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"body": "<p>A distinctive feature of Whitechapel High Street for sixty years was a stone obelisk. Purchased by ‘the people of Whitechapel’, that is the parish, in 1853, it had been on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, and is probably identifiable as the ‘granite obelisk and base, 20ft high, weighing about 15 tons, of Cornish granite’, exhibited in the external enclosure at the west end of the building by R. Hosken of Penryn.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>It was erected in the middle of the High Street opposite the end of Commercial Street, surrounded by eight stone bollards, ‘for the protection of foot passengers’, and generally to provide a ‘rest’ for pedestrians in the middle of the wide crossroads. It was disparaged in <em>The Builder</em> – ‘rather an attenuated pyramid than an obelisk: it wants the true <em>needle </em>character.’[^2] It also served as a glorified lamp standard, with lights affixed on each side. It had to be moved in 1883 as it was in the way of works for the District Railway line. It was re-erected, its lamps replaced by flanking lamp-posts (also later removed), in a more convenient position between tramlines further east in the High Street, at its widest point south of No. 83. The obelisk met an ignominious end in 1913 when it was knocked down by a lorry.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations</em>, 1851, p. 8: Royal Collection, RCIN2800050, photograph by Claude-Marie Ferrier, 1851</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The Builder</em>, 19 Feb and 9 April 1853, pp. 116, 226: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 5 Feb 1853, p. 6: <em>East London Observer (ELO)</em>, 28 June 1913, p. 6</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/SMW/A/1/1: <em>ELO</em>, 28 June 1913, p. 6: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P33919 </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Plans to enlarge Edith Cavell Home were produced in 1939 by N. H. Oatley, who proposed clearing the adjacent terraced houses for a six-storey extension. The scheme was revived with a renewed specification after the war, with Bennett & Son appointed as architects. They departed from the familiar and established configuration of nurses’ dormitories interspersed with bedsitting rooms for sisters. Knutsford House, a six-storey concrete-framed and brick-faced block, opened in May 1957 to provide forty-one self-contained flats reserved exclusively for sisters. Each flat contained a bedroom, a living room, a kitchenette and a bathroom. A basement contained a box room, storage lockers and laundry facilities, along with service rooms. Plans were swiftly in hand for an addition extending north to the corner of Raven Row, securing an additional six flats on the principal floors. The block was named in memory of Sydney Holland, the hospital’s chairman. </p>\n\n<p>[^118]: RLHA, RLHLH/X/83/21; RLHTH/S/10/19; RLHLH/P/1/12: ODNB: <em>Nursing Times</em>, 19 July 1957, p. 807.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>The nurses’ garden occupied a large plot to the south of the hospital, bounded by Stepney Way to the north, Newark Street to the south, and the laundry to the east. It had originally been laid out in connection with almshouses built for John Baker’s Charity by the Brewers’ Company, which agreed to preserve ground directly behind the hospital as a shrubbery. The medical officers had resisted building development immediately behind the hospital, prizing fresh air and good ventilation. This principle was firmly established by 1814, when an accounts committee recommended leasing the vacant, ‘unproductive’ land behind the hospital for any purpose that would not contaminate the quality of the air.[^119] The conveyance of the piece of ground to the Brewers’ Company converted it to a suitable purpose, and it was enclosed for a garden overlooked by the almshouses. By 1881 it had fallen into neglect and was transferred to a local committee headed by the businessman Stanley Kemp-Welch and the Rev. Sidney Vatcher of St Philip’s Church. It was redesigned and replanted in 1882 as a public garden, with a pond, a fountain and an aviary. Entrance gates were donated by the St Pancras Ironwork Company and a garden house was donated by Lord and Lady Brabazon. The garden was inherited by the hospital’s nurses in 1898, shortly after the almshouses were acquired to provide a site for a laundry. Nurses were required to collect a key from the hospital, which fitted the garden gate and the doors of St Philip’s Church. After the construction of an indoor swimming bath in 1936–7, the garden was redesigned with symmetrical footpaths dividing flat lawns and neat corner pavilions at its west end. The garden survived until 1963, when it was cleared for a pathology block.[^120]</p>\n\n<p>[^119]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/15, pp. 318–21. </p>\n\n<p>[^120]: RLHA, RLHLH/S/1/3: <em>The Graphic</em>, 19 July 1884: <em>Globe</em>, 3 July 1882: S. Williams, ‘Eden, as we know it, is a fertile and happy region situated in the heart of Whitechapel’: The nurses’ ‘Garden of Eden’ at the London Hospital’, <em>London Gardener</em>, Vol. 18 (2013–14), pp. 99–118.</p>\n",
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"title": "Nurses’ swimming bath (1936–7)",
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"body": "<p>A swimming bath was built in 1936–7 on the east side of the nurses’ garden, financed by a donation from E. W. Meyerstein, a retired stockbroker who endowed numerous hospitals. A handful of sites on the hospital’s estate were considered for a nurses’ swimming bath, but it was determined that the garden possessed ‘the merit of simplicity’.[^121] The chosen position adjacent to the laundry preserved the majority of the garden, and avoided the costly implication of uprooting tenants. The house governor, A. G. Elliott, and surveyor, J. G. Oatley, undertook to engage an architectural firm with specialist experience of swimming baths. Visits were arranged to comparable baths, including those at St Mary’s Hospital, the Middlesex Hospital, and Bourne & Hollingsworth’s staff hostel in Gower Street. Alfred W. S. Cross and Kenneth M. B. Cross were identified as the leading architects in the field. This father-son partnership boasted longstanding experience of swimming baths, including the municipal baths in Haggerston and the nurses’ baths at the Middlesex Hospital. </p>\n\n<p>Cross & Cross designed a low-lying brick-built structure with a sequence of flat roofs serving as garden terraces. The west elevation overlooking the nurses’ garden had a jaunty appearance, exaggerated by a series of porthole windows. A central staircase ascended to a first-floor terrace, adorned with a Portland stone plaque commemorating Meyerstein’s generosity. A porch at the north end of the building served as the nurses’ entrance to the swimming bath, opening into a passage leading to a top-lit changing area. The ground floor was dominated by the rectangular top-lit swimming pool, skirted on its west side by a viewing gallery with tiered seating for seventy spectators. A reinforced-concrete basement contained a filtration plant room. Construction by William Moss & Sons of Cricklewood commenced in July 1936, and the swimming pool was opened in the following spring.[^122]</p>\n\n<p>[^121]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/24/29. </p>\n\n<p>[^122]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/24/29; RLHLH/P/2/15; RLHTH/S/10/35: Alfred W. S. Cross, <em>Public Baths and Wash-Houses: a treatise on their planning, design, arrangement and fitting</em>(London: Batsford, 1906).</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Stephen Williams, a little-known, but significant member of the Strict Baptist church at Little Prescott Street (what is now the furthest south extension of Mansell Street), was influential in the appointment of Samuel Burford [c. 1726-1768] as minister of the church in the mid-eighteenth century. In the end, this appointment also resulted in the establishment of a new Strict Baptist church at Little Alie Street.</p>\n\n<p>After the death of the previous minister, the minute books of the church show that James Fall had been proposed to take the deceased minister’s place, but in an election held in 1753, votes against his appointment narrowly outnumbered those in favour by four. The minutes show that Stephen Williams voted against Mr Fall’s appointment and it is quite possible that Williams had Samuel Burford in mind for the post, Williams’ sister Hannah having married into the Burford family. However, despite doubts shown by some members of the congregation, the minutes state that on 27th April 1755, 'The Church unanimously chose him [Burford] and thought proper to give him a call'. The passing over of James Fall led to the setting up of his own church at Little Alie Street.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>There were six licensed victuallers operating in and around Plough Street in the 1730s, but only two pubs survived into the nineteenth century. What had become the Half Moon and Punchbowl was on the south-east corner of Buckle Street and Plough Square. By the early 1880s it was a boarding house, like other neighbouring buildings, with many beds occupied by Germans. The Man in the Moon, on the south-west corner of Plough Street and Colchester Street, had fallen into disrepute on account of juvenile gambling. Around fifty youths were found inside betting on skittle grounds in 1845, and in 1850 young thieves were found ‘stooping over a strong fire’ in the basement.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>By this time, the area’s residents were overwhelmingly Irish and German labourers. Densely inhabited streets were reportedly vexed by criminality, ranging from petty thefts, as when two orphaned Irish boys plundered lead and timber from unoccupied houses in Plough Street, to haunting tales of abuse and violence at the hands of tradesmen and drinkers. A ragged school was founded on Braham Street in the early 1850s, formally partnering with the Shoe-Black Society in 1854.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>[1]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 24 July 1850, p.4; 12 June 1840, p.4; 6 Oct 1860, p.7: London Metropolitan Archives, MR/LV/05/026: Ordnance Survey maps: Post Office Directories: Census: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 12 Sept 1845, p.8; 31 Oct 1849, p.4: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 1 June 1852, p.8: <em>East London Observer</em>, 4 May 1878, p.1</p>\n\n<p>[2]: <em>Ragged School Union Magazine</em>, vol.6, 1854, p.224: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 31 May 1858, p.7: Census</p>\n",
"created": "2020-07-31",
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{
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"body": "<p>Louis London & Sons’ clothing factory replaced four houses on Alie Street immediately east of the German school in 1913. Founded in 1859, this firm moved from Houndsditch and Middlesex Street (Petticoat Lane) to a large, amply fenestrated, symmetrically fronted, seven-bay, four-storey building. Hobden and Porri of Finsbury Square were the architects, Sheffield Bros of Shacklewell the builders. The premises were modestly enlarged at the back in 1915 and then significantly extended eastwards in 1924–6 across the former Baptist chapel and synagogue site, again throughHobden and Porri, with Albert Monk of Lower Edmonton as the builder. Further snaking extension up to Goodman’s Stile was carried out in 1939, Henry Kent of Lewisham being the builders. The Louis London label had fashionable allure, a showroom opened in Henrietta Place in Marylebone in 1946 and factories were established outside London. Queen Elizabeth II visited Alie Street to mark the firm’s centenary in 1959. Other rag-trade businesses succeeded and the factory survived until about 2009, proposals for its conversion to flats from 1996 to 2002 coming to nothing.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Daily Telegraph & Courier (London)</em>, 20 March 1900, p.13: <em>East London Observer</em>, 2 March 1912, p.8; 17 June 1916, p.4: <em>Sunday Mirror</em>, 31 Jan 1926, p.13: <em>Western Daily Press</em>, 19 March 1928, p.2; 22 July 1930, p.2: <em>Yorkshire Evening Post</em>, 21 Oct 1935, p.3: <em>Manchester Evening News</em>, 24 Dec 1940, p.5: <em>The Tatler</em>, 13 Nov 1946, p.33: LMA, District Surveyors Returns; Collage 1116971: Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, 1387/706: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: www.aliestreet.com/uk/occasionwear/info/history.html </p>\n",
"created": "2020-07-31",
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{
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"body": "<p>Whitechapel’s largely sugar-trade dependent German population had a presence at Hooper Square for most of the nineteenth century through St Paul’s Reformed Church. This accommodated London’s third oldest German Protestant congregation, founded in 1697 as the German Evangelical Reformed Church by Calvinist refugees from the Palatinate. The church began at the Savoy Palace and moved to Duchy Lane, close by, in 1771. That site had to be abandoned to make way for Waterloo Bridge. The church council favoured a move to Whitechapel to be amid the area’s growing <em>Deutsche Kolonie</em> and a church was built on the east side of Hooper Square in 1818–19. It was a typical Nonconformist preaching box with a west porch, probably galleried as there were 260 sittings in the 1870s. The church prospered under the pastorate of Johann Gerhard Tiarks from 1822 to 1858, which united Calvinist and Lutheran strands of Protestantism. George Wicke, a sugar refiner, bequeathed £300 in 1829 and small schools were added to the east, for boys in 1834 and girls in 1852, both rebuilt in 1879 to designs by Thomas and William Stone, architects. The congregation was once more uprooted in 1884 and the church was demolished in 1886 to make way for the somewhat church-like pumping station to the Commercial Road Goods Depot that survives on the south side of Hooper Street as the Pump House (see p.xx). The congregation opened a newly built church and schools in Goulston Street in 1887.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/1767/001; MBW/2649/34/09: The National Archives, PROB11/1682/23: <em>Dublin Intelligence</em>, 4 June 1709, p. 2: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 23 March 1818, p. 2: <em>Bell’s Weekly Messen</em>ger, 28 Jan 1822, p. 8: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 8 Aug 1853, p. 1: <em>The Atlas</em>, 27 Aug 1853, p. 557: Francis Watts, <em>Bulletins and Other State Intelligence</em>, 1854, p. 711: <em>The Builder</em>, 5 April 1879, p. 383: <em>The Globe</em>, 15 Nov 1884, p. 6: Ordnance Survey map 1873: Isabella (Mrs Basil) Holmes, <em>The London Burial Grounds</em>, 1896, p. 166: John Southerden Burn, <em>The History of the French, Walloon, Dutch, and other Foreign Protest Refugees Settled in England</em>, 1846, pp. 240–1: Panikos Panayi, <em>Germans in London Since 1500</em>, 1996, pp. 54–9 </p>\n",
"created": "2020-06-05",
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{
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"title": "Nos 30, 30A and 30B, Commercial Road",
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"body": "<p>The first buildings here were speculative shophouses put up by James Morter in 1876–8 as a plain and rectilinear, four-storey, white-brick trio, Nos 30, 30A and, to the west, No. 30B, each three windows wide with continuous reconstituted-stone window heads and short courses of red brick. These premises saw varied use, including as coffee rooms at No. 30, rag-trade manufacturers and wholesalers coming to dominate from the 1920s.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Nos 30 and 30A collapsed following a fire in 2007. Crown Choice Developments Ltd proposed a grossly bulging twenty-five-storey glass tower for the whole site in 2012, to designs by Llewellyn Davis Yeang, architects. This was precluded by the constraints of the small site, hemmed in as it is by Aldgate Place, Altitude Point and Riga Mews. After selling No. 30B, Crown Choice secured permission in 2015 to build the relatively small-scale six-storey block of flats over shops at Nos 30 and 30A, to designs by 21st Architecture Ltd of Goswell Road, somewhat echoing its predecessors with stock-brick facing above a two-storey grey-brick plinth. No. 30B was demolished in 2018 and replaced to designs by Claridge Architects for Nichols Developments Ltd of Harlow with a seven-storey slip of a building, flats over a shop.</p>\n\n<p>The two projects went ahead collaboratively in 2019–20, with Reddington Construction Ltd handling the whole site. Entrances to the residential storeys are from Buckle Street, to which the flats have enclosed balconies or ‘winter gardens’.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Post Office Directories: District Sureyors' Returns: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 23 March 1877, p. 464: The National Archives, IR58/84823/4086-8</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2020-02-13",
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"body": "<p>On the site east of Tower Hill that much later became that of the Royal Mint, Edward III founded the Cistercian abbey of St Mary Graces in 1350. Lying between Hogg Lane (later Rosemary Lane then Royal Mint Street) and East Smithfield (The Highway), gardens and open lands to the abbey’s east included a square field of about ten acres known as Well Close. This might have been the site of what was called Cropats well in the thirteenth century. After its suppression in 1539, the abbey was adapted to be a manor house, lived in from 1542 to 1560 by Sir Arthur Darcy, Lieutenant of the Tower of London and a commissioner for the Court of Augmentations that oversaw the administration of former monastic lands. Darcy’s house and the manor of East Smithfield were acquired by Queen Elizabeth I in 1560 for the formation of a depot for supplying the navy. The abbey site was thus transformed to be the Royal Naval victualling yard, a use that continued to 1785. Thereafter it was redeveloped as premises for the Royal Mint’s move out of the Tower of London.[^1] </p>\n\n<p>In 1546 Darcy granted the Well Close to Thomas Stepkin (alternatively Stephyn or Stepkyn), a brewer for whom the water source would have been valuable. Stepkin was an immigrant, possibly of German origins, who had become a denizen in 1523 and built a thriving business while owning much other land in Wapping (then part of the parish of Whitechapel). His main brewing site was probably that on the Thames, already long established, which later became the vast Red Lion Brewery, on Lower East Smithfield (St Katharine’s Way) between the St Katharine Docks and Hermitage Basin. The arrival of the victualling yard brought this brewery greater prosperity. Sustained by naval contracts, the brewery was in the hands of John Parsons by the 1630s. Having come into Crown ownership in 1560 the Well Close field, diagonally crossed by footpaths by the 1620s, was demised to Daniel Goldsmith during the Commonwealth.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: The National Archives (TNA), SC12/26/32: T. F. T. Baker (ed.), <em>A History of the County of Middlesex</em>, vol.11:<em> Stepney, Bethnal Green</em>, 1998, p.7: Ian Grainger and Christopher Phillpotts, <em>The Cistercian abbey of St Mary Graces, East Smithfield, London</em>, Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) monograph 44, 2011, p. 71: Ian Grainger and Christopher Phillpotts, <em>The Royal Navy victualling yard, East Smithfield, London</em>, MOLA monograph 45, 2010, pp. 9,11</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: TNA, E210/4857; E320/L37; E304/4/L37; MPF1/158: Karen Proudler, <em>The Stepkin Family of Tudor London</em>, 2018</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-09",
"last_edited": "2021-02-02"
},
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"id": 921,
"title": "Alan Hughes talks about the history of the Bell Foundry since it has been in his family's hands",
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"properties": {
"b_number": "32-34",
"b_name": "Whitechapel Bell Foundry, 32–34 Whitechapel Road",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "32-34 Whitechapel Road",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 26,
"search_str": "Whitechapel Bell Foundry, 32–34 Whitechapel Road"
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"body": "<p>Previously, [before my great grandfather] the company had been owned by the Mears family for four generations. That's very roughly 100 years. The last Mears hit hard financial times, and took into partnership a man called Stainbank, who was from Lincolnshire, he was a timber merchant, but above all he had money. The Mears and Stainbank were only together for 10 years, 11 years, something like that. When Mears died, Stainbank, who was clearly younger, inherited the business. Stainbank, when he died, left the business in his will to his nephew, a chap called Lawson, who was a retired Indian bank manager. That was 1884.</p>\n\n<p>Lawson, being a bank manager, knew nothing else about anything except banking, inherited this business, didn't understand what the heck was going on but realised that it was a business and it was running. His inheritance pretty much coincided with the arrival of my great grandfather, who at the time was a very keen bell-ringer, but importantly worked for a company, I believe, in Vauxhall, a foundry I think it was in Vauxhall. The nub of it is this: he used to visit here on a regular basis selling this company metal. He came in and found this chap Lawson sitting at his desk. They obviously fell into conversation, and at the end of the conversation, Lawson offered great grandfather the position of general manager.</p>\n\n<p>My great grandfather came here as general manager. He was only 22 years old. He ran the company for Lawson. When Lawson died in 1904, great grandfather wrote to Lawson's widow, and I don't have a copy of the letter. It was a letter, apparently, in which he explained why he felt he was entitled to have first refusal to the purchase of the business, having run it for Lawson for 20 years. He made an offer, and I don't even know what the offer was. But it only took her three days to say, \"Yes, fine,\" because she didn't want it. That gave great grandfather ownership of the business, but not the property.</p>\n\n<p>Because when George Mears had taken Stainbank into partnership, the ownership of the buildings and the land remained with the Mears family, who through marriage became the Venables family. In 1960 agents acting for the Venables family said, \"Look, we don't want this property anymore. We want to sell it. You inhabit it, therefore we're giving you first refusal.\" They asked in 1960, it's laughable today, but they asked for £20,000. Which was hard, so we took out a 10 year mortgage in 1960 on the buildings and the land. That meant that in 1970, 10 years later, the ownership of the buildings and the land passed to us as well as the business.</p>\n\n<p>[For the 100 years previous to that] We’d been renting it, paying rent. Exactly, paying rent. The interesting thing too is going back into the sales day books. The Mears family themselves owned different parts of the business. One of the Mearses who was never taken into partnership was a John Mears. He seems to have been the black sheep of the family, but I don't know why. John Mears owned the very far rear of the property, and every month, John Mears was paid rent for that by the partners. We also do have the contract of partnership agreement between Charles and George Mears which is a very lengthy document. When you read between the lines, they really did not trust each other.</p>\n\n<p>They may not even have liked each other but even if they did, they clearly didn't trust each other. That was the Mears family, but because it went very rapidly, Mears, Stainbank, Lawson, Hughes, we have no connection to the Mears family at all. We know nothing about the Mears family, and really the only thing that we have inherited are the sales day books. As a family we have no knowledge of them. We know they came from Canterbury. We know that the first William Mears became either bankrupt, or near bankrupt in his early years. We know that the prosperity of the company grew very rapidly and seems to have peaked some time around 1830, 1840, when Thomas Mears was clearly a very wealthy gentleman.</p>\n\n<p>He was in the list of the first commissioners of income tax in this area when commissioners of income tax started in about 1820 I think. If you go into Highgate Cemetery, go in through the main entrance, the first thing you'll see is this enormous thing, which is the tomb of the Mears family. To have had that position and that size of tomb, you must have had money. The whole history of the Mears family is set out on this tomb in Highgate Cemetery. On a number of occasions I think Charles Mears and also George Mears, possibly Thomas Mears, were in turn masters of the family's company. Clearly, they were people of substance and people of some wealth.</p>\n\n<p>I don't know whether they lived here in the bell-foundry house. I suspect that they did initially, but as they became wealthy, this wasn't a cool place to live, was it? If you look at the property map of this area, this wasn't, and so towards the end of their tenure, they had a foreman whose name was Warskitt. I think it was Warskitt, and I think Warskitt lived here. The Mearses lived in a more fashionable area, but again, I don't know where they lived. Stainbank, I think, lived in Camberwell. Where the Mearses lived, I don't know.</p>\n\n<p>[My great grandfather] came here in 1884, same time as Lawson's manager. He was Lawson's manager from 1884 to 1904…We have been very careful to brush out some of the history there because in fact Albert Hughes [my grandfather] was the oldest of three brothers, Leonard and Robert. They both disgraced themselves. First of all, Leonard in about 1919, when he tried to sell the business behind my grandfather's back to George Co. and 600 Group. When my grandfather protested that he would have nothing of it, then Leonard Hughes said, \"Well, in that case, I'm leaving because this company has no future.\"</p>\n\n<p>He quit. So he has been airbrushed out. Then the other one was Robert Hughes, who was the bookkeeper. He kept the books, did everything to do with the money. For some reason, there was an audit undertaken here round about 1929. The accountants found that Robert Hughes had been augmenting his salary on a regular basis by fiddling the books. He was dismissed and disgraced which left only my grandfather. Those pieces of information have been airbrushed out of the official story.</p>\n\n<p>[Albert Hughes my grandfather] was the oldest. He was the senior partner. As far as I know, he was the only one of the three who was actually a bell-ringer. He was, like his father, a very, very keen bell-ringer. Very good bell-ringer.</p>\n\n<p>Douglas [my uncle] was about six or seven years younger than my father [William Hughes] when he came into the business. My grandfather was convinced that, just as my great grandfather was pretty much convinced that, the company wouldn't survive. .. When my father William, and my uncle Douglas left school, he ensured that they had good employment away from this company.</p>\n\n<p>My father started work at the head office of the Thornycroft Company in Smith Square. They made trucks, diesel engines, that kind of stuff. Douglas started work with an insurance broker, Price Forbes as they were then, but the name has changed since they've been amalgamated with other firms of insurance brokers. He was convinced that when his time came the company would close, but my father decided that he would join his father. Which he did in 1945, and of course we're talking war years when we weren't making bells, we were making aluminium castings for the Admiralty. Then after the war, of course, the demand for the bells hugely increased because, of course, war damage and bombing.</p>\n\n<p>We had this huge amount of work to do immediately after the Second World War but with fewer people to do it because they had gone to war and not come back. I don't know the whole story but my uncle was either persuaded to join with his brother or he decided to join with his brother. I don't know which but they both came into the company.</p>\n\n<p>Again, because we were so short of skilled trades, both of them worked in the foundry extensively and also went out doing bell hanging work extensively because it was an all hands to the pump situation. Life was difficult. We had war damage, obviously, and yet a full order book and yet very little cash, and materials were rationed, so you had an order to build something but you couldn't buy the materials to build it anyway.. These were very trying times and, of course, I joined them later on.</p>\n\n<p>It was quite an exciting time because only from 1970 did we actually own the property… because it had been mortgaged from '60 to '70. We were paying rent on it prior to that. In a sense, it wasn't for us to throw fireplaces away because we didn’t own them anyway. Also, we had decided to do some rebuilding once we owned the property. This was a great time of clearance and let's clear the decks and start again.</p>\n\n<p>The facade has had very little done with it over the years. If you look at photographs of the facade from the 1920s, there is the most enormous and ghastly enameled sign right way across the parapet that says 'Bell Foundry.' Even if you look at the brickwork today, you'll see that the brickwork across the parapet looks a lot newer. I suspect that the parapet was rebuilt. Not just because the bricks look newer, because also it's upright. The whole building leans but the parapet is upright which suggests to me that it was rebuilt. The rest of it has been patch repair.</p>\n\n<p>Again, going back to the time when I joined the company, all of the timber work right the way across the whole of the front was grained in the same way as our front entrance was grained. Now, I personally hate graining. It's just a thing. I don't like it, I think it’s horrible. It pretends to be what it isn't. I would prefer if they just paint it. It took us something like two years to get permission from the local council to actually paint the house timberwork green as it now is. That was a real struggle but at least visually, there is now some separation between what was the bell foundry house with the green and the front entrance, the business, which is still grained.</p>\n\n<p>It's got to be 25 to 30 years ago. Ever since then, any repainting, and it's due for another repaint, any repainting has had to be in the same shade of green because if you change the colour of the paint in a grade two style listed building, you'll have to get at least a planning consent just to change the colour of the paint.</p>\n\n<p>My grandfather died in August 1964. Although I can remember him very clearly, it was as a schoolboy. I started work here in August 1966 [aged 18], so he was already dead but my grandmother still lived here…I started in what we call the loam shop making moulds and casting tower bells. That's where I started.</p>\n\n<p><strong>The Bell Foundry during and after World War II</strong></p>\n\n<p>I've never lived here… This was my grandparents' dining room…It also doubled up as a living room. There was a desk over there. My grandmother was a great writer of letters, so she would sit over there and write letters. .. Well, just behind the door and there was an armchair in that corner and there was an armchair in this corner. Then, there was a radio there.</p>\n\n<p>The panelling was very badly cracked, I understand, by the time we came out of the Second World War. We ourselves here, our own carpenters did huge repairs to this panelling. It was done very carefully. What you can't see is where the splits run down the centre of the panels, they took the panelling out and screwed into the back a series of brass strips which stitched the crack. They stitched the cracks together and then they filled the gaps and they painted over them. But the brass plates just stopped the splits moving.</p>\n\n<p>The repairs to the panelling was done around about 1950. It was to try to make the place half decent after the Germans … I think [the building] survived [WW2 bombing] for two reasons. The first was there were no direct high explosives but were loads of incendiaries. Most of the damage that was done in the East End of London was incendiaries, it wasn't high explosives and it was that the East End burned rather than just being bombed.</p>\n\n<p>Fire did as much damage as high explosives. The Germans were dropping incendiaries, loads of them. This place caught fire loads of times. But because my grandparents and my parents lived here and my father had a reserved occupation. Douglas went to war, had a great war actually because nobody shot at him. But my father was here on reserved occupation, so they would be up all night putting fires out.</p>\n\n<p>There's nothing wrong with a fire provided you put it out quickly. It's if you don't put it out, it becomes a problem. [laughs].. They had buckets of sand and buckets of water and fire extinguisher and all that to the ready. As soon as something caught fire, they'll be running around on the roof putting fires out.</p>\n\n<p>That's why it survived. The following morning they would have to patch the roof again or there'd be glass broken in windows, all that kind of stuff. Providing there was electricity, and there wasn't always, providing there was electricity, you could run the machines and we could continue making aluminium castings. Some days, of course, there was no electricity. Other days, there was no water. Other days, there was no gas. You took each day as it came because that's what happens in war.</p>\n\n<p><strong>The houseman and his work</strong></p>\n\n<p>This was the dining room. Their bedroom, my grandparents' bedroom was the room up here directly above… The room at the back which is now an office was the kitchen… The room above, the next room on the first floor there was the living room.</p>\n\n<p>But the living room was pretty much set out most of the time with musical handbills because my grandmother was a solo hand bell ringer. She used to rehearse, she used to practice in there. She had this large table with all these bells laid out. She didn't have to put them away. She could go in there and just ring bells. That was only cleared away when she got older and she gave up hand bell ringing. Then my grandfather decided he liked to have a television, so the television was up there but the radio was still down here.</p>\n\n<p>Then, the top floor, I never got to visit the top floor until, gosh, 30 years ago because my grandparents and then my grandmother always had a houseman. Somebody who would clean the place, light the fires, clear the ashes but also make teas and coffees for the office.</p>\n\n<p>My early memories here from the '50s and early '60s was all of the offices had coal fires. This was the coal cellar underneath. There was a wooden trapdoor just outside the pavement which has now been covered in concrete but the concrete marks where it was. The coal used to be delivered loose seven times at a time, then large lumps were broken up.</p>\n\n<p>It's almost a full time job if you've got fires in all the offices and the house in the winter just going around, lighting the fires, clearing the ash, leading the grate, breaking up coal. That's quite a job. But he [the houseman] would go out and do all the shopping, he'd keep the place clean. He actually had [two of the rooms on] the top floor. So it's only when my grandmother died in 1972, I think, John Hill continued to live here for another couple of years until he died, and then and only then did I actually get to visit the top floor of the house. Because it was his apartment, I never went there.</p>\n\n<p><strong>2 Fieldgate Street</strong></p>\n\n<p>What is now our shop is actually the downstairs room of No. 2 Fieldgate Street. That was his [a jeweller’s] shop. Sclaire, was his name, Sclaire's shop. He lived in the house above so we had no access to that. Yes, it's here. Sclaire died and one of his relatives, oh crummy, was it a nephew or something, tried to claim that he had the right to live there because he had always lived there, but he hadn't.</p>\n\n<p>A long protracted legal battle then ensued in which we had to find all manner of people who lived here who would swear in a court of law that this guy didn't live there, they'd never seen him before in their lives, and the court found in our favour. That meant that we had the use of those buildings. But we did not have the use of that room or that room, because that was part of the territory that Sclaire occupied.</p>\n\n<p>Sclaire was paying rent to the Venables family, just as we were, and then of course, but Sclaire was evicted before we bought the building, so Sclaire never had to pay rent to us, because by the time we'd purchased it in 1960, Sclaire had gone.</p>\n\n<p>We turned the first floor room .. into a workshop and subsequently it became a drawing office which it still is, and the top rooms were just used as storage, which they still are. It's just a dump. It's a disgrace, really. It's just a dump.</p>\n\n<p>No. 2 Fieldgate Street, we are told, is older than this building. So No. 2 Fieldgate Street was there anyway and then this was built up to it. The GLC dated No. 2 … on the basis of the glass being flush with the front of the building and apparently that puts it prior to 1690 or something.</p>\n\n<p>I don't know and, to be honest, I don't care. [laughs] The other thing I'm told is unusual but not unique is you look at that door, and you think, yes, well, it's got stone facings. Well, they're not. They're timber to look like stone. Again, the GLC said this is an indication of relative poverty. It was the thing to have stone round the door, but if you couldn't afford it you dummied it up in timber and painted it the colour of stone.</p>\n\n<p><strong>How the houses have been used</strong></p>\n\n<p>This is No. 2 Fieldgate Street. But that door is now simply a fire escape. We don't use it for any other purpose. [The drawing office is on the] First floor, and those two windows is just a store. It's just a dump where we store stuff. Actually that room is a bathroom, and is currently used from time to time by our daughters who are living in those two rooms [that used to be the houseman's flat]</p>\n\n<p>[The first floor is what] we call .. the library, which is pretentious. It's just where we keep our old books. This room, has, our elder daughter is an accompanist, that's how she earns her living, and we got a grand piano in there so that's her practice room. Also, if she's having to rehearse, quartets, quintets, whatever, they can come here because they don't disturb anybody.</p>\n\n<p>Here, here is where the piano sits.. The rest of the room is largely unaltered. But we do about eight to ten times a year we have evening receptions here. It's usually for city livery companies or ward clubs, city organisations, who wish to bring a group to view the foundry, but also they then stay on and we serve drinks and finger food and stuff. That is served up here. All three rooms have interconnecting doors as your drawing correctly shows and so we lay food out in here. This room now, we call the red room because we've painted it red, it's the coldest room in the house. It's right on that east corner. It's bloody cold, we thought we'd paint it red then.</p>\n\n<p>I think when he [my great grandfather] was the manager he didn't live here. I think he lived in Leytonstone somewhere, but when he gained ownership of the building he moved in.</p>\n\n<p>Yes, I'm not sure which, either that, or that, was his [my father’s] bedroom. There were two brothers and a daughter. Yes, that's right and my uncle had one room and my father had the other and at the back, where are we, we are behind that room, there was an extension put in around about 1825. That was a bedroom. It's now a kitchen, but that was my aunt's bedroom. I remember it as a bedroom. Brass bed and all that stuff. It had a certain smell to it.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Hughes family history</strong></p>\n\n<p>My father married before my uncle. He met my mother in fact when he was working at Thornycrofts, and they bought a flat in Lewisham. During the war, they got married before the war, because transport was so erratic, he was finding increasingly he was having to walk from Lewisham to Whitechapel and back again at the end of the day. There were no buses, trains out. There's a war, for heaven's sake.</p>\n\n<p>My grandparents were finding it increasingly difficult to stay awake 24 hours seven days a week, so they quit the flat in Lewisham and moved here. There were the four of them in the house. Towards the end of the war, the war would seem faded away. It didn't suddenly stop because gradually we were winning this war, we, collectively, were winning the war and so air raids became less and less and less frequent as the Germans were gradually pushed back home as it were.</p>\n\n<p>Before the war ended, I think it was six months or something before the end of the war, my parents bought a house in West Wickham in a very poor-- It was a new house, it was only two years old but it had been occupied by the Home Guard or something and there were tank traps in the garden, it was a right mess. They bought it for very little. My mother thought my father was absolutely mad to do it, but in retrospect it was probably one of the wisest things he's ever done.</p>\n\n<p>They actually set up house there just before the end of the war. They lived there right the way through. My mother in her '90s then asked to be moved into sheltered accommodation, because she couldn't maintain the house. So for the last three or four years she lived in the house. That's where they lived and that's, obviously, where I was brought up. That was my home.</p>\n\n<p>My uncle Douglas, he married. I don't know how he met his wife, I've always assumed he met her at Price Forbes but I don't know. They married, it was either during the war or towards the end of the war. They initially bought a house in Hayes so they weren't that far from my father and mother. That's Hayes Kent not Hayes Middlesex, and then from there, they moved to Merston. Then from Merston they moved to Chalden and then they stayed there until my aunt died, which would have been 20, 25 years ago, then my uncle sold the Chalden house and moved into sheltered accommodation .. and then he died. That's the history.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Works to the front wall in the 1970s</strong></p>\n\n<p>In the 1970s the GLC were monitoring this building because the front facade was…, slipping gently into the road. We think the problem started with the building of the underground railway because the District Hammersmith and City Line goes straight down the middle of Whitechapel Road. They didn't tunnel it. They dug a huge trench and put a bridge over the top because it's only just below the surface. We think that the holding back of the earth wasn't done with sufficient rigour, and therefore the lands started to slip into the trench slightly before the bridge was built.</p>\n\n<p>It's only the front rooms that are shifting. You can see this room is going. This corner, that corner is about nine inches out of plumb which is a lot for just a two-storey building. The GLC put monitoring all over the place and they came along every six months or something with laser things. They were able to demonstrate that the building was moving at an accelerating rate. So we were faced with doing a number of things. Firstly, there was a great crack down this corner because the facade was tearing away from the end wall.</p>\n\n<p>Stainless steel anchors were put through the thickness of the brickwork to just hold the crack, not to pull it back. You can't pull buildings back but you can stop them going further. That was done. Also they found that this building has no foundations. The bricks just sit on the earth.</p>\n\n<p>They corbel out for about three quarters. That's all. Which was typical of the day. In the cellar here on the front wall, the foundation company came in and they hand dug in metre sections down till they got to the gravel which is underneath the clay. They then cut into the gravel by one metre and they cast a one-metre square concrete block starting one metre below the gravel coming right way up to the underside of the wall. When the concrete had cured they then rammed a non-contracting grout in the gap. When that had cured they'd go and do another bit so they stitched their way round. The whole of the front is now supported on this enormous concrete block thing which goes down into the gravel bed.</p>\n\n<p>Also, I'm told, I haven't looked for the evidence, they put in chains running through the depth of the floor to tie into this back wall so that these walls are also constrained. There are resin anchors into the brickwork in the front and it's either chains or tie bars that go back through the depth of the floor and cut into that part of the building which isn't moving.</p>\n\n<p>We had to have an architect and an engineer come in and do it. We had a grant from the GLC towards the cost of doing it… I didn't handle the grant details. My uncle did that. No, he didn't. The architect did it. A guy called James Strike who is now retired I think… He’s still around. I haven't spoken to him for years but the reason I know he's still alive is within the last 18 months someone who came here said that he knew James Strike and James sent his best wishes or something to that effect. That was him. He retired as an architect and I think he found being an architect hard work and he went into teaching architecture at a university or college somewhere but I don't know where.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Derek Kendall photographs the building</strong></p>\n\n<p>The last interest that we had was from English Heritage who sent a photographer here [in 2010] to photograph the interiors.</p>\n\n<p>We're in some English Heritage hidden London interiors book. It's funny because he came here by permission and by appointment and he was going to take these pictures for this book and we said that's fine. He said, \"I'll only be here for half a day,\" and we said, \"Fine,\" and at lunchtime, he said, \"Can I stay here the rest of the day?\" We said, \"Yes, it's okay. \" At the end of the day he said, \"Can I come back tomorrow?\" He spent three days.</p>\n\n<p>The thing that fascinated him, strangely, most about this building was the staircase. He got really really excited about that staircase and it's just a staircase but he said the thing about it is that, obviously, it's 1738, but he said it is unaltered. He couldn't bring to mind another London property where he had seen a staircase unaltered since it was constructed. Dan Cruickshank, he did some filming here. It was a program he was doing something to do with London sewers. It was quite unsavoury but he got excited about the door furniture on the front door here because although we've added to it we haven't taken anything away.</p>\n\n<p>The original door furniture is still attached and he got quite excited about that. The Queen, when she came here was saying what wonderful buildings these were. I said poverty is a great way of preserving the past. .. If you can't afford anything you don't do anything which means you hang on to what you got…</p>\n\n<p><strong>The workshops</strong></p>\n\n<p>The land that we had at the back, the bit in fact that has been rebuilt, was made up of two parts. Part was a huge wooden shed which was a workshop and it was the wooden shed that we were wanting to remove and replace. Also a yard. Now the wooden shed projected into next door's property, but we owned it. But it was a nuisance to them because it was like a peninsula of land sticking into their land. At the same time between that shed and Plumbers Row there was an open yard. The open yard belonged to them. So they had this little isolated plot of land that we were occupying that they owned.</p>\n\n<p>We owned land effectively in their property. So prior to the rebuilding work we had an exchange of property and it was done on a square foot for square foot basis. I don't think either of us actually gained square footage. But we took ownership of the yard and we gave them the bit that stuck into their property. That gives us the footprint we have today. Having exchanged those boundaries we then set about clearing the whole site and then constructing new workshops. They don't look new anymore but they were new 40 years ago… 1980, That is the construction of those workshops.</p>\n\n<p>The foundry is incredibly quiet today because we have a policy with holidays that you use it or lose it. Our holiday period is in end of March. Purely coincidental this is just about half our staff are on holiday today, and I've already mentioned that.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Walking around the house </strong></p>\n\n<p>The mantle shelf is new. Because they didn't have mantle shelves. Mantle shelves came in Victorian times. The other thing, of course, from the 18th Century and that is that you didn't designate a room for use. You would move the furniture around according to how you were intending to use the room. But, again, the GLC seemed to think that this room was used for food because of the marble.</p>\n\n<p>Yes, marble apparently was relatively expensive for people who were poor. You didn't go splashing out on marble but marble was used for setting out food because it would keep food cool all the time. They thought that in the original plan of things this room was probably used for serving food because of marble. I said, \"But it's on the first floor. Why would you carry food up the stairs? That doesn't make sense.\" They said, \"But they used to do that.\"</p>\n\n<p>[The kitchen was] Downstairs right in the far corner [on the ground floor]. So everything had to be carried up the stairs. But I've nothing to support that opinion. It's just, and again, it was given verbally by a GLC architect.</p>\n\n<p>It could even be that at ground floor level you've got smells, you've got noise from the street, you've got people banging on the windows. Maybe coming up to the first floor you've got a bit more privacy. Maybe it's just a nicer place to be.</p>\n\n<p>This is where my grandmother had her hand bells. She had a table in the middle here and all the hand bells were laid out. So the room really wasn't used for any other purpose other than for her to practice hand bell ringing.</p>\n\n<p>This is where Jennifer practices. .. That fireplace has always been exposed but it's not ancient. That has to be mid 19th Century because it's so over the top ornate.</p>\n\n<p>It's almost Puginistic, isn't it? You can also see how with the building moving you've got that great split at the back of the hearth, because that's the bit that didn't move. This is sitting on this floor and it's coming away... We’re now going what 30 to 40 years since that was done. It doesn't look to me as if we're moving further. Of course, you can't put it back. You can feel the slope, can't you? This is the cold room.</p>\n\n<p>That, again, was boarded up. We only took the boarding off there just over a year ago. Again, it had a gas fire and it was boarded. Having been encouraged by taking the boarding off in the library, my wife said, \"I wonder what's behind here.\" We haven't lit this. I don't see why we couldn't. One of the mysteries is we had roof repairs done two or three years ago so there was scaffolding right up across the roof. I went in and inspected all of the chimneys and the intriguing thing is that every single fire has its own flue. The flues don't connect.</p>\n\n<p>There's one more pot than I can find a fireplace for. Well, this apparently is something that people did because the number of fires is a bit like the number of cars. The number of fires you have is an indication of your wealth because coal's relatively expensive. The more fires you had the more wealth you had.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Walking around the property</strong></p>\n\n<p>If we go out to what we call the new back foundry-- we produced this drawing some years ago. This was done in house, but it’s a sort of cut away of what goes on inside… This is 34 Whitechapel Road.</p>\n\n<p>These here really give you some idea of the history. ….. This room here was where we stored metal. And it was called Kimber's room. This was the bit that we owned. And I told you had projected into the next-door property.</p>\n\n<p>That extension was acquired- we don't have a date for it - but it was round about 1820, 1830. That's when the Mears family fortunes, as it were, peaked. But I don't have a date for that.</p>\n\n<p>This is No. 2 Fieldgate Street where we used to keep the music ... all the hand bell stuff used to be kept in the red room. Then of course, we're supposed to provide disabled access. Well, how are you going to get people upstairs? So we thought we're going to have to bring it all down stairs. A wheelchair will come in here.</p>\n\n<p>So we can get wheelchairs into this area…. We also, from time to time, have groups from local schools. So we can take a few school kids in here, which is why that thing moves so slowly because if you're presenting it to children, who are sort of six or eight or ten years old, it needs to move a bit more slowly for them.</p>\n\n<p><strong>The back wall</strong></p>\n\n<p>Okay, structurally this fascinates me because this is the back wall of No. 2 Fieldgate Street. No, it isn't. Precisely. There's nothing there. There’s absolutely nothing there. That is a beam. That is a timber beam. And the whole of the side of the house sits on that timber beam. And above is a nine-inch brick wall. So you've got a nine-inch brick wall sitting on a timber beam.</p>\n\n<p>Yes, and what makes it even worse is where the staircase turns, you would hit your head. And it's been cut back. And it's only two inches deep.</p>\n\n<p>The yard started here. And again, this wall is half-an-inch thick. That's all there is, just half an inch. This panel here.</p>\n\n<p>Well, we think it's 1825 because there's a fireplace through what used to be the kitchen. And it says ‘TM [Thomas Mears] 1825’. Right, okay, so going back through the rear door into the yard area.</p>\n\n<p>When you look at the structure, you're thinking, \"Hang on a minute. This doesn't make sense.\" This wall ends here. It's just a stud wall because beyond that is just half-inch panelling. Same thing here, the wall just ends there. And then all of this is just timber.</p>\n\n<p>We’re pretty sure this is 1825 because of the dating on the fireplace. But you can also see that when the extensions were built, they came out as far as they could. They came out as far as that window edge.</p>\n\n<p>It's all a bit of a mess really.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Various building works</strong></p>\n\n<p>This looks new because that was rebuilt in the 1960s. It was virtually falling down. So that was completely rebuilt then. And that's when the old well was discovered because being a coaching inn, it had a well. And this is the well pipe that went down the well. So that told you the depth of the well. And we filled it in and put proper foundations under this wall because again, this was a wall with no foundations. It just sat on the earth.</p>\n\n<p>This now has a proper foundations. And this also was rebuilt. And that also has proper foundations.</p>\n\n<p>I can just remember when that was the stable, in there, because I can remember the mangers were in there. But that's now our metal house. But that used to be a stable because, presumably, the chap who lived here had a horse.</p>\n\n<p>The yard, of course, also extended further this way. And we know that because these aren't outside windows…</p>\n\n<p>This wall was built in about 1840, when we put in our first tuning machine. And you will see that-- this machine was put in 1920. But it's kind of similar to the previous machine. It relies upon the building to hold it up. So because this was the end of the yard, all they did was put one wall across, and you create a room.</p>\n\n<p>Well, this was what we did [rebuilt the cellars] in 1980, having done the land swap. And the people next door were very reasonable because they could see that, for a time, we would need both parcels of land.</p>\n\n<p>They very kindly waived rent. They just said, \"Okay, how long is this reconstruction going to take?\" We said, \"Well, because we got to keep working. We got to phase the work, so we can keep working.\" We said, \"It won't take more than two years.\" And they said, \"Right. If you do it within two years, we will waive the rent on this yard. But if you start dragging it out, then, of course, that's a different story.\" But we didn't. We just wanted to get it done.</p>\n\n<p><strong>A rare example of manufacturing in London</strong></p>\n\n<p>And the sad thing is, of course, that people don't understand manufacturing. If you say to people, a milling machine, [they have] no clue what you're talking about.</p>\n\n<p>I think the fascination for people who visit is that they are visiting a dirty workshop, where stuff is made because they've never seen it before. And they'll probably never see it again.</p>\n\n<p>... And we then put that frieze on the bell. To us, that frieze has meaning. It won't have meaning to anybody else, but it does to us. It's a frieze that we used in the early 19th century on bells. And the point about these two bells is that they have been made to an old style profile, so that they match in with the old bells that are already in the tower. We can look at that. We just say, \"Well, it's an old-style bell.\" If it's a modern bell, it will have a different frieze on it. And I'd say that's a modern profile.</p>\n\n<p>It's an interesting frieze, that, because for several years I owned a narrow boat. If you look at the decoration on narrow boats, the style of which dates from late 18th, early 19th century, you'll find the same frieze as part of the decorative paintwork on narrow boats. So clearly, it was a fairly normal kind of early 19th century, late 18th century style of-- It's a series of curves. It's a very simple geometric shape.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Dealings with the local council</strong></p>\n\n<p>I think also that because this place suffered neither the extremes of war nor the extremes of wealth, an awful lot has remained unchanged. It's continued to this day with the grants that have been given by national and local government. In 2012 or before 2012, there was High Street 2012, when Tower Hamlets Borough and presumably others decided to spend money restoring and improving the appearance of the properties down this corridor. Well, the money started at Aldgate and came to the end of the block. And it started at the end of the block and continued east.</p>\n\n<p>And we were excluded. Then a couple of years ago, they decided on another system of improving the buildings. It came up to the end of this block. And it started at the end of that block. So every time money is spent on this road, this block is specifically excluded. Every single time. We applied to English Heritage for some grant aid ten years ago for restoring our chimney because our chimney is unnecessary, and it was in dire need of attention. They said, \"No. We can't help you because it would be unfair to your competitors.\" But they have just given our competitors £3 million.</p>\n\n<p>I’m thinking, \"Why is it fair to give them £3 million pounds, but it's not fair to give us anything because we have a competitor?\"</p>\n\n<p>It doesn't make sense. I think Tower Hamlets would like to see us go because they have now rearranged the roads at the side - and we notified them of this - in such a way that it is impossible to reverse a vehicle into our gateway without going the wrong way up a one-way street. So the only way you can load or unload is illegally. There was no consultation. They rearranged the road. And we said, \"Hang on a minute. Do you realise what you've done?\" And they said, \"Crumbs. Sorry.\" So they changed it. Six months later, they changed it back. They did the job twice. On large stuff, even illegally, we can't get a large vehicle into our work. So on large projects, we have to go to the expense of double-handling. We have to load here in a small vehicle, then take it to another site for loading into a container for export. It's actually put up the cost of our export work.</p>\n\n<p>We have twice had people come in from Tower Hamlets saying that we have been reported for using solvents. Now, we don't use any solvents at all in any of our processes. Yet we've had environmental health coming here saying we have been reported to them for doing this. Well, of course, we have been reported because how can we be reported for using something we don't use? They spent a whole day here sniffing around the premises just being a nuisance. I think in a perfect world, Tower Hamlets would like to see us go. It's because this is turning into a residential area. And of course this noise and smoke and dust and all the things that you get with industry-- There's a hotel just opened at the back. So I don't think we fit in to what Tower Hamlets want for this area.</p>\n\n<p>We tried to get permission from Tower Hamlets-- There was a bell ringers' event in London. And there is a small mobile belfry. It fits on to the back of a trailer, and it's towed by a car. We tried to get permission from Tower Hamlets to park it on the pavement to the side, which is why they said, \"No, you can't do that because it might damage the paving stones.\" We said, \"But vehicles pull on to this routinely.\" \"Oh no. You can't do that.\" Then we had some repairs done to the chimney. And we said we would like to have a scaffolding built. \"No, you can't have scaffolding at the front of the building at all. We won't give you a license for it because you might damage the pavement.\" Then we said, \"Can we have a cherry picker to inspect the chimneys?\" \"No. You can't have a cherry picker because the cherry picker might damage the pavement.\"</p>\n\n<p>So whatever we want to do, Tower Hamlets say no. So I think they would like to see us go. From my point of view, I think one of my greatest incentives to running this business is to ensure that Tower Hamlets don't get what they want.</p>\n\n<p>But in the end Tower Hamlets will win because they always do. But we had large trees growing outside, which were disturbing the pavement. We were worried about disturbing the wall. And for years, we wrote to Tower Hamlets and asked them to have the trees cut down. And they ignored it. Then the Queen visited. And the tree was taken down the week before the Queen came.</p>\n\n<p>We've also had to register with Tower Hamlets a letter holding them responsible for not enforcing parking regulations on Fridays because of the mosque. Because they don't enforce parking, which means that cars - depending on upon what time of year it is - they'll park against our gates, so we can't open them, and on the pavement. Historically, we cast on Fridays, big casts, because then the moulds cool down over the weekend. But if we were to have a fire, you can't get a fire engine here because they allow vehicles to park. And if you phoned up parking control, they say, \"Oh, yes, no we don't. When the mosque is operational on a Friday, we don't enforce parking regulations.\"</p>\n\n<p>So we had to go through our insurers on this, and I said, \"But we've written to Tower Hamlets. And they won't reply.\" They said, \"No, but if you register the letter, they will have received it. And although they won't reply, you know they've had the letter.\" So we've had to do that simply to cover ourselves in the event of fire, and the fire engines can't get here, and parking control won't have the vehicles removed. So they're only little things. They're petty. I mean, they're very, very, very petty....</p>\n\n<p><strong>Whitechapel and its future</strong></p>\n\n<p>I think that if you take Greater London, and you say where are things going to change most in the next ten years, it has to be this area. If for no other reason, Crossrail. When Crossrail opens Whitechapel Station, I can get to Heathrow in 19 minutes. Way, that would be great. But the whole thing with Crossrail and with Stratford and the Olympic Park, and the fact that it's been - become rather sort of almost trendy now …-- it's an area that was neglected hugely really after manufacture - after the docks went, isn't it? I mean, that was the big change because it wasn't just the docks. It was all of the industries that were related directly to the docks. And we went through this period of, I don't know, three, four, five decades, something like that; when the East End of London was frankly just forgotten. It was just a sort of smell out east.</p>\n\n<p>Then of course we had the whole Canary Wharf thing. And that actually turned things around. But I can remember, when I started here, there were no shops. There were no banks. There was nothing. You wanted groceries, no grocery store. Hardly anybody in the street. A few drinkers, but that's about all. Loads of traffic, but people went through. They didn't go to it. But that has so changed. And I don't think we have seen anything like the end of the change. I think it's the beginning of the change. But again, that is the tradition of the East End. The whole point about the East End of London, it has been constantly changing and reinventing itself through the centuries. It is an area, I should say, of historically continuing change all the time, the East End's changing. So what is happening now is actually a continuity of what has been happening for nearly a 1000 years.</p>\n\n<p>I’m not complaining, and I'm not in any sense promoting. I'm just observing, a casual look at the history of the East End of London over the last five [hundred] to 1000 years tells you-- I mean, look at the population. Look at the type of people, who live here, who move here, do things, then move out. And then another lot come in; and the development of the docks, and all of the industries around the docks. It's a period of continual change change change change change change.</p>\n\n<p>Exactly that. And so if you record anything, it's just a snapshot in that long history. And don't expect it to look the same in 50 years time because it sure as hell won't.</p>\n\n<p>We are part of the East End. But there are so many, many, many, many other things and other people that have passed through the East End. It is that great sort of lively melting pot, and not all of it's good. There's the good and the bad. But it's a sort of - it's a melting pot of things and energy and goings on, as it were.</p>\n\n<p>I mean, I love it. I prefer the East End to the West End because the West End is too much money and too much Disney, you know? And it's all too smart and too nice. The East End is just loads and loads of different ordinary people just trying to carve out a life…. There’s a sort of an energy in that, isn't there, really, that just keeps it alive?</p>\n\n<p>Alan Hughes was interviewed by Shahed Saleem and Peter Guillery on 19 February 2016 at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Behind roadside waste, the south side of Whitechapel Road from immediately east of the parish church as far as Stepney was by 1459 a fifty-acre ‘great field’ that pertained to Ashwyes manor, named for the family that held this and much more land eastwards from the thirteenth century. A substantial plot (445ft west–east and around 100ft deep, about an acre), seemingly taking in an approximately 300ft road-side frontage (waste) that is now 2–34 Whitechapel Road, was held by Abbot John Vintoner of St Osyth’s Abbey in Essex by 1516 when it was leased to the rector and churchwardens of the parish of St Mary Matfelon. At the Dissolution, this property, described as a mansion and garden, was sold by the Crown in 1543 with numerous other lands to (Sir) Hugh Losse (d. 1555), who became Edward VI’s surveyor. It reverted to the Crown to be leased for sixty years in 1548 by (Sir) John White, a grocer, future Lord Mayor and MP from Farnham in Surrey, and Stephen Kyrton (or Kirton), a Farnham relative and another merchant.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Speculative building on the garden ground appears to have followed in the late 1560s. A twenty-one-year lease of 1561 of what seems to be this acre to John Inglishe, a Whitechapel blacksmith, was transferred to Henry Fawkes, a citizen Grocer, who had built a house by 1569 when the lease was transferred to John Wale, a Whitechapel sawyer, who divided the property into ten plots for leases to Henry Martin, a pewterer, John Somerland, a grocer, Peter Meservis, a draper, Henry Allen, a draper, Rowland Richardson, a carpenter, Thomas Mayor, a blacksmith, Robert Jefferson, a baker, Richard More, a freemason, John Williams, a baker, and John Wardall (or Wardoll), a weaver. At the end of the sixteenth century, Stow claimed, as if noting a disturbing novelty, that ‘both the sides of the street be pestered with cottages and alleys, even up to Whitechapel Church, and almost half a mile beyond it’.[^2] A jettied timber three-storey pair survived at Nos 24–26 into the 1890s. Were any of these ‘cottages’ still extant, they would doubtless be Grade II* listed.</p>\n\n<p>By 1620 around one-and-a-half acres fronting this section of Whitechapel Road south to the parish boundary (just north of the line of Mulberry Street) along with about three acres more on the other side of where Fieldgate Street and Plumber’s Row now meet was held by Thomas Pierrepoint (variously spelled) from the Manor of Stepney which had in 1617 given copyholders a right of unlicensed subletting. When Pierrepoint died in 1655 his land held eight tenements and eight cottages, which Faithorne and Newcourt’s map of 1658 suggests were densely lined along the street east of the church and its rectory up to a windmill approximately on the site of Mosque Tower (36 Whitechapel Road). The largest, with eight hearths, was occupied by Frances Car(e)les.</p>\n\n<p>After 1667 Philadelphia, Lady Wentworth, sold off manorial property and was permissive about building on wastes. The Pierrepoint land, which had passed to another Thomas Pierrepoint, a citizen stationer of Bournes Hall, Bushey, Hertfordshire, held thirty-two premises by 1688. There was probably some back building by this time and Queen’s Head Alley ran back on the site later occupied by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, suggesting an earlier name for the Artichoke public house that was to be replaced by the foundry. The land was effectively wholly built up by the 1740s.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>In 1720 the property passed to the Rev. Edward Baynes of Galway in Ireland, who by 1727 had moved to Castlebar, County Mayo. He was the only grandson and heir of Mary Bull (née Pierrepoint). By 1736 there was a sugarhouse facing what is now Plumber’s Row at the back of the property on the site of 28–30 Whitechapel Road. The Artichoke Alehouse was at the east end of the frontage on the main part of the present foundry site. Bisecting the Baynes property, the line of Plumber’s Row was a footpath (Church Path) alongside a ropewalk by the 1730s. The ropery was run by Paul Johnson, who married Catherine Lester, sister of the proprietor of the bell foundry. The roadway was called Baynes Passage in the 1780s. Further west (the site of Nos 8–14) was the George Inn with a livery yard behind. Beyond, a narrow passage beside the rectory opened up as Windmill Alley and led to the Mulberry Gardens, on the line of what became Union Street in the 1780s, later Adler Street.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>Edward Baynes died in 1766 and his son, also Edward and a lawyer, was admitted to the whole four-and-half-acre copyhold property. He mortgaged it through Laetitia Powell (1741–1801, née Clark) before taking up residence at the Tower of London then decamping to the Continent in 1769, very likely in debt. A year later Arthur Baynes, surgeon-major to the Gibraltar garrison, oversaw the surrender of the estate and its purchase by Anthony Forman (1725–1802), the Board of Ordnance’s chief clerk at the Tower, who came from a family of Leicestershire ironmasters. His brother, Richard Forman (1733–1794), who had married a Mary Baines in 1761, and who was also an Ordnance clerk at the Tower, was an intermediary as Baynes’s attorney. Their sister Jane Forman married John Greenfield, whose name has stuck to Whitechapel. Sir George Colebrooke, Lord of Stepney manor, allowed Anthony Forman to purchase the freehold. By 1805 the land was held by John Clark Powell (1763–1847), Laetitia’s son and later Governor of the London Assurance Corporation.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>The George Inn and its livery stables to the rear had been inherited by William Fillingham in 1749. Charles Fillingham was making saddles and harnesses here around 1800, John Fillingham (1763–1817) had the freehold of the house at No. 12, and later Fillinghams continued to make saddles at No. 8 into the 1920s. The George Livery Stables were run by George Starkins Wallis from around 1815 into the 1850s, and then by Charles Webster Ltd up to 1913. The George public house continued at No. 14. Some of this frontage had been recently rebuilt in 1770, possibly including the site of Nos 10–14. The most westerly house by the rectory was where John Henry Prince, later to achieve modest fame as a Methodist writer, was born in 1770. By 1750 Richard Whiteshead, a coachmaker, was established to the east of the George. He was followed by James Exeter, then William Hammer and his descendants from around 1810 into the 1840s at what became Nos 20–26. The sugarhouse behind the site of Nos 28–30 was first run by John Brissault from around 1736, then by James Lewis Turquand from about 1765. It passed to George Wolrath Holzmeyer in 1779, and then in 1799 to William Wilde, who, it appears, had by 1805 built a new sugarhouse on a larger and deeper rectangular footprint on the site that was later that of the Bell Foundry’s back workshop. John Henry Wagentrieber ran this sugarhouse by 1812 up to about 1827 after which it may have been demolished.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: T. F. T. Baker (ed.), <em>A History of the County of Middlesex</em>, vol.11, <em>Stepney: Bethnal Green</em>, 1998, pp.19–52: <em>Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII</em>, vol.18/1 (Jan-July 1543), 1901, items 623/43 and 53: The National Archives (TNA), Z/407/Lb.372: <em>Calendar of Patent Rolls, Edward VI</em>, vol.2 (1548–9), 1924, p.67: History of Parliament online</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: John Stow, <em>A Survey of London</em>, 1598 (1994 edn), p.384: H. C. Maxwell Lyte (ed.), A Descriptive Catalogue of Ancient Deeds, vol.5, 1906, items 12194,12204,12811,13536</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), M/93/001, pp.98–102,127–8; M/93/015, pp.24–8: Hearth Tax returns 1666: William Morgan, <em>London &.c. Actually Survey’d</em>, 1682</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: LMA, M/93/024, p.194; M/93/026, pp.401–2; M/93/028, p.311; M/93/030, pp.158,202–3; M/93/031, pp.165–7; O/009/055: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), Map 233; P/SLC/2/16/7: John Rocque, map of London, 1746: Bryan Mawer's sugar-industry website</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, M93/037, pp.263–4; M93/038, pp.244–51: British Library (BL), Crace pf 16.22: THLHLA, P/SLC/2/16/16–17: TNA, PROB11/1245/241; PROB11/1383/35; PROB11/2058/129: <em>Gentleman’s Magazine</em>, vol.95, May 1804, p.411: Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History for Forman</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LMA, M/93/037, pp.160–5,263–4; M/93/038, pp.244–51; THCS/294–424; Land Tax Returns; District Surveyors Returns: BL, Crace pf 16.22: Mawer: Richard Horwood, maps of London 1792–1819: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub</em> Prince: THLHLA, Map 233: TNA, PROB11/1593/177; IR58/84803/2076: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-19",
"last_edited": "2021-07-21"
},
{
"id": 1136,
"title": "2–32 Scarborough Street ",
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"body": "<p>There was some bomb-damage repair of the eleven houses that survived on the south side of Scarborough Street’s west end in 1949–51. However, plans for a large commercial building on the site were approved in 1956 and after 1960 the whole block was cleared, used for a short time as a site for mobile homes, and then given over to car parking. Tower Hamlets Council approved residential development of the block in late 1980, shortly before the site became one of sixteen across London to be protected by the Greater London Council’s Community Areas Policy, introduced by the Council’s Labour administration in 1981 to preserve established residential areas in deprived localities on the margins of central London against development pressures, especially office expansion. This support for community-based development fell away upon the Conservative government’s abolition of the GLC in 1986, but this site had been developed with terraced housing in 1984–5. The sixteen timber-frame, three-storey, brown-brick houses were standard products from Llewellyn Homes Ltd of Eastbourne, who erected the houses for the GLC as Walter Llewellyn & Sons Ltd. Grouped as five, six and five, the two-bay houses in the central group are larger, for eight persons, than those to either side, for six.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Ordnance Survey maps: Goad insurance maps: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control files 23553, 23565: interview with John Biggs by Shahed Saleem, 25 April 2016</p>\n",
"created": "2020-08-04",
"last_edited": "2020-10-02"
},
{
"id": 315,
"title": "13-15 Greatorex Street with 80 Old Montague Street, including the former Morris Kasler Hall (kosher luncheon club)",
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"body": "<p>This site was acquired by the adjacent Great Garden Street Synagogue in 1934 and a year later Messrs Joseph, architects, prepared plans for two buildings, to be a welfare centre and antenatal clinic for the Federation of Synagogues. These were approved, but not seen through. The site stood empty until 1961–2 when development was carried out through Dennis S. Lichtig, architect, and J. Hyde & Co. Ltd, builders, to provide the synagogue with a single-storey communal hall. In the late 1960s this was named the Morris Kasler Hall, after a leading member of the congregation, and became home to the Kosher Luncheon Club, filling a gap caused by the demise of the area’s small Kosher restaurants. Above were two storeys containing four flats.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Much of the synagogue's congregation and the Federation’s adjoining offices moved away, but the luncheon club, the last of its kind and among the last manifestations of the Jewish East End, continued up to 1994, having endured a racist arson attack in 1992. The complex was acquired by the Bethnal Green Business Development Centre Trust, with the help of a European Union grant as part of the Bethnal Green City Challenge, for a conversion to offices and studios. This was carried out in 1999 by Ankur Architects for use as a Business Development Centre. There are six flats above the former hall, the block having been raised a storey in the late 1990s.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 13771: jewisheastendmemorymap.org/?feature_type=polygon&id=93d=93: private collection, sales particulars, 1934</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 20 October 1994; 27 February 1997, p. 13: <em>Hamaor – Journal of the Federation of Synagogues</em>, 1997: Tower Hamlets planning applications online: Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, <em>Rodinsky’s Room</em>, 1999, pp. 36-41, 168-70</p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-30",
"last_edited": "2020-10-21"
},
{
"id": 483,
"title": "Sufia Alam's recollections of working at the Jagonari Women's Centre",
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"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"properties": {
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"body": "<p>I started at the Wapping Womens’ Centre in 2009…. And I was also a senior manager at the Jagonari Centre in the bigger projects, which was empowering and timely for me, it enabled me to come out of my comfort zone.</p>\n\n<p>One of the projects that we did was the ‘End It’ programme for domestic violence, which was a big milestone for this community because especially women’s organisations got a lot of bad press around women breaking marriages, as perceived by men. So it was a nice project we did with the mosque, it was my first encounter of getting the mosque on board.</p>\n\n<p>The Jagonari was going through some difficulties in 2013, and soon after I left it went into liquidation…. The Jagonari Centre was inclusive to women, not just Bangladeshi women, which is what it set out to be. Our focus was to empower women to be active citizens within the community, and this was happening. Women were progressing well in education, taking up careers, jobs, training. So we felt that we could offer that to more women.</p>\n\n<p>One of the successful projects that came out was ‘Women Ahead’ which was working with women offenders who had come through the prison system, and we were integrating them back into society. So we had Muslim and non-Muslim women, and women from other faiths working together. Some people found it difficult because they didn’t like that change, and I think that’s where things went a bit pear-shaped. When you introduce a different community change will happen, and especially with that particular project it was women from a particular group where integrating them was a different process than integration Muslim or Bangladeshi families. These were women, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, who had been through the Criminal Justice System or they’d suffered domestic violence through which they were driven to criminal acts. We were working with them in assisting with employment and empowerment that would prevent them to offend again.</p>\n\n<p>There were some Bangladeshi women, Pakistani and mostly English women. Even though the majority of the young senior managers felt this was the place where a wide range of communities could be served, the managers felt this should not be the focus of Jagonari. That, with the fact that the council put in a corporate rent, which went from peppercorn to corporate, which meant that with the market values around here, we couldn’t afford to pay, and along with funding cuts, it made it very difficult to stay.</p>\n\n<p>We fought a legal battle in terms of trying to get the original lease retained, so a lot of the surplus was used up in legal costs, and that’s where it went downhill, and a lot of people were laid off. </p>\n\n<p>Sufia Alam was in conversation with Shahed Saleem on 15.05.17</p>\n",
"created": "2017-10-06",
"last_edited": "2020-10-12"
},
{
"id": 199,
"title": "From Gower's Walk to homes in Hessen",
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"username": "bryan_mawer"
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"properties": {
"b_number": "52 to 58",
"b_name": "52 to 58 Commercial Road",
"street": "Commercial Road",
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"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 10,
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"body": "<p>On the east side of Gower's Walk on the corner of what is now Commercial Road (formerly part of Church Lane) stood a sugarhouse. It was run by John Walton and Johann George Wicke from around 1790, though it had probably been built by others some years earlier. Walton died in 1804 and Wicke continued the business through to his death in 1829. He instructed that the leasehold sugarhouse, dwelling house, warehouse and premises in his own occupation, and the adjoining dwelling house, cooperage, warehouses and premises, were to be sold. There was probably nothing remarkable about this group of buildings other than their height compared to the surrounding dwellings, but George Wicke is certainly worthy of comment.</p>\n\n<p>A single man, sugar refining made him very wealthy indeed. His will not only shows his thought and generosity towards his employees and to many local schools and charities, but also that he left sums to a number of parishes in his native Hessen, Germany, for investment in land, the rents from which were to support the education of deserving children. Further sums of £5000 were left to each of four young family members in Hessen with which they built family homes. Unlike his refinery buildings, these beautiful dwellings are still in use and in wonderful condition. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Mawer, Sugar Refiners & Sugarbakers, Wicke: <a href=\"http://www.mawer.clara.net/wicke.html\">www.mawer.clara.net/wicke.html</a></p>\n",
"created": "2016-11-21",
"last_edited": "2021-07-20"
},
{
"id": 206,
"title": "The Blue Anchor public house",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"properties": {
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"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "Bar Indo (formerly the Blue Anchor Public House), 133 Whitechapel Road",
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"body": "<p>There has been a pub here since at least the eighteenth century, probably earlier. Until the late 1760s it was known as the David and Harp. An alley on the site of No. 131, present since at least the 1650s, was called King David’s Alley or David and Harp Alley. In 1770 Edward Rayner appears to have been the first proprietor to have called the establishment the Blue Anchor (Whitechapel’s earlier Blue Anchor was on what is now Royal Mint Street). Destroyed by fire on Christmas Day in 1853, the Blue Anchor was rebuilt for George Church in 1854 by William Mundy & Son, builders. Church obtained a music licence in 1856. His building still stands, its four-storey stuccoed Italianate front packed with arched openings. The ground-floor front and interior, where match-board dados and a yellowed ornamental ceiling survive, were recast for Charringtons in 1928 by when the pub was known as the Old Blue Anchor. From 2000 to 2019 it continued as Bar Indo, a free house, with the old Blue Anchor sign in store. A timber cottage to the west, beyond a narrow throughway to a yard that was a remnant of the alley, was replaced in 1855 with a narrow shophouse, Hall & Son as its builders. This echoed the pub in its façade and blocked the passage. It survives in mutilated form as No. 131.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Land Tax: Old Bailey Online, t17650918-57: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 28 Sept. 1813: Drapers’ Company Archives, S44,59,83–85: <em>Standard</em>, 26 Dec. 1853: London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1770/12/024; MR/L/MD/0608: District Surveyors Returns</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2016-12-12",
"last_edited": "2020-10-13"
},
{
"id": 298,
"title": "1 Whitechapel Road and 2-8 Osborn Street",
"author": {
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>There was a Post Office at Whitechapel Road's east corner with Osborn Street from the 1840s. This came to be known as the ‘Russian’ Post Office, incorporating the ‘Ghetto Bank’, which was heavily used for remittances to eastern Europe, continuing into the twentieth century as Feldman’s Yiddish Post Office. From the 1890s there were kosher wine stores to its rear along Osborn Street adjoining the Victoria Wine Company depot.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>A large Second World War bombsite at the Whitechapel Road/Osborn Street corner saw temporary post-war use by stallholders. The four-storey corner building was built in 1957–8 to designs by Hugh V. Sprince, architect, by Walter Gladding & Co. Ltd, local builders (14 Davenant Street), for the freeholder, Tobias Chapper, of Wembley, to whom the property had come from D. Chapper, a wholesale hosier on Whitechurch Lane. Plans for the block to extend further along Whitechapel Road came to nothing. The upper storeys were let to be a clothing factory.</p>\n\n<p>From around 1996 to 2015, when it was converted to be a branch of Efes Turkish Restaurant, the corner restaurant here was the Clifton, one of Brick Lane’s best-known names. Musa Patel (1939–1996, of Pakistani origin) is said to have opened the Clifton at 124 Brick Lane in 1967, this reportedly being the first licensed ‘Indian’ restaurant in the street. Soon after a café at 108 Brick Lane became the Clifton Kebab House.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Post Office Directories: George R. Sims, <em>Living London: Its Work and its Play, etc</em>, vol.1, 1901, pp.24–8: Museum of London, 004501, photograph by John Galt, <em>c.</em>1900: Samantha Bird, <em>Stepney Then and No</em>w, 2013, p.29</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 15904: London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/AR/BR/17/060131: Post Office Directories: [Claire Alexander, Seán Carey, Sundeep Lidher, Suzi Hall and Julia King, <em>Beyond Banglatown: Continuity, change and new urban economies in Brick Lane</em>, 2020, at www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/RunnymedeBanglatownReport.pdf</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-24",
"last_edited": "2021-01-04"
},
{
"id": 470,
"title": "Photos and notes on data centres",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"properties": {
"b_number": "6",
"b_name": "Camperdown House, 6 Braham Street",
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"body": "<p>See more photos here: <a href=\"https://wheretheinternetlives.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/6-braham-street/\">https://wheretheinternetlives.wordpress.com/2016/07/01/6-braham-street/</a></p>\n",
"created": "2017-09-04",
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}
]
}