlets Council. After clearances were approved, the preparation of architectural designs began in 1970, but the scheme only slowly came to the front of the queue. It comprises 105 dwellings extending from Old Montague Street to Chicksand Street. There and facing Monthorpe Road (most of Hopetown Street being renamed as part of the project) there are mostly houses. Flats are concentrated around Frostic Walk. There is a community centre at 13 Frostic Walk, designed to be a common room for elderly residents, and a row of shops with flats above at 14–28 Brick Lane. Most of this was built by G. E. Wallis & Sons Ltd. Glenlion Construction Ltd followed on with the eight houses at 6–20 Chicksand Street. All is of three storeys and red brick faced. Open space south of 6–20 Chicksand Street was intended as a playground.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/RA/D2G/12/174 and 177; GLC/AR/CON/09/A2225; GLC/AR/CON/09/A2601; GLC/AR/BR/34/004328; LRB/PS/ROP/13/025/814</p>\n",
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"id": 259,
"title": "Loom House in 1950",
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"body": "<p>I walked past the Gowers Walk side of this building as a child at weekends in the 1950s. The brickwork was intact, but a bit dowdy and dirty. At that time it was occupied by and used by Browne & Eagle, who used it for assessing bales of wool, and storing them. It is said that the wool was of high quality, and some was Merino. Strong hearsay has it that a lad who lived in Gower's Walk before my time used to scale the drainpipes on this building, stand on the roof a bit, and then come down. He was described as 'a broth of a boy' by his scoutmaster.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-01-15",
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{
"id": 1082,
"title": "The Loom, 101 Back Church Lane",
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"body": "<p>The Loom is a converted wool warehouse of 1889–90, bounded south and west by the then newly made Hooper Street and a straightened and widened section of Gower’s Walk, outcomes of the construction of the Commercial Road Goods Depot. The site had been the southern part of a late eighteenth-century parochial burial ground, built up after 1800, Harris’s Yard with a mission hall, and a long-lived animal-charcoal works. The warehouse was built for Browne & Eagle, wool merchants, a firm founded around 1840 by George Elliot Browne (1807–1853), who was joined in partnership about 1846 by George Christopher Eagle (1826–1873), from Mile End. After Browne’s death, Eagle married his widow and built up the business from a base in the City, importing wool from Australia, and from 1864 taking and building warehouses in Whitechapel. The firm continued to expand after Eagle’s demise, locally and otherwise, up to and beyond the building of these premises on Back Church Lane, Whitechapel’s only surviving wool warehouse. </p>\n\n<p>Holland and Hannen, generally employed by Browne & Eagle, were the builders of what was originally a five-storey building in five fireproof divisions or ‘risks’, each with its own central loophole bay on both east and west sides. In 1897, Browne & Eagle Ltd built an even larger warehouse on the east side of Back Church Lane, for which Edwin A. B. Crockett (1835–1915), then Surveyor to the Fire Offices Committee, was the architect. He claimed to be following principles adopted in the earlier building, for which he was perhaps also the architect. The two warehouses were connected from the south end of earlier building’s east side by a tunnel and three iron footbridges, removed in the 1960s. The London Hydraulic Power Company’s high-pressure mains powered the wall cranes until 1903 when electricity took over.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Browne & Eagle Ltd had vacated the west-side warehouse by 1952. It was a headquarters for Augustus Barnett, wine merchants, from about 1970 till the late 1980s, after which the building, by then known as Old Loom House, was used as office space by, <em>inter alia</em>, gift retailers and creative enterprises including David Raphael Management, Stuart Batley Photography, the Independent Theatre Council, and Paris Records. The building was acquired around 1987 by the Berkley Group, established by Graham and Brian Meehan in 1977 to convert neglected buildings and then expanding into grander projects. The warehouse was formally converted in 1988–9 with a full storey and an attic added and a central light well inserted for fifty-six office units. A canopied entrance on Back Church Lane declared the building to be New Loom House. Occupants included financial services and technology companies and health charities. The building was acquired by the Yianis Group with a view to conversion to flats but was sold on for £35m in 2013 to Helical, another developer, which elected to refurbish the building as offices, work seen through in 2016–17. Some tenants remained, including an original occupant, the Lloyd’s brokers Corrie Bauckman Batts, but the design-conscious renovation by Duggan Morris, architects, reflected a shift back towards the creative industries, if not to the bohemian character of the 1980s, with fewer units and higher rents. Widened entrances, with distinctive 12m sliding panels in strips of woven steel, like ‘the reed-frame of an historic loom’,[^2] were formed on both main elevations and linked by the Walk, a passage with bespoke mild-steel panel lining and a polished concrete floor. A further sheep-themed artwork adorns one wall of the enlarged light well which has landings railed with similar woven-strip steel balusters. The Back Church Lane reception area opens into a large café, initially a branch of the cyclist-friendly Look Mum No Hands! replaced by Hermanos in 2019.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Financial Times</em>, 26 Feb 1896, p. 8: Post Office Directories: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors' Returns; CLC/B/017/MS15627/024; CLC/B/017/MS14943/012; /015; /019: The National Archives, PROB11/2171/279: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): Ancestry: London County Council Minutes, 28 June 1897, p. 699; 20 July 1897, p. 849: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 21 Oct 1887, p. 1</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Architectural Review (AR)</em>, Dec 2017/Jan 2018, p. 48 </p>\n\n<p>[^3]: THP: <em>Harrow Observer</em>, 14 April 1970, p. 8: <em>The Stage</em>, 12 May 1983, p. 32; 4 April 1985, p. 29; 18 Sept 1986, p. 14: <em>Uxbridge and West Drayton Gazette</em>, 4 Aug 1993, p. 5: <em>Hammersmith and Shepherd’s Bush Gazette</em>, 23 June 1995, p. 65: <em>Business Wire</em>, 7 March 2001: London Stock Exchange Aggregated Regulatory News Service (ARNS), 27 May 2005: TendersInfo, 12 Jan 2011: PR.com, 17 June 2012: <em>Property Week</em>, 26 July 2013: <em>AR</em>, Dec 2017/Jan 2018, pp.44–53: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P33766; P00506–7; P00510–11; P00517–18</p>\n",
"created": "2020-06-05",
"last_edited": "2020-08-04"
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{
"id": 748,
"title": "East One",
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"b_name": "East One Building, 20-22 Commercial Street",
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"body": "<p>Nos 20-24 Commercial Street is a red-brick-faced steel-framed former factory and warehouse building put up in 1927-8 to the designs of Trehearne & Norman architects on the site of St Jude’s church. With vestigial classical details – stone cornice and first-floor window surrounds - it was built as a speculation by Marcus Estates Ltd, who had acquired the site from Crosby Estates Ltd of Bishopsgate, purchasers in 1925 of the site from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.[^1] In 1929 the building was acquired and occupied by Ellis and Goldstein Ltd, manufacturers of coats and costumes, and furriers, with branches in Manchester, Dublin, Glasgow and the City of London, who stayed till 1959 when David Barnes, knitted goods manufacturers, a subsidiary of Courtaulds, moved in, to be replaced by Ematex Ltd in the 1970s and 1980s.[^2] In 2002-03 the building was converted to offices, extended to the rear, and given a fifth floor by the Aitch Group to the designs of Buckley Gray architects.[^3] It has been occupied since as East One, largely by companies involved in a variety of tech industries.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), uncatalogued building control files 12422 and 12443; LC6874; B/ELL/2/8 </p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Post Office Directories: THLHLA, uncatalogued building control file 12422</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-18",
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"id": 1084,
"title": "NatWest Management Services Centre, Goodman’s Fields (demolished)",
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"body": "<p>The National Westminster Bank (NatWest), the UK’s first ‘super bank’, was formed in 1967 from a merger of the National Provincial Bank and the Westminster Bank, both of which had begun computerizing their operations by 1962. In 1970, seventy per cent of the bank’s accounting was computerized and branches had started connecting to central computer systems in the City. By 1974 these were housed in two separate buildings in Coleman Street and St Swithin’s Lane, and the bank had a project in hand to establish a single building to house burgeoning back-office or ‘management’ services, including data processing and cheque clearing.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>To this end NatWest acquired both the obsolete Commercial Road Goods Depot from British Railways and all the redundant or under-used Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) buildings east of Leman Street. This vast Whitechapel site was attractive in that it would provide enough space for large operations while being close to the City, such proximity still being seen as essential. It was also in the ambit of the development area arising from the Gardiner’s Corner transformation. Ninety-five per cent of the bank’s processing was automated, but the rest of up to three million daily transactions were sorted by hand. Another attraction, therefore, was the availability of local labour, especially ‘female and semi-skilled. They will be carrying out repetitive, almost factory-like operations quite different from those required for normal office duties’.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The prime mover in the acquisition of the property was Gerald Leigh (1930–2002), a racehorse breeder and property speculator since the late 1940s.[^3] In 1971 London and County Homes Ltd, of which Leigh was a director, had acquired much of the east side of Gower’s Walk from the CWS and others. Leigh approached the British Railways Property Board with a view to augmenting this holding with the goods warehouse site. However, when a deal was concluded in late 1973, it was Standard Securities Ltd whose offer was accepted, in preference to, among others, Associated Newspapers and National Car Parks. Standard Securities Ltd had been formed in 1971, with Leigh as chairman, as a holding company of a property investment group in which Norwich Union held a twenty per cent stake. By 1973 it claimed not just the Gower’s Walk property but also leasehold possession of the other former CWS buildings east of Leman Street, which, with the British Railways site, made a total of fifteen acres. Negotiations were soon underway with NatWest to lease the central part of the site for a large building for which NatWest secured an Office Development Permit in 1974. A downturn in the property market made it more attractive to sell the freehold to NatWest, which transaction was completed in September 1975. Planning permission had been granted a few days earlier, projecting redevelopment of much of the area between Leman Street and Gower’s Walk.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The bank’s architects, Elsom, Pack & Roberts, had prepared a scheme for a large building, mostly set well back from the site’s frontages to Leman Street, Alie Street, Gower’s Walk and Hooper Street. It was to extend west only to Goodman Street and no further south than the former goods warehouse, leaving the major CWS buildings on Leman Street and the printing works at the south end of Lambeth Street and Goodman Street intact. The southern third of the site was reserved for future expansion. Higgs & Hill were appointed contractors in September 1975 and the site had been cleared by the end of the year. The building was topped out in May 1977, handed over in record time in July 1978 and formally opened on 25 April 1979, by when the name Goodman’s Fields had been revived as an address.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>The whole low-rise concrete-framed complex was encased in bright-red tuck-pointed brick. This was in keeping with the period’s ascendant anti-modernist preference for the supposed softening effect of brick, as exemplified by Darbourne & Darke’s Lillington Gardens through to Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall and Partners’ Hillingdon Civic Centre, respectively completed and begun in 1973. But any reversion to tradition here was particularly skin deep, the boxiness of the buildings reflecting the priorities of commercial architecture and the facility’s function as a cheque-clearing factory.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>The centre was essentially two interconnected establishments. The front or office complex comprised a central six-storey entrance block set back from and facing Alie Street, with its entrance marked by a deep canopy and a sweeping access ramp behind a bastion-like wall. This was flanked east by a forward projecting lower group of four ranges around a light well. Recessed bronzed aluminium windows lit all these front buildings. The entrance block linked south to a big, square-plan and largely windowless operations building, basically a shed full of computers. Four years after it opened, Richard MacCormac vilified the NatWest development for its lack of public space and for the way it ‘inverts the traditional street frontage and perimeter form of the city block into a dense block of building surrounded by a grass verge. The effect is to blast holes in the traditional fabric like a bomb’.[^7]</p>\n\n<p><em>Building Design</em> had found the place correspondingly cheap and dowdy in its internal finishes. Show was limited to a double-height entrance hall, its brown-and-orange chevron-patterned carpet an allusion to the NatWest logo, with escalators rising to a mezzanine gallery. Offices had demountable partitions, so office space could be given over to computers or vice versa. For its time, the centre was highly energy-efficient, with heat generated by the operations building used to heat the offices. Electric vehicles were deployed, with their own charging station in the car park south of the operations building. With a workforce of 3,000 to 4,000, the centre included two restaurants, a basement bar, a nurse’s station, and a staff shop near the main entrance. The centre was soon extended with a six-storey wing to the west of the entrance block. Permission was sought in 1987 for extensive further service buildings to the south, but this was not followed through and in 1993 NatWest secured planning permission to redevelop the entire site with offices, though in the event only minor alterations were made for conversion of part of the operations building to office use. By 2000, when NatWest was taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland, economies of scale and shifts from bulky computers running tapes to digital storage had generated a more concerted effort to redevelop the site.[^8] The centre closed in 2008 and was demolished in 2011–12.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives (TNA), AN169/937: <em>Financial Times</em>, 11 Aug 1969, p. 3: <a href=\"http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/national-westminster-bank-plc-history/\">www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/national-westminster-bank-plc-history/</a>: Ian Martin, ‘Centring the Computer in the Business of Banking: Barclays Bank and Technological Change, 1954–1974’, PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2010, pp. 109, 149, 158–9</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: TNA, AN169/937: Martin, ‘Computer’, pp. 21, 159: <em>The Times</em>, 3 March 1975, p. 11: <em>Building Design (BD)</em>, 4 May 1979, pp. 19–21</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <a href=\"https://www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/leigh-dispersal-small-but-mighty/\">www.thoroughbreddailynews.com/leigh-dispersal-small-but-mighty/</a>: <em>The Times</em>, 13 July 2002, p. 40</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: TNA, AN169/933; AN169/934; AN169/937: <em>Financial Times</em>, 28 March 1969, p. 32; 29 March 1982, p. 25: Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Archives, NWB/2479</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: RBS Archives, NWB/2479: <em>The Times</em>, 5 Dec 1977, p. 18: <em>Estates Gazette</em>, 8 July 1978, p. 105</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>BD</em>, 4 May 1979, pp.19–21: RBS Archives, NWB/2479; NWB/2739; NWB/2479: TNA, AN169/937: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Raphael Samuel, ‘The Return to Brick’, in <em>Theatres of Memory</em>, vol. 1: <em>Past and Present in Contemporary Culture</em>, 1994, pp. 119–35: Gavin Stamp, ‘Suburban Affinities’, <em>Twentieth Century Architecture, </em>No. 10:<em> THE SEVENTIES: Rediscovering a Lost Decade of British Architecture</em>, 2012, pp. 136–51</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>Architects' Journal</em>, 15 June 1983, p. 61</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>I walked around the walls that once bounded what is now Hooper Square many times as an early teenager in the 1950s. Back then the walls around this space were tall, and held up a set of railway sidings at first floor level. The space enclosed at ground floor level was a dark cavern of railway storage, I think, with a small network of tracks and a few railway wagon turntables. I never saw any of these, but I often saw wagons being drawn from the northern side of Hooper street by capstan haulage, across the road from the ground floor of the great Tilbury Warehouse (Commercial Roads Goods Depot) which ran along the side of Gower's Walk. The space occupied by railway trackwork associated with the Tilbury was a bit larger than the space now shown as Hooper Square, and a large overbridge in Hooper Street topped wooden doors that opened at ground level to let trucks be pulled across the road from one dark cavern to another. On top of the bridge was a fan of short railway sidings and tracks that led into the Tilbury itself at first floor level. The capstans (there were a few) were powered by the Pump House at the western end of Hooper Street.</p>\n",
"created": "2016-11-08",
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"title": "Hooper Square",
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"body": "<p>South of Hooper Street late twentieth-century redevelopment was delayed long after the National Westminster Bank had built to the north in the 1970s, probably in part at least because of the costs and technical challenges of removing an extensive array of railway vaults. Tower Hamlets Council had permitted NatWest’s Management Services Centre on the basis that sixty per cent of the larger site would be made available for housing, which imposed a presumed use for the land south of Hooper Street. The Greater London Council was considering its suitability for low-rise housing in 1977 when NatWest appears to have disposed of the property. Development plans did not surface until 1986 when the site’s owners were Countryside Properties Ltd, an Essex-based developer, working here in association with Abbey Housing, part of the Abbey National Building Society. At the end of 1987 permission was given for the erection of a development of 129 flats and maisonettes, studios to three-bedroomed, in blocks of four to six storeys, most arranged in a square around an acre of landscaped communal garden, flanked west by Bowman Mews (named after the sugar refiners on the site) and south by Conant Mews (after the nineteenth-century landowners). The vaults were cleared in 1988 and the estate had been built by 1990. </p>\n\n<p>The architects were Darbourne & Darke. Hooper Square was less ground-breaking than their Lillington Gardens development of 1961–73, but it shares the firm’s emphases on private outside space, variety of outline, intelligent flat planning, and generous landscaping. It resembles more their housing-association estate at Queen’s Road, Richmond, where building began in 1978. Many flats have their own doors to Back Church Lane or Hooper Street, some raised over parking with first-floor terraces. As at Queen’s Road, and as was widespread in the years around 1990, there is a canted corner, to the north-east, which led to the laying out of hexagonal studio flats. The estate is faced in beige stock brick, contextual deference to nearby listed buildings that has not been sustained by newer neighbours. Elevations are simply enlivened with soldier courses and shallow arches of dark-grey engineering brick, and rooflines are broken by small gables. The property market crash of 1989 meant that flats were still being sold, at reduced prices, in 1993. The estate is collectively managed by its leaseholders as the Hooper Square Residents’ Association. Pump House Mews, two two-storey blocks, one of two semi-detached houses, the other of maisonettes, was built to the west of Bowman Mews in 2000 for Hilden Homes to designs by Barker Shorten, architects, effectively completing a subsidiary square the north side of which is the renovated Pump House.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: hoopersquare.com: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control files 22103, 22105, 22123; P03892–9: <em>Built Environment</em>, Aug 1973, pp. 432–3: <em>Financial Times</em>, 18 June 1986, p. 24; 18 June 1987, p. 26; 10 Jan 1990, p. 29; 15 April 1992, p. 15: <em>Daily Mail</em>, 17 Jan 1988, p. 29; 13 Dec 1991, p. 45; 21 May 1993, p. 65: <em>The Times</em>, 12 Feb 1990, p. 22; 20 June 1990, p. 35; 14 July 1990, p. 46: <a href=\"https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1400339\">historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1400339</a>: <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/dec/20/geoffrey-darke\">www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/dec/20/geoffrey-darke</a> </p>\n",
"created": "2020-06-05",
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{
"id": 953,
"title": "Wells Yard",
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"body": "<p>Using a mix of map resources particularly the <em>Map Of London 1868</em>, by Edward Weller[^1] and Charles Booth's maps[^2] it was discovered that the gardens at the rear of this row of buildings occupy what was once Wells Yard to about the end of Gower's Walk. At the time however Gower's Walk didn't continue down to Hooper St (Wells Yard) it in fact doglegged down to Wells Yard which then turned right and is now under what is Hooper Square. The original Hooper's Square was closer to Leman St.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>References</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <a href=\"https://booth.lse.ac.uk/map/17/-0.0668/51.5123/99/1\">https://booth.lse.ac.uk/map/17/-0.0668/51.5123/99/1</a></p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <a href=\"http://london1868.com/weller45b.htm\">http://london1868.com/weller45b.htm</a></p>\n",
"created": "2019-08-31",
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{
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"title": "Goodman's Fields redevelopment, 2002 to 2020",
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"b_name": "Piazza Walk, Goodman's Fields",
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"body": "<p>In 2002 the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) submitted an outline scheme for redevelopment of the whole site bounded by Alie Street, Leman Street, Gower’s Walk and Hooper Street. Prepared by Sheppard Robson, architects, it proposed reconstructing the NatWest Management Services Centre’s operations building as glass-faced offices and demolishing the office blocks to the north. Two quadrangles of flats were proposed, to the north-east on Alie Street and to the south on Hooper Street. At the north-west corner a new garden (Leman Square) would provide access to the recast operations building and be flanked by blocks of shops and offices on Alie Street and Leman Street. The former CWS headquarters at 99 Leman Street was to be refurbished as flats, while only the façade of the adjacent 75 Leman Street was to be retained in front of new buildings arrayed around a space called Goodman Square. The scheme, which would not have risen higher than eight storeys, was gradually fleshed out and a section 106 agreement provided for twenty-five per cent ‘affordable’ housing (rented and shared ownership). </p>\n\n<p>In the event only the southern part of the Sheppard Robson plan was executed. It took shape on the north side of Hooper Street in 2006–7 as City Quarter, comprising Times Square and 120 Gower’s Walk, four separate five- and six-storey blocks (203 flats) enclosing a garden, with Christopher Court, forty-five more flats in a similar L-plan block to the west adjoining the back of the former CWS headquarters (99 Leman Street), now refurbished as Sugar House for forty-two more flats. The north and east blocks (116 flats) were reserved for key workers, ‘affordable’ rent and shared ownership. The design was typical of its time, bar-code style, with windows offset on alternate floors, glazed cantilevered balconies, and ceramic cladding, light-grey with vari-coloured strips to the set-back top floors.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In 2005, in a move away from ‘non-core operations’, RBS had disposed of numerous London properties, including the remaining parts of the Goodman’s Fields site, to Morgan Stanley Real Estate Funds (MSREF). </p>\n\n<p>Here MSREF’s first development partner was Omega Land, a wholly owned subsidiary led by RBS’s former head of development. By 2007 Omega was reducing its stake in Goodman’s Fields and gradually being taken over by Exemplar Properties. London’s planning landscape had changed radically following the loosening of restrictions on tall buildings in the London Plan of 2004, since when permissions had been granted for several tall buildings on sites close to Goodman’s Fields. </p>\n\n<p>Exemplar commissioned Liftschutz Davidson Sandilands (LDS), architects, for a radical revision of the Goodman’s Fields scheme. In 2008 permission was sought for this new project which abandoned renovation of the former NatWest complex, now empty and overgrown by the time of its demolition in 2011–12. Meanwhile, and in the context of the backwash of a financial crash, the Berkeley Group, which already owned the City Quarter development, was raising money in 2009 to finance a move out of volume house-building. By the end of 2010 Berkeley had acquired the Goodman’s Fields site for around £90m from BNP Paribas, administrators for MSREF, retaining LDS who were already Berkeley’s architects for the rebuilding of the Ferrier estate in Kidbrooke.[^2] The LDS scheme retained Sheppard Robson’s motif of quadrangles of flats, but replaced the offices that were to have occupied the operations building with a further residential courtyard and otherwise simplified the overall layout with greater density, both horizontally and vertically, (Ill. – Goodman’s Fields, LDS plan in 2009, to be redrawn). It proposed 722 flats, 650 units of student accommodation, a 351-bed hotel, and retail space. The blocks of flats were to rise six to nine storeys and to be brick-faced, reflecting London’s shifting architectural manners. In addition, six corten-steel clad towers would rise up to twenty-one storeys, inspired, according to the architects, by the towers of San Gimignano. Fanciful though that comparison might be, the scheme did address the urban-design drawbacks of its predecessor, the NatWest Centre, as had been highlighted by Richard MacCormac.[^3] Berkeley acted as main contractor in the implementation of the LDS plans. Phased building work began in 2011. Numerous amendments and two further planning permissions in 2012 and 2014 expanded the project to encompass more than 1,000 flats, an increased proportion with one and two bedrooms, with extra storeys to some towers, and an additional tower on the Gower’s Walk side of the south-east block.</p>\n\n<p>The first phase of 2011–13 was the residential conversion of the former CWS Drapery Showroom as Sterling Mansions (75 Leman Street), the formation to its rear of Four Seasons square, a garden designed by Fabrik landscape architects, and a block of student housing adjoining to the north at 65 Leman Street, where the CWS drapery extension was demolished. This provides ‘premium accommodation’ for students in five- to ten-storey blocks for 390 en-suite study bedrooms and 227 studio flats. Designed in conjunction with Carey Jones Chapman Tolcher, architects, it features dark-brown brick, grey-clad sections and bronze window surrounds. It was bought from Berkeley in 2012 by Student Castle, a student accommodation provider founded in 2010. It was renamed Liberty Plaza in 2015 when it was acquired by CPPIB Liberty Living, and is now known as Drapery Plaza.</p>\n\n<p>This and the blocks that followed respect, indeed push up to, street frontages except on Gower’s Walk where there is an access road and open space called Chaucer Gardens. Changes in architectural taste saw off the corten cladding, which was superseded by a more monochrome grey. The towers sprout thus from the lower blocks, which are clad in yellow or brown brick broken up by copious square glazed bays and ranks of cantilevered glass-railed balconies. The north-west block, completed in 2015, includes the hotel – a Premier Inn with 250 beds, and two high-rise residential towers (Cashmere House and Satin House) that have a swimming pool, gym, business lounge, private cinema and a £5m penthouse. Similar facilities are available to purchasers of market-value flats in the other blocks which were completed in 2017–19. All the flats had been sold by the end of 2019, while minor works continued into 2020.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>‘Affordable’ housing makes up thirty per cent of the Goodman’s Fields development (calculated by number of rooms, not by floor space). It is more integrated than is often the case elsewhere, though there are separations. It includes Ceylon House in the north-west block, a mix of social-rented housing run by Peabody and shared-ownership flats, and, in the south-east block, Pimento House fronting Gower’s Walk, which is all shared-ownership flats. A mosaic created by local residents through Tower Hamlets’ Society Links project was installed in Ceylon House in 2019.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>Much has been made of the development’s landscaping and biodiversity. Each of the blocks has an internal garden at first-floor level over ground-floor retail spaces, most of the lower blocks have sedum roofs, and there is a ‘sky wildlife reserve’ on the north-east block. The London Wildlife Trust has been involved in the planting and provision of bird and bat boxes, and beehives. Publicly accessible space, designed by Murdoch Wickham, includes Piazza Walk, a deep and narrow way in from Leman Street between 65 Leman Street and the north-west block that continues as a footway through to Gower’s Walk. There is also the more enclosed Four Seasons garden and a footway that runs north–south roughly on the former line of Goodman Street. </p>\n\n<p>Naming has reflected shifting ambitions for Goodman’s Fields, the revival of which place name has endured. In the Sheppard Robson scheme many of the blocks and open spaces reprised names with local associations – Goodman’s Square, Sugar House, Alie Court, Christopher Court and Gower’s Court. This approach continued only much more tangentially under Berkeley Homes; Cashmere House and Satin House seem intended to arouse luxurious association while perhaps also loosely evoking the area’s former silk industry. Similarly vague and non-specific echoes of local history can be discerned in the public art and street names – Bridle Mews, Canter Way, Stable Walk are based on the developer’s narrative that horse-grazing and livery stables were predominant features of the area’s past. Other names have a more generic international tone (Piazza Walk, Four Seasons Gardens), and a number of blocks are named after tropical woods and plants – Meranti, Neroli, Cassia, Kingwood, Marua, and Pimento. Here the evocation is anything but local, and seems rather to reflect the developer’s marketing strategy from 2012, heavy promotion of the high-rise flats in Singapore, Hong Kong and the UAE.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>Art has been installed, most prominently, and pursuing the equine theme, on Piazza Walk in the shape of a group of giant bronze horses leaping through water features, by Hamish Mackie and unveiled in June 2015: ‘the vision was to have a group of horses running loose through the central piazza, dynamically splashing water as they traverse the streets of London, having escaped from their livery stables. Avoiding the crowds and pedestrians, they are finally forced to a halt by the traffic on Leman Street.’[^7]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Evening Standard</em>, 9 Jan 2008, p.38: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The Times</em>, 9 Dec 2006, p. 60; 17 Dec 2010, p. 61: <em>Estates Gazette</em>, 10 Dec 2005, p. 32; 22 April 2006, p. 31; 15 Sept 2007: EGi Web News, 31 Jan 2012: <em>Building Design</em>, 30 Nov 2007, p. 3; 20 July 2011, p. 2: <em>Financial Times</em>, 27 Feb 2009, p. 20: THP: google streetview archive: bing streetside, 20 July 2011: <a href=\"https://www.sheppardrobson.com/architecture/view/city-quarter\">www.sheppardrobson.com/architecture/view/city-quarter</a></p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>City AM</em>, 5 Feb 2016, p. 26 </p>\n\n<p>[^4]: EGi Web News, 31 Jan 2012: <em>Estates Gazette</em>, 31 March 2012: THP: Martketwired, 10 Aug 2015: cjctstudios.com/portfolio/goodmans-field/: <a href=\"http://www.fabrikuk.com/posts/article/items/fabriks-new-plaza-at-goodmans-fields-is-now-open/\">www.fabrikuk.com/posts/article/items/fabriks-new-plaza-at-goodmans-fields-is-now-open/</a></p>\n\n<p>[^5]: www.pimentoe1.co.uk/: www.peabody.org.uk/news-views/2019/may/new-mosaics-for-whitechapel</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: THP: <em>Islamic Finance</em>, 2 Oct 2012: <em>South China Morning Post</em>, 28 Nov 2012, p. 5: <em>The Straits Times</em>, 18 Nov 2012 </p>\n\n<p>[^7]: www.murdochwickham.com/projects/regeneration/goodmansfields/</p>\n",
"created": "2020-06-05",
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"id": 254,
"title": "Miss Muff's molly house",
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"body": "<p>In 1728 Black Lion Yard was the site of the house of one Jonathan Muff, which he ran as a Molly house, a resort for gay men and transvestites (a molly being a term for a gay man). It was raided in that year and some of the clientele charged, as sex between men was then a capital offence.[^1] Some sources give the current Black Lion House at 45 Whitechapel Road as the site of Black Lion Yard but it was further east, running from Whitechapel Road, at a point under the site of the Whitechapel Technology Centre, through the site of Magenta House to a point on Old Montague Street at the east end of Hopetown, the Salvation Army hostel. </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: http://eastendwomensmuseum.org/miss-muffs-molly-house-in-whitechapel/</p>\n",
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"title": "78 Chamber Street",
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"body": "<p>The single-storey electricity sub-station of 1953 that is attached to the block at 9 Prescot Street formed part of the Co-operative Wholesale Society's complex. The adjacent south side of 9 Prescot Street was given an entrance and its own address as 78 Chamber Street in 2016–17, for independent access to upper-storey offices.</p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-04",
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"title": "Royal Mint Gardens",
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"body": "<p>The north side of Royal Mint Street was clear in the 1970s save for car parking and the survival next to Mansell Street of a hydraulic accumulator tower of 1894 and 1913 from the Midland Railway Company’s depot. With the formation through this site of the Docklands Light Railway in the 1980s, the British Rail Property Board, as landowner, planned to develop the remaining ground, which widened to the west, employing Watkins Gray International (Ivor Berresford) as architects, working with Ove Arup & Partners, and contemplating air rights over the railways. The Royal Fine Art Commission judged an office scheme, which rose to ten storeys at its west end, unacceptably bulky in 1989. Revised plans from Oxford Real Estates Ltd and the same architects up to 1996 were consistently rejected by the Commission, whose Deputy Secretary, Richard Coleman, noted ‘The site requires the skills of an architect of immense ingenuity and a developer with deep pockets and considerable nerve.’[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Even so, the ten-storey office and retail scheme gained planning permission in 1998. It was amended in 2003–4, but again deferred. From 2008 the project and planning consents were taken forward by Zog Brownfield Ventures Ltd, a joint venture between the Zog Group, a consortium of property companies, and HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) that had been incorporated in 2007, employing GML Architects Ltd. Network Rail Infrastructure Ltd, which had inherited the freehold, granted ZBV (RMS) Ltd an option on a 999-year lease on the 2.7 acre site and air rights. In 2011–12 this was assigned to IJM Land, a major Malaysian construction and property company, which had formed another joint venture, IJM Land Berhad/RMS (England) Ltd. This new developer employed Broadway Malyan to design a new and differently purposed complex. This proposed a twelve-storey block to the west for a 236-room hotel with 33 apart-hotel spaces and 79 flats, and, further east beyond open ground connecting Royal Mint Street and Chamber Street, three fifteen-storey blocks for 266 flats above shops and offices, all cantilevered over the railways as far as Chamber Street, where use would be made of the London and Blackwall Railway viaduct’s arches. This huge project, which can only be described as bulky, was deemed acceptable. Farrells (London) LLP were engaged as architects, working with AKT II as structural engineers, and Chris Blandford Associates as landscape designer. Reworked plans for what was named Royal Mint Gardens were advanced and agreed in 2014–15. The eastern section was taken forward first, revised as 254 mixed-tenure flats in fourteen-storey blocks, incorporating ground-floor shops and first- and second-floor offices, with central gardens at third- and fifth-floor levels, and is being built in 2018–19 by the JRL Group’s Midgard Ltd. The western hotel block is set to follow.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4625/C/02/036</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>New London Architecture – Project Showcase, New Ideas for Housing</em>, 2015, p. 86: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>A small synagogue, possibly a successor to the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/358/detail/#the-green-man-and-the-sons-of-lodz-chevra-40-newcastle-street\">Newcastle Street synagogue</a> was located in Davis Mansions, New Goulston Street, from the 1890s to the 1930s. Converted from a shop in 1895-6 by the building’s landlord, Abraham Davis, it housed the Sons of Lodz, or Lodzer Synagogue, from then until it merged with the Lubner synagogue c. 1934, the merged synagogue merging in turn with the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/837/detail/#fieldgate-street-great-synagogue\">Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue</a> after 1947.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em>, 8 Oct 1897, p. 27; 8 Sept 1899, p. 23: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's Returns: <a href=\"https://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/EE_lublin-lodz/index.htm\">https://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/EE_lublin-lodz/index.htm</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-16",
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{
"id": 36,
"title": "65-68 Whitechapel High Street",
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"body": "<p>The short uniform terrace at Nos 65–68 dates from 1853, when it was put up by James Brake, a Clerkenwell builder. Henry Crockford, a fishmonger at No. 65, and James Hunn, a greengrocer at No. 68, retained tenancies from before the rebuild. The early buildings the group replaced included a timber gable-fronted pair at Nos 67–68. Nos 65–68 were substantially refurbished and given new shopfronts in 2010–12 to plans by Julian Harrap Architects (Robert Sandford, job architect), with PAYE as contractors. The front walls of Nos 67-68 and all the stucco architraves and the cornice were renewed. The gambrel roofs are as original. This was the first part of the High Street 2012 project, ninety per cent funded from Tower Hamlets Council with English Heritage through a Heritage Lottery Fund Townscape Heritage grant. The project had been conceived when it was anticipated that the 2012 Olympics Marathon would pass by. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: District Surveyors Returns : Tower Hamlets Planning: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 22 May 2014 - http://www.eastlondonadvertiser.co.uk/news/heritage/harrup_architects_get_riba_award_for_restoring_high_st_2012_back_to_1900_1_3612037: information kindly supplied by Robert Sandford</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"title": "Goodman’s Fields Tenter Ground and its first development",
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"body": "<p>The tenter ground on Goodman’s Fields was a large open quadrangle, unevenly sided but roughly 200 yards squared or eight acres. It was used for stretching and drying newly made cloth on frames called tenters from at least the beginning of the seventeenth century. Access was from Goodman’s Stile at the north-east corner and there were warehouses and workshops, presumably connected to this use, along the north side of what later became Alie Street. The laying out of this and other streets on Sir William Leman’s estate from about 1678 presaged the building of rows of houses backing on to the tenter ground, now reduced to about 150 yards squared or somewhat less than five acres. Walled private gardens behind the houses, many of which were large enough to be called mansions, opened onto a perimeter carriageway around which trees were planted. A passageway at the west end of Prescot Street was the only public entrance to the tenter ground from the 1680s till about 1815. The preservation of this sizeable open space cannot have been determined purely by considerations of amenity. The houses of the 1680s and later backed on to rather than faced the ground – this was not a garden square. Sir William Leman intended that the space should be called Leman’s Quadrangle, not Square, though this never took. Continuing commercial use of the tenter ground must have been a decisive factor in the unusual, even unique, layout of the Leman estate. Many members of the Clothworkers’ Company lived in close proximity to Goodman’s Fields from the 1650s to the 1720s, and John Rocque’s map of the 1740s shows eleven tenter lines. In 1743, a newspaper reported that ‘rogues’ attempted to steal cloths hung high up on the tenter ground’s drying poles by throwing weighted cords to pull the poles down. They were caught because one of the poles fell onto the roof of a house alerting its occupants to the scheme.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The open ground was still being used for tenters in 1756 when it was let to a Mr Richardson, likely Richard Richardson (1718–1765), a Clothworker who lived in a house on the site of 22 Alie Street. The Leman estate was partitioned at this date, and the tenter ground was divided, ownership of its north part going to Elizabeth and John Newnham, of the south part to John Granger Leman. Demand for continuing cloth-working use was perhaps declining as it was proposed as part of this agreement that when Richardson left the occupiers of the surrounding houses might collectively pay for the space to be enclosed as an open pleasure ground, even suggesting a 32ft-wide perimeter carriageway with rounded corners. This, however, did not come to pass. </p>\n\n<p>In 1775 Edward Hawkins (1723–1780), the locally eminent carpenter–builder based on Leman Street, took thirty-one-year leases of both halves of the Tenter Ground, now a place name not a description, with covenants to prevent development. Hawkins bought half the Newnham moiety of the Leman estate copyhold in 1779 (which included the north half of the Tenter Ground), and Samuel Hawkins (1727–1805), Edward’s brother and heir, bought the other half of the Newnham moiety in 1787, all with covenants against development perpetuated. Samuel Hawkins had, however, enclosed the ground in 1786 by erecting a 6ft-high open palisade around the carriageway. Inside it a garden was densely planted on much of the eastern side, and there were grassy meadows for the grazing of horses and cows to the west and south-east. By way of buildings there was only a wooden cowshed, then a low brick shed, later converted into a house.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>By 1803 the fence had been destroyed, and the ground had fallen to use as a dump. The destruction was later dated to 1799, when 50,000 volunteer soldiers gathered to be inspected by George III, ‘the garden of the tenter-ground became the field of Mars, and the spring and summer flowers yielded to the flowers of chivalry’. The inspection turned into farce as the volunteers and the king failed to meet, the former gathering on Alie Street while the king waited on Prescot Street, and then both circling the field to find each other until the king departed in frustration, ‘a prettier game of hide and seek never was played’.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Through the first half of the nineteenth century, the Tenter Ground was used for a variety of gatherings, including of the Whitechapel Volunteers, 500 strong drilling here in 1807, of H division of the Metropolitan Police, based on Leman Street from 1830, and of East India Company recruits. The ground became established as a site for public speaking. In 1832 the Rev. Edward Irving, the radical preacher and founder in that year of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, riled the local Jewish population by ‘haranguing’ in the Tenter Ground on Saturdays, against the personal counsel of members of the Rothschild family, provoking crowds to await him, rotten eggs in hand. Thomas Perronet Thompson MP, an advocate of ‘sensible Chartism’, addressed crowds in 1841, and there were also civic processions, fairs, and duels. By this date any sense of even an inverted garden square had been lost, with many of the private gardens built over for workshops, some for noisy or noxious industries, including chemical, gun, and pencil factories. The loss of peace and pleasantness would have vitiated reservations about development of the ground.[^4]</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p><em>Development</em></p>\n\n<p>In 1806 Edward Hawkins (1749–1816), a banker in Neath, Glamorganshire, inherited the northern part of the ‘Tenter Field’ property that had pertained to his cousin, the younger Samuel Hawkins. The Hawkins lease of the southern section having expired, that land had reverted to William Strode (1738–1809), the successor of John Granger Leman. Hawkins and his son, also Edward Hawkins (1780–1867), began to negotiate a plan with Strode for the development of the Tenter Ground. After Strode’s death, and the complex and contested division of his estate, copyhold of the southern section of ground passed to the Scarborough family. </p>\n\n<p>Development intentions were facilitated in 1814–15 by the demolition, following auction, of two vacant Prescot Street houses (between what became Nos 60 and 61), to create a gap for an access road into the ground. The southern part of the ground was put up for auction in six lots, but it appears not to have sold. The Hawkins responded to these manoeuvres by demolishing three houses on Alie Street (between Nos 26 and 30) for a northern access road that was initially called Alie Place. Flanking houses were built in the 1820s, but the younger Hawkins failed to negotiate a way round the prohibitive covenants that prevented building further south. When the Scarborough interest then over-rode those to advance its own development plans, Hawkins went to law in 1833 to stymy his rivals, but the case was dismissed.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>After the failure of the lawsuit in 1833, development with modest terrace houses on a grid layout on the southern or Scarborough section of the ground began fairly immediately. A church was a standard anchor for a housing development and St Mark’s Church was built in 1838 on Hawkins’s northern ground, on the east side of what was initially called St Mark’s Street. By 1841 there were around twenty houses with around 100 inhabitants on the north side of Tenter Street (now South Tenter Street). The west side of the southern stretch of St Mark Street was also built up around this time. The perimeter carriageway had fallen into disrepair to the extent that stagnant pools of foul water posed a health risk and were said in 1843 to be ‘an eye sore to many respectable families who inhabited the new houses built on a portion of the old tenter ground’.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>By the time plans for proper drainage were made in 1849, the Tenter Ground was almost fully developed, with the Jews’ Orphan Asylum of 1846 standing immediately north of the church, Scarborough Street and Newnham Street laid out running east–west across St Mark’s Street, and the former carriageway reformed as Tenter Street times four, differentiated by compass direction. Loney & Dunkinson of Philpot Street had begun to build forty to fifty houses in 1845, but did not see that through. The main builder–developers were William Hawksworth of Mansell Street, who put up twenty-nine houses on Scarborough Street and the Tenter Streets in 1847–50, and Charles Johnson, of Rotherhithe, responsible for nine with John Hall in 1846–7 and twenty-four independently on Scarborough Street and the Tenter Streets, mostly to the east, in 1849–51. Newnham Street and remaining St Mark’s Street and Tenter Street frontages for around forty houses were handled by William Antcliffe from Blackfriars in 1849–52. By this time there were altogether around 130 houses on the former Tenter Ground. Most of these were standard two-storey brick artisans’ dwellings, many but not all with rear outshuts, none with yards of any size except behind a few three-storey houses to St Mark’s Street. The piecemeal nature of the development under two estates gave rise to some confusion as to street names and addresses, the 1861 census noting that the numbering was very irregular.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>At first, settlement in the Tenter Ground’s houses was mixed. Residents varied in ethnicity and occupation, with some merchants occupying the better buildings along St Mark Street. By the end of the nineteenth century, the area was overwhelmingly east-European Jewish, the main employment being tailoring. This remained the case up to the Second World War. Yoel Sheridan, a resident, has written about the place on Friday afternoons in the 1930s:</p>\n\n<p>‘Newnham Street was busy preparing for Shabbas. [My mother] was not alone in whitening the square area outside the front door. All the pavements had been washed and the white squares outside each household looked like a bouquet waiting to be presented to the Shabbas bride. People were hurrying home in their work clothes. Food had to be prepared before Shabbas as no active cooking could be done on that day. ... The most popular and traditional recipe was cholent. ... The larger pots belonging to the larger families were too big to go into the family ovens and so an arrangement was made with the local Jewish baker for the cholent to be cooked overnight in his oven. ... On Friday afternoons {my elder brother and I} would take the family cholent in its two-handled brown enamel pot to the bakers located in St Mark’s Street next to the Scarborough Arms Pub on the corner of Scarborough Street.’[^8] </p>\n\n<p>Wartime bombs wreaked havoc on the Tenter Ground. By the 1960s less than half the nineteenth-century houses (around fifty-five) had been salvaged and made habitable and LCC prefabricated mobile homes were up on part of the cleared ground. Many pre-war residents failed to return to this Jewish enclave, while Geoffrey Fletcher thought the mix of survivals and prefabs lent ‘a pleasingly mournful 1947 quality to the composition’.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Ogilby and Morgan's map of London, 1676: The National Archives (TNA), C10/544/6: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), LMA Q/HAL/298: <a href=\"https://www.londonroll.org/\">www.londonroll.org</a>: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), cuttings 221.2, unidentified newspaper, 1743</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: TNA, PROB11/908/360: <em>The Law Journal for the Year 1833</em>, vol.11/ns vol.2, 1833, pp.126–8: Richard Horwood's maps of London, 1792–9 and 1813</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Economist and General Adviser</em>, 11 Dec 1824, pp.471–2:<em> Jewish Chronicle</em>, 10 April 1874, p.22</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Times</em>, 7 Jan 1804, p.3: <em>Sun (London)</em>, 15 Jan 1830, p.2; 23 June 1830, p.3: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 4 Nov 1830, p.2; 6 Dec 1843, p.4: <em>Evening Mail</em>, 4 June 1832, p.4: <em>Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle</em>, 10 June 1832, p.2: <em>Bell’s New Weekly Messenger</em>, 5 July 1835, p.13; 28 Feb 1841, p.5: <em>Evening Chronicle</em>, 18 June 1841, p.2: <em>Express (London)</em>, 13 Sept 1847, p.3</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: THLHLA, P/SLC/1/21/1: British Library, Crace Port. 16/9: LMA, LMA/4673/D/01/004/002; Collage 35141; Land Tax Returns: <em>The Law Journal for the Year 1833</em>, vol.11/ns vol.2, 1833, pp.126–8: TNA, PROB11/1436/196: Horwood, 1819: Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, DE/X22/28997: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 9 Oct 1830, p.4: <em>Star (London)</em>, 11 Oct 1830, p.4</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 6 Dec 1843, p.4; 3 Dec 1840, p.4: <em>Perry’s Bankrupt Gazette</em>, 5 April 1834, p.7; LMA, SC/PM/ST/01/002, William Grellier’s map of Whitechapel, <em>c.</em>1840–5: Census</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 19 Jan 1849, p.4: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 17 March 1849, p.4: Census: LMA, District Surveyors Returns: Collage 119332</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Yoel Sheridan, <em>From Here to Obscurity</em>, 2001, p.59</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Geoffrey Fletcher, <em>Geoffrey Fletcher’s London</em>, 1968: Ordnance Survey maps: THLHLA, L/SMB/D/4/14; L7832</p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-04",
"last_edited": "2021-05-04"
},
{
"id": 329,
"title": "26–28 Osborn Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"properties": {
"b_number": "28",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Osborn Street",
"address": "28 Osborn Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
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"search_str": "28 Osborn Street"
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"body": "<p>George and Henry Fulcher had a distillery on the site of Nos 26–28 from the 1840s. After war damage No. 26 was rebuilt with a red-brick front in 1949–50.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, P93/MRY1/090; MR/S/BS/008: Post Office Directories: Ordnance Survey maps: District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 14722: Tower Hamlets planning applications</p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-30",
"last_edited": "2020-08-26"
},
{
"id": 345,
"title": "Size Yard",
"author": {
"id": 69,
"username": "bryan_mawer"
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"properties": {
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"b_name": "Black Lion House",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "Black Lion House, 45 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>The footprint of the present building covers ten or so houses, shown on Horwood's map of 1813 to have been fronting Whitechapel Road. Cutting this terrace, directly opposite Union St (now Adler St), was a covered entry into Size Yard. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>The Land Tax records for Size Yard 1798-1830 indicate eight dwellings, let by two landlords, along with the business premises and yard belonging to the Little family, variously carpenters, builders, back makers and undertakers.</p>\n\n<p>In 1808 part of Little's premises was taken over by Messrs Osborn & Sumner sugar refiners, who were there until 1811. The sugarhouse stood empty for the following two years, was used by John Smith for the next two, then by Messrs Bullwinkle & Howard through to 1818. It was Nicholas Bullwinkle & Co in 1820, and by 1822 Henry Trollop was the refiner.</p>\n\n<p>In 1827 the premises were, once again, shown as being empty, and by the following year the whole of the premises were back in the hands of the Little family, who retained them through to at least 1852. [^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The A-Z of Regency London, The London Topographical Soc & Harry Margary, 1985. ISBN 0 902087 19 3.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Land Tax Records, London Metropolitan Archives.</p>\n",
"created": "2017-04-04",
"last_edited": "2020-09-10"
},
{
"id": 652,
"title": "The first corps",
"author": {
"id": 230,
"username": "Clare_F"
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"properties": {
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"b_name": "",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
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"search_str": "20-22 Whitechapel Road"
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"tags": [
"Buck & Hickman",
"Salvation Army",
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"body": "<p>I wrote a feature in <em>The Salvationist</em> magazine on 20/22 Whitechapel Road (28 Feb 2015), called 'The First Corps', as it was the Army’s first official Corps, then a large Men’s Shelter, till blitzed in the Second World War. In its place a smart new office building is rising – where once beds were fourpence! I hope the new owners put a deserving plaque there. It also appears in Margaret Harkness’s <em>Captain Lobe </em>(1889), and in <em>A City Girl</em> (1887), recently republished. </p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-16",
"last_edited": "2020-09-22"
}
]
}