HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET, HEAD, OPTIONS
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept
{
"count": 1059,
"next": "https://surveyoflondon.org/api/v1/documents/?format=api&page=7",
"previous": "https://surveyoflondon.org/api/v1/documents/?format=api&page=5",
"results": [
{
"id": 109,
"title": "Units Workshops, 1-13 Adler Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 98,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.067624278430134,
51.51582673751899
],
[
-0.067266745341531,
51.51526486267481
],
[
-0.067443979235003,
51.51522070947007
],
[
-0.067791271739465,
51.515783687309835
],
[
-0.067624278430134,
51.51582673751899
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "1-13",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Adler Street",
"address": "1-13 Adler Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 7,
"search_str": "1-13 Adler Street"
},
"tags": [
"flatted factory",
"London County Council"
]
},
"body": "<p>The <em>County of London Plan</em> of 1943 prescribed distinct zones of activity, recommending the dispersal of industry away from London’s inner boroughs. It was recognised, however, that small factories and workshops, heretofore scattered hither and thither, could not realistically be banished but would need in some degree to be kept close to the housing of those they employed and gathered together in low-rent premises. The plan therefore recommended the building of flatted or ‘unit’ factories, ‘which have proved suitable for clothing, some types of light engineering, light chemicals and chemists’ preparations, and furniture, although the latter will require more room for saw benches.’[^1] In keeping with this the Stepney–Poplar Reconstruction Scheme of the late 1940s envisaged an industrial enclave to either side of Plumbers Row, a heavily bombed area that extended west to Adler Street. Denys Munby presented formidable evidence in favour of industrial relocation in <em>Industry and Planning in Stepney: A Report presented to the Stepney Reconstruction Group </em>(1951). But, having investigated multi-storey flatted factories, the LCC reaffirmed their desirability in East London in 1954 as redevelopment began to swing into action. A Unit Factories programme was begun and an exemplar followed at Long Street in Haggerston in 1958–9. Further support for this approach to keeping employment local had come from Michael Young and Peter Willmott.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Compulsory purchase and other difficulties meant that Walter Bor, the planner–architect in charge of redevelopment in Stepney in the LCC Architects’ Department’s Town Planning Division, had to revisit plans for the Plumbers Row area in 1959 to accept mixed use before he had worked up a scheme for unit factories/workshops. He turned to another cleared bombsite on the west side of Adler Street (beyond the zone) and alternatives for a two-storey building were prepared and revised. Yorke, Rosenberg & Mardall were engaged to see the job through in 1961 and prepared a scheme for a five-storey block to house fifteen units of from 600 to 2,200 square feet for light industry or wholesale showrooms above seven ground-floor shops, with access galleries off two stair and lift landings to permit subdivision. A specification for fair-faced concrete finish of the highest standard was questioned but approved as being of ‘architectural importance’. When tenders came in too high, the architects were obliged to reduce the estimate of £124,520 by £22,000. In the event the contract went to William Willett (Contractors) Ltd in 1963 for £110,430 and the building was completed in 1964. Early tenants were mostly in the rag trade, largely tailors.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Built with a reinforced-concrete frame and grey-brick infill panels on a regular grid, there is cantilevering that with the recessed galleries gives this building’s long elevations dramatic Modernist geometry. Much of the fair-faced concrete has been painted, rougher aggregate staying exposed on the gallery rails. Parts of the building have been adapted for educational use, the second and third floors unified for the Icon College of Technology and Management London.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: J. H. Forshaw and Patrick Abercrombie, <em>County of London Plan</em>, 1943, pp.97–8.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Michael Young and Peter Willmott, <em>Family and Kinship in East London</em>, 1957, pp.165–6: <em>Architects' Journal</em>, 23 April 1959, pp.625–34.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/THL/D/1/1/267: London Metropolitan Archives, LCC/AR/CON/02/9117: <em>Architectural Review</em>, Jan 1963, pp.52–3: Post Office Directories.</p>\n",
"created": "2016-08-26",
"last_edited": "2019-08-19"
},
{
"id": 543,
"title": "The Ducking Pond and adjacent early developments",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 613,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.060289552921225,
51.52000892125181
],
[
-0.060286879791474,
51.520005760930346
],
[
-0.060166355858229,
51.52003947820785
],
[
-0.060160847216767,
51.520032449362226
],
[
-0.05970639544274,
51.520155226770356
],
[
-0.059710807421086,
51.52016092952866
],
[
-0.059518651440827,
51.520215490572035
],
[
-0.059512564248735,
51.52020717281191
],
[
-0.059063844086707,
51.52033796304043
],
[
-0.059074141662118,
51.52035157951227
],
[
-0.059055975946971,
51.520356480356625
],
[
-0.058951966764275,
51.52038574415594
],
[
-0.058849748657421,
51.520416898438704
],
[
-0.058823368857625,
51.52041875970091
],
[
-0.058775292742479,
51.52040995952855
],
[
-0.058735715353432,
51.52038418575662
],
[
-0.058716262272256,
51.52035231572314
],
[
-0.058403734290675,
51.51989671038118
],
[
-0.058497299220453,
51.51987144952073
],
[
-0.058582084480285,
51.51984914106043
],
[
-0.058857898256129,
51.52025214072288
],
[
-0.058846988996878,
51.52025222114404
],
[
-0.058837311186921,
51.52025506688368
],
[
-0.058831327755901,
51.52026217537856
],
[
-0.058831549058999,
51.5202675357201
],
[
-0.058837332948331,
51.520274732333704
],
[
-0.058850235442817,
51.5202815556098
],
[
-0.058864679645244,
51.520286685496785
],
[
-0.058881386958285,
51.52028989554017
],
[
-0.058898480378179,
51.520290351228155
],
[
-0.058916818838781,
51.52028555251154
],
[
-0.058919492017624,
51.52027724159061
],
[
-0.058914305358899,
51.52026619400672
],
[
-0.05944900155929,
51.52011563983706
],
[
-0.059444148714767,
51.52010884007606
],
[
-0.059635195085777,
51.52005571429474
],
[
-0.059639896920844,
51.52006168126916
],
[
-0.060173298813551,
51.51991090731141
],
[
-0.060182832999735,
51.51992458729116
],
[
-0.060220634024459,
51.51991443943455
],
[
-0.060289552921225,
51.52000892125181
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "2",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Durward Street",
"address": "Kempton Court (2 Durward Street and 7-23 Brady Street)",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 5,
"search_str": "Kempton Court (2 Durward Street and 7-23 Brady Street)"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>Part of a natural watercourse known as the Black Ditch that flowed through Stepney from Shoreditch to Limehouse formed the irregular northernmost boundary to this part of the parish of Whitechapel. This was canalised as a common sewer that turned south outside the parish to the east (across what became the Albion Brewery site), and was used as part of a burial ground during the plague of 1665. origins of Whitechapel’s Ducking Pond, so called by 1715 when it was leased to Joseph Gosden (John Bosley took it for 90 years in 1739), may have to do with this watercourse. The pond has been associated with punishments, as by see-saw and as connected to witch-trials, and it was close to the manorial court and a pound that stood to the east beyond Mile End Gate. However, it is more likely that its name derives from the sport of setting dogs on ducks, as with other sites of the same name on London’s margins in Clerkenwell and Mayfair. Even so, it was a sufficient body of water for women twice to be found drowned therein, in 1753 and 1798. In 1768 it was resorted to by rebellious silk-weavers, known as ‘cutters’, for the destruction of cloth produced below piecework rates. The Ducking Pond was perhaps a casualty of water extraction for distilling, carried out on a large scale to the north from the 1760s. Its site was built over in the early years of the nineteenth century when what survives in part as Winthrop Street was formed as Watson’s Buildings. The name Buck’s Row was in use by 1780 and had wholly superseded Ducking Pond Row by the 1840s.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>From the manorial Court House on the corner with what is now Court Street eastwards, the south side of Ducking Pond Row was densely built up by the 1740s. Development behind the present site of 287–293 Whitechapel Road can be traced back to Henry Allam, a Whitechapel blacksmith and gunner, who leased the land in 1591. At the beginning of the eighteenth century ownership passed to Edward Elderton, a grazier and butcher who held lands south of Whitechapel Road. In 1722, when this property to the west of Yorkshire Court was taken by John White, a tallow chandler, there were two new houses. Among the buildings on Ducking Pond Row was White’s melting house, a forerunner of a slaughterhouse on land that became part of the Spencer Phillips estate.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The road that is now Brady Street (previously Ducking Pond Lane, then extended as North Street and again renamed in 1875) was a 40ft-wide cart- or horse-way in the 1670s leading to meadows owned by Ralph Thickens and tenanted by Abraham Carnal (or Carnell), a brick-maker. West of his property a 60ft frontage on the north side of Ducking Pond Row was leased from the manor for 500 years in 1672 by Thomas Blakesley, a Whitechapel weaver. Ducking Pond Lane’s frontages south of Ducking Pond Row were thickly built up by the 1740s, incorporating to the west a court of eight small houses known as Pratt’s Rents. From 1761 there was a Jewish cemetery to the north, across the parish boundary in Bethnal Green.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Whitechapel Distillery aside there was a lot more noxious land use in the area to either side of 1800. Matthew Horne had a bone house on Ducking Pond Lane in the 1770s, and Thomas Whitwell, probably another distiller, was near White’s Row in the eighteenth century. George Monks, a night-man, took a large plot of land on what was to become the west side of North Street in 1797 for the dumping of night soil. William Monk had at least some of this as a bone ground by 1822 when this corner of the parish was ‘wholly occupied by Horse Slaughterers, Nightmen and Bone Choppers’.[^4] Monk also held what had been the tallow chandler’s site on the south side of Watson’s Buildings west of what was now Nelson Court. By 1833 his slaughterhouse there had been taken by William Barber. It kept going as one of Harrison Barber & Co.’s seven London slaughter depots, with redevelopment in 1901–2, only closing around 1950 (see Lily Austin's memories alongside this account).[^5]</p>\n\n<p>The wedge of land between Buck’s Row and Watson’s Buildings (Little North Street by 1850, then Winthrop Street from 1883), which had been taken as an extension of the distillery in 1829, was solidly built up with terraces of sixty almost back-to-back two-storey houses following a lease of 1861 to George Torr who ran a manure works to the north. Building on Little North Street continued into the 1870s and the houses stood into the 1970s. Buildings along Brady Street including the Roebuck public house at No. 27 on the Durward Street corner stood until 1996.[^6] Winthrop Street itself retained nineteenth-century granite setts.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Joel Gascoyne’s maps, 1703: Drapers' Company Archives, Pemel's Trust, O10: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), M/93/138; M/93/272; E/PHI/75a: <em>Read’s Weekly Journal</em>, 26 May 1753: <em>Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser</em>, 23 Nov 1769: <em>Mirror of the Times</em>, 1–8 Sept 1798: Richard Horwood's maps, 1799 and 1813</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Transport for London Group Archives (TfLGA), LT000555/617/1–8: LMA, E/PHI/39,54–55,62–63</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: TfLGA, LT002051/1077, 2407: John Rocque's map, 1746: LMA, E/PHI/75A-B</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: LMA, M/93/333</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, E/PHI/397–9: London County Council Minutes, 8 Oct 1901, pp. 1189,1195: District Surveyors Returns: Goad maps, 1890: William John Gordon, <em>The Horse-World of London</em>, 1893, pp.183–9: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: TfLGA, LT002009/451: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2018-01-03",
"last_edited": "2018-01-08"
},
{
"id": 583,
"title": "The Whitechapel 'fatberg'",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1698,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.062755898137067,
51.51857235799611
],
[
-0.058216859270041,
51.51960039921044
],
[
-0.058148482851386,
51.51948612756745
],
[
-0.061091729886378,
51.51883423152082
],
[
-0.061616259170046,
51.51871888429734
],
[
-0.06270768344222,
51.51847582817058
],
[
-0.062755898137067,
51.51857235799611
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "Whitechapel Market, Whitechapel Road",
"feature_type": "PLACE",
"count": 48,
"search_str": "Whitechapel Market, Whitechapel Road"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>The Whitechapel ‘fatberg’, a congealed mass of solid sewage, among the largest ever found at about 250m long and 130 tonnes was removed from the sewer under this side of this section of Whitechapel Road by Thames Water in late 2017. A section is on display at the Museum of London in early 2018.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-02-21",
"last_edited": "2020-10-20"
},
{
"id": 834,
"title": "The early history of the Dock Street and Ensign Street area",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1385,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.067575803709333,
51.51021492278667
],
[
-0.067783647338447,
51.51017527172947
],
[
-0.067828706900756,
51.510167293395675
],
[
-0.067884358000762,
51.51028332470727
],
[
-0.068021222270461,
51.51026117174896
],
[
-0.068027105232624,
51.51027869995762
],
[
-0.068059007104689,
51.51027341168682
],
[
-0.068045803249401,
51.51025517119752
],
[
-0.068185711037114,
51.51022956959143
],
[
-0.068302205657116,
51.51049311218949
],
[
-0.068154065018083,
51.51051508999573
],
[
-0.068142111677326,
51.51048931210634
],
[
-0.068158013519995,
51.51048782991857
],
[
-0.0680993992664,
51.51035372697415
],
[
-0.068063773094401,
51.51035895389879
],
[
-0.068055396596396,
51.510336723241444
],
[
-0.067963562571312,
51.510349163498944
],
[
-0.067961653646245,
51.510339150568754
],
[
-0.067909585576321,
51.510347692789416
],
[
-0.067933270683552,
51.5104044774377
],
[
-0.067674158297256,
51.51045078856997
],
[
-0.067629160671485,
51.51036923447038
],
[
-0.067652633918951,
51.51036497018876
],
[
-0.067575803709333,
51.51021492278667
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "7",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Dock Street",
"address": "Wombat's City Hostel, 7 Dock Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 25,
"search_str": "Wombat's City Hostel, 7 Dock Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>The lands immediately west of Well Close were gardens in the outer precinct of the Cistercian abbey of St Mary Graces from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. They were irregularly built up by and during the late seventeenth century. A substantial copyhold property either side of all but the south end of Salt Petre Bank was enfranchised in 1655 by parties led by Henry Loades, a merchant adventurer whose principal claim to fame appears to be that he gave a rattlesnake to the Royal Society for dissection. The land then reportedly housed just three houses and three cottages, though the wider address was recorded as hosting 37 mostly two-hearth properties in 1675. Ten years on Loades’s property was recorded as holding seven houses, five cottages and a glasshouse. That explains Salt Petre Bank (Dock Street's earlier name) – saltpeter was used in glass manufacturing. By 1678 Edward Dallow was making green bottle glass on the southern part of the land between the bank (road) and the close; Philip Dallow was appointed royal glassmaker in 1689. Rocque’s map of the 1740s shows Glass House Yard to the southwest and Glass House Hill, a mound in open space, to the centre east. The Dallows also had a second glasshouse in the vicinity; there was another Glass House Yard north of East Smithfield further west (see p.xx). The Salt Petre Bank glassmaking premises passed to Richard Russell, senior then junior, and their partners in the mid to late eighteenth century. A large house on the west side of Well Street with at least one ornamental ceiling, which had probably pertained to the Dallows, was insured in 1768 by the elder Russell who also held several local pubs (the Horse and Horseshoe, the Black Boy, and the Black Horse, see below), and other local property. </p>\n\n<p>Well Street was formed as such as part of the Well Close (Marine Square) development led by Nicholas Barbon. In leases of 1683 the whole of its west side went to John Hinde, a goldsmith banker, and the east side was divided between Hinde, Felix Calvert (Calverd), a brewer, and John Wilson. Among numerous sub-leases William Prideaux, an associate of Barbon’s, took more than a dozen house plots that were generally 16ft wide. The east side was soon mostly built up, and four two-storey houses of this period survived into the 1960s as 21–27 Ensign Street. The west side, where glassmaking continued, stayed mostly open except at its north end. Loades Court, north of the glasshouse on the Sailors’ Home site, was a late seventeenth-century development of six houses. Henry Loades senior died in 1696, his son Dr Henry Loades, a physician, in 1698 when the estate was divided among heirs. By 1772, when copyholds hereabouts were enfranchised, John Ekins, treasurer at the Royal Exchange Assurance Office, had control of the property, subsequently held in trust by John Webster followed by Thomas Webster.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>There were many other courts and alleys. On the Loades estate off the west side of Salt Petre Bank, and beyond a large skittle ground set back from the Rosemary Lane junction, there was, from north to south and connecting to White’s Yard (later Glasshouse Street then John Fisher Street): Half Moon Court (gone by the 1790s); Hog Yard (later Shorter’s Rents then Flank Street) leading with a northerly dogleg to Cherubin/m Court; and Black Boy Court. Carpenters Yard ran south off what was the east end of Rosemary Lane, now the west end of Cable Street, and was also gone by the 1790s. Numerous small houses included some back-to-back groups. Some small timber houses stood on the east side of what had been Salt Petre Bank until the 1840s. Inhabitants were generally poor. From the mid 1680s a watch house stood at Well Street’s junction with what became Cable Street. That too had gone by the 1790s. </p>\n\n<p>From at least the 1690s there was a brewery midway along the west side of Salt Petre Bank, north of the Black Boy and its eponymous court. Salt Petre Bank’s other public houses were the Black Lion, the Cart and Horses, and the Two Pots, all there by 1730 and soon joined by the King of Prussia near Rosemary Lane. There was also the Horse (later Horns) and Horseshoe on Rosemary Lane’s south side where it met Cable Street, the Black Horse on Well Street’s west side, and, by the end of the century, the Royal Standard opposite on the south side of Graces Alley. The Salt Petre Bank brewery was held by James Stutter by 1776 and then leased for 60 years in 1802 to Anthony Calvert of the Wapping-based victuallers, Camden, Calvert and King, who intended but did not carry out redevelopment.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>There was a sugarhouse on Salt Petre Bank from the 1720s, possibly on the site on the west side that pertained to Thomas Hodgson from about 1830. It passed through many hands including those of Daniel Austin from 1798. In about 1752 John Arney established another sugarhouse on the east side of Well Street, with premises extending back to Wellclose Square. His son Scheve Arney was succeeded here by Ludwig Witte in 1800 and the building was enlarged around 1810. John Wagener enlarged again, to the northeast, in the 1850s, with Charles Dyson as his architect. Sugar refining ceased here in the early 1870s.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Carsten Dirs and Major Rohde were refining sugar elsewhere on Well Street in the 1760s and 70s (possibly further south), then Diederich Wackerbarth and Samuel Maud had a seven-storey sugarhouse from the 1780s to about 1815 on what had been Glass House Hill, part of the site that is now 18 Ensign Street. Around 1801 three more substantial sugar houses were built all but in a row on the east side of Salt Petre Bank replacing houses near its north end. Sixty-one year Loades estate leases went to Maud, J. S. Meyer, and Smith, Suhrsen & Austin. These buildings were cleared in the 1840s. Land to the south between Salt Petre Bank and Well Street was open as a deal yard, leased to James Nowlan in 1801. Samuel Deakin, an oil merchant on Well Street, leased ground here in 1809 to William Everhard, Baron von Doornik, Edmund Griffith and Jeremiah Donovan. They built the Phoenix Patent Soap Manufactory, substantial premises that included three-storey warehousing and a gateway graced by a carved and gilt phoenix and Royal Arms, to exploit Everhard’s patent for making soap for use in seawater, for sale to the Navy and other seafarers. The venture failed, bankruptcy following a year later. [^4] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/MMD/1/1–7; P/MMD/2/2; P/SLC/1/17/37–9; P/LEL/1/1: The National Archives (TNA), E179/143/370, f.35v; PROB11/435/326; PROB11/445/52: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MDR1772/3/168–9, /172–3, /192–3; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/337/516926; MS11936/321/491470; Land Tax returns (LT): John M. Sims, ‘The Trust Lands of the Fire Office’, <em>Guildhall Miscellany</em>, vol. 4/no. 2, April 1972, pp. 98,109,111: William Morgan, <em>London etc Actually Survey'd</em>, 1682: Rocque's map, 1746: Historic England Archives, RCHM inventory card, 1928: Charles Hutton et al (eds), <em>The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London</em>, vol. 2, 1809, p. 561: Derek Morris and Ken Cozens, <em>Wapping 1600–1800</em>, 2009, pp. 140–1</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, MR/LV/05/026; LT: TNA, WO55/1776: THLHLA, P/MMD/1/2–7; P/MMD/2/1–2: Morgan: Rocque: Horwood's map, 1799 and 1813: Morris and Cozens, <em>Wapping</em>, pp. 52–55</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, THCS/214; MBO Plans/440–2; LT: THLHLA, P/FAR/1/3/3/1; P/FAR/1/3/8: Bryan Mawer, surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1395/detail</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THLHLA, P/MMD/2/1–2; L/THL/J/1/16/13: LMA, THCS/280; LT: Horwood: TNA, C217/59: Mawer, surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1370/detail/</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-01",
"last_edited": "2020-12-11"
},
{
"id": 878,
"title": "Rag Fair and Rosemary Lane to 1840",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1700,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.070945132337544,
51.51021419997014
],
[
-0.070951067578723,
51.5102277140376
],
[
-0.070898811199882,
51.51023714629324
],
[
-0.070917381971465,
51.51027716141803
],
[
-0.070881130885056,
51.51028295731296
],
[
-0.070862738106381,
51.510248608310874
],
[
-0.070769476297735,
51.51026743533961
],
[
-0.070788252129627,
51.510301925514284
],
[
-0.070753203361862,
51.51030775757811
],
[
-0.070735310409513,
51.51027458406735
],
[
-0.07068160237232,
51.51028211859123
],
[
-0.070640721365031,
51.51018467843966
],
[
-0.070890187021744,
51.510140890147795
],
[
-0.070889379574192,
51.510138140235156
],
[
-0.070901160084848,
51.510135712013096
],
[
-0.070945132337544,
51.51021419997014
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "23-29",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Royal Mint Street",
"address": "23-29 Royal Mint Street, Royal Mint Estate",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 7,
"search_str": "23-29 Royal Mint Street, Royal Mint Estate"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>Rag Fair, held in Rosemary Lane and thriving by 1700, was by far London’s largest used clothing market in the eighteenth century. It continued with gradual decline until after 1900. Trading was mainly handled by women, unlicensed and in large part in stolen goods. It happened on six afternoons a week (not Sundays) along the whole length of Rosemary Lane. The market was much opposed by some, and much enjoyed by others. Repeated attempts to suppress it failed. ‘Rosemary Lane and Rag Fair possessed one of the most powerfully articulated reputations for disorder of any London street.’[^1] </p>\n\n<p>In 1699 Ned Ward described the street as ‘a Savory place, which in Ridicule of fragrant Fumes that arise from musty rotten Rags, and burnt old Shoes is call’d by the sweet Name of <em>Rosemary-Lane</em>’, a place frequented by a ‘Tatter’d Multitude’ and ‘all the Rag-pickers in Town’.[^2] The market was mainly out in the open in the street, but Rag Fair did give rise to some market buildings on its north side. Immediately west of what had been Swallow’s house was the Great Exchange, a storeyed range at the back of a large open yard. Built by ‘Captain’ Richard Johnson following the acquisition of a 99-year lease in June 1741, it was complete by 1746. Johnson had been speculating in property on the Leman estate since the 1720s when he established the Royal Bagnio on the east side of Leman Street. He also had a share of the Alie Street playhouse. Within a year of Johnson’s lease the Great Exchange was advertised as ‘near a hundred Shops open’d, where all manner of Apparel, Table and Bed Linen, new and second-hand, are sold cheaper than any other Place in London; also ready Money given for all-manner of cast off Cloaths.’[^3] ‘Johnson’s Change’, sometimes so-called, was inherited with the rest of Johnson’s estate by his ‘friend’ Catherine Roberts when he died in 1769. Empty in 1781, the Exchange was soon after redeveloped as Johnson’s Buildings, with Back Change to the north, numerous small houses in a ‘cluster of four courts’.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>Between Mill Yard and Backchurch Lane off the north side of Cable Street were the smaller Old Exchange and New Exchange. These appear to have antedated Johnson’s Exchange. The New Exchange, present by 1736 and seemingly first held by Nicholas Guestor, was described as a square where people brought old clothes to sell, and as having both shops and cheap lodgings. This was in ruins in 1781 and both these easterly depots were gone by the 1790s.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>Clothes-selling aside, Rag Fair was also an important base for thief-takers in the first half of the eighteenth century, and a centre of prostitution, with sailors being a prevalent related presence. By the mid 1680s there was a watch house of some form at the east end of Rosemary Lane. The challenge that Rag Fair presented to local administration led to this being given more durable form in 1708 through the erection of a new building in the middle of the road at the north end of Well Street, where eastwards continuation became Cable Street. This east end of Rosemary Lane was the site of the culmination of an anti-Irish riot in 1736, a protest against cheap labour, there being a significant Irish population south of Rosemary Lane. The watch house had gone by the 1790s.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>In 1730 Rosemary Lane’s Whitechapel frontages had fifteen public houses: the Blue Anchor, the Chequers, the Crown, the Crown and Pump, the Five Golden Pots, the Fountain, the Half Moon and Seven Stars, the Red Lion and Crown, the Rosemary Branch, the Sugar Loaf, the Sun and Sword, the Tobacco Rolls, the Waterman’s Arms, the Whale, and the Windmill. The King of Prussia was in Blue Anchor Yard.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>By 1706 the Abell estate had passed to another William Abell who leased the Board of Ordnance’s waggon-store yard to William Ogbourne (<em>c.</em>1662–1734), who from 1700 was the Board’s Master Carpenter and who had lived in the 1690s on Chamber Street. He had also been the surveyor (architect) for the Trinity Almshouses on the Mile End Road in the 1690s. Ogbourne used the extensive premises as a timber yard. He took the freehold from another Richard Abell in 1725, and was knighted in 1727 having served as Sheriff of London and Master of the Carpenters’ Company. After Ogbourne’s death in 1734 the timber yard passed via Edward Gatton to Henry Craswell, and thence to Richard Maddock as Maddock, Craswell & Co., and into the nineteenth century to James Maddock for Maddock and Gibson’s deal yard.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>There was still a degree of social mix and good-sized houses continued to go up. Taking a 61-year lease from John Turvin, a citizen haberdasher, Samuel Hawkins, citizen carpenter, built three three-storey and basement (eight-room) brick houses near the east (White Lion Street) end of Rosemary Lane’s north side in 1729–30 and also undertook to build at least three more similar houses adjoining in 1735. Hawkins Court and Nicholls Court (after John Nicholls) appeared between Abel’s Buildings and White Lion Street. The White Lion was on the eponymous street’s west side, next door to the White Swan at the corner of the northern or east–west arm of Abel’s Buildings.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>To the west, Rosemary Branch Alley led through to what was called Little Prescot Street by the first years of the eighteenth century. A Baptist chapel was built on the west side in 1730. What is claimed to be the oldest continuous Baptist congregation moved here from Wapping under the leadership of the Rev. Samuel Wilson. In 1841 the ‘ruinous effects’ of the arrival of the London and Blackwall Railway forced it to decide to move again, but a shift to Commercial Street did not happen until 1854–5.[^10]</p>\n\n<p>By 1771 the great house that had been Swallow’s had been divided and the building up of adjoining grounds included a soaphouse in what had previously been a brewhouse. Dense redevelopment of this area followed by the 1790s, with small houses around what continued to be called Swallow Gardens, a name that endured as applying to an alley under a railway arch that gained notoriety in 1891 as the site of the murder of Frances Coles.[^11] </p>\n\n<p>To the south the once abbatial garden ground west of Salt Petre Bank (later Dock Street) had been largely built up by 1680 with Blue Anchor Alley already then a spine for an irregular array of subsidiary courts. Goodson’s Rents lay to its east and beyond was White’s Yard (Glasshouse Street from 1867, then, in what had long been a strongly Roman Catholic district, John Fisher Street from 1936). Here poverty prevailed from an early date. In the southwest corner of the parish (as after 1694) there was a glasshouse run by the Dallow family in the decades either side of 1700. Even more intricate density had been stitched in by the 1740s, by when there was much Irish settlement in the area. Hare Brain Court and Money Bag Alley, east and west of Blue Anchor Yard, were an outlying part of the Loades estate, the rest of which was around Salt Petre Bank. Further south, where the glasshouse had been, Shall I Go Naked Street became New Martin (later Martan) Street in the 1750s when it was lined by rows of one-room plan houses each about 12ft square, twelve to the north, nine to the south with the Crown public house at the White’s Yard corner. Two-storey brick houses that were assessed as having been built in the early eighteenth century survived at what became 59 and 60 Royal Mint Street into the 1980s.</p>\n\n<p>Several copyhold tenancies in this area were enfranchised in 1772. In 1773 Thomas Barnes, a Whitechapel bricklayer in the early stages of what was to be a prolific career of high-volume low-quality housebuilding, agreed to put up two of twelve houses on Crown Court, east of Cartwright Square (another courtyard) on a plot that measured twenty-five feet by seventeen feet. Well Court (or Yard) west of Cartwright Street was developed in 1778–83 by a Mr Goodyear. Off Blue Anchor Yard, Sheen’s Buildings were put up by Samuel Sheene the Younger, a Rosemary Lane carpenter. Some of this was timber built, none of it was substantial. Outside Whitechapel to the west, the Weigh House School was formed in 1846 at the south end of Darby Street, just east of part of what had been the Aldgate Burial Ground, consecrated in 1615.[^12]</p>\n\n<p>There was a Jewish presence from an early date, with a ‘Rosemary Lane’ congregation said to have been formed in 1748. Jewish men became prevalent among Rag Fair’s heretofore largely female traders, as was attested by Francis Place, who thought the area a dangerous place.[^13] In the nineteenth century there was a gradual decline of the still largely street-based market in favour of more shop-oriented Petticoat Lane. Local housing descended into classically perceived rookery or slum conditions. Henry Mayhew saw many Jews in the street and said ‘they abound in the shops’.[^14]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Edward Ward, <em>The London-Spy Compleat</em>, 5th edition, 1718, p. 333</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Janice Turner, ‘An Anatomy of a “Disorderly” Neighbourhood: Rosemary Lane and Rag Fair <em>c.</em>1690–1765’. University of Hertfordshire PhD thesis, 2014, pp. i,148–153</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Daily Advertiser</em>, 18 May 1742: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Collage 35122</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Fourth Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners</em>, 1838, p. 145: LMA, Land Tax returns (LT): The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/951/259: : Derek Morris, <em>Whitechapel 1600–1800</em>, 2011, pp. 83–7</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LT: Turner, pp. 120–1,158–9: Richard Horwood's maps, 1813 and 1819 </p>\n\n<p>[^6]: TNA, WO55/1776: LMA, MJ/1708/10/21; MJ/SP/1708/10/57: <em>Daily Gazetteer</em>, 2 Aug 1736: George Rudé, ‘“Mother Gin” and the London Riots of 1736’,<em>Guildhall Miscellany</em>, no. 10, Sept. 1959, pp. 53–63: Turner, pp. 75–76, 81–6,199–298: Horwood</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: LMA, MR/LV/05/026; LT: Turner, p. 121</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, D-X3376/15: Howard Colvin, <em>A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1660-1840</em>, 3rd edn, 1995, p. 713: LT</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, DE/B737/T39: Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies, D-X337/18: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/WBW/13/17/2; L/WBW/13/18: Turner, p. 119</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>A memorial of mercies, trials and deliverances, realised by the first Baptist church, in removing from Prescot Street to Commercial Street</em>, 1856, pp. 1–5: <a href=\"http://www.stgitehistory.org.uk/media/dissenters1.html\">http://www.stgitehistory.org.uk/media/dissenters1.html</a>: Derek Morris, <em>Whitechapel 1600-1800</em>, 2011, pp. 101-2</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: LMA, Q/HAL/301; MDR/1767/4/466–474: Horwood: THLHLA, L/THL/J/1/16/23; P06369</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: LMA, M/93/028, pp.470–1; M/93/159/1; MR/B/C/1778/312–13; /1783/083–91; MDR1772/3/166–9, /182–3; MDR1772/5/122–3, /136–7: LT: William Morgan's map, 1682: THLHLA, L/THL/J/1/16/26; P/HLC/1/14/15; P/GLC/1/6/2; P/MMD/2/2: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, <em>An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London</em>, vol. 5: <em>East London</em>, 1930, p. 71: Turner, p. 119</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: https://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/London/EE_rosemary_ind/index.htm: British Library, Add MS 27827, ff.144–5; 27828, f.118: Turner, p. 20: Morris, pp. 112–13</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: Henry Mayhew, <em>London Labour and the London Poor</em>, vol. 2, 1861, p. 45: <em>Daily Graphic</em>, 10 Sept 1900</p>\n",
"created": "2019-04-26",
"last_edited": "2020-09-15"
},
{
"id": 886,
"title": "Grocers’ Company’s Wing and further expansion, 1873–6 ",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1230,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.06071898744648,
51.51847914149303
],
[
-0.060743358937849,
51.518529899918775
],
[
-0.060362148562617,
51.518618013153
],
[
-0.060404024127419,
51.51868851949335
],
[
-0.060356952993906,
51.51869974522794
],
[
-0.060399234817198,
51.51877056309998
],
[
-0.060042469531136,
51.5188530372297
],
[
-0.060006551123239,
51.51879256032364
],
[
-0.05997171006068,
51.51880061452483
],
[
-0.059923949522789,
51.51872019830377
],
[
-0.059602716389847,
51.51879445706454
],
[
-0.059631951693606,
51.51884368227145
],
[
-0.059135089420495,
51.51895853862307
],
[
-0.059031394281591,
51.51878393727422
],
[
-0.059075483581288,
51.51877374555587
],
[
-0.05923306113512,
51.518737319626666
],
[
-0.059261815633844,
51.518785736083466
],
[
-0.059453095208379,
51.51874286661955
],
[
-0.059437777096903,
51.51871791341666
],
[
-0.059509844762857,
51.518701022201654
],
[
-0.059472510825189,
51.51863713193043
],
[
-0.059893693119402,
51.51853565124978
],
[
-0.059897251108141,
51.51854177905041
],
[
-0.060406197614306,
51.5184267554985
],
[
-0.060388475186227,
51.51839623334771
],
[
-0.060226549751936,
51.51811735804654
],
[
-0.060490662909997,
51.51805857683586
],
[
-0.060500593175314,
51.518078725457706
],
[
-0.06071898744648,
51.51847914149303
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "",
"b_name": "Former Royal London Hospital",
"street": "",
"address": "Former Royal London Hospital ",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 53,
"search_str": "Former Royal London Hospital"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>The hospital expanded eastwards in 1873–6 with the construction of the Grocers’ Company’s Wing, a post mortem department and a nurses’ home. Their completion secured the London Hospital’s status as one the largest general hospitals in the country, with almost 800 beds. The only surviving remnant of this building programme is the north range of the Grocers’ Company’s Wing, which presents an orderly 120ft frontage to Whitechapel Road terminating at its junction with East Mount Street. Two bays of the south part of the wing survive in 2019; the rest was cleared in the 1960s for the construction of the Holland Wing.[^52] </p>\n\n<p>This significant enlargement was catalysed by rising numbers of inpatients. Despite the completion of the Alexandra Wing in 1866, the hospital struggled to keep pace with the demand for beds. In 1870 the house governor, William Nixon, recorded an ‘extreme pressure of inpatients’, exceeding 500 at any one time.[^53] Parts of the old medical college were converted into quarantine wards for contagious cases and wards for patients afflicted with erysipelas, a bacterial skin infection, opened in a single-storey building in East Mount Street. The provision of isolation wards evidently failed to secure a long-term solution to overcrowding. A few years later, Nixon reported an alarming ‘state of repletion’ in the wards.[^54] He declared that the hospital was ‘not large enough’ to fulfil the demands of the surrounding district, despite its strict policy of admitting only urgent and curable cases.[^55] This deficiency was exacerbated by the practice of providing separate accommodation for more than twenty-one types of inpatients, for the most part divided by gender, treatment, and medical condition. This classification system led to frequent shortages in beds for particular cases, which made it necessary to mix different types of patients in the wards. Additional room was most urgently required for medical cases, children and obstetric patients.[^56]</p>\n\n<p>The proposed solution was to extend the hospital to provide 200 additional beds, increasing the number of inpatients by a third. A public fundraising campaign was launched with the aim of securing £100,000 towards the construction and operating costs of an enlarged hospital. A new wing extending east from the central block was deemed preferable to ensure the proximity of wards to the ‘working centres’ of the hospital, namely the lifts, the staff offices, the laundry, the kitchen, the operating theatre, and the depository.[^57] The intended site was occupied by the old medical college and a carriage shed fronting Whitechapel Road, along with various workshops, sheds and stables in East Mount Street.[^58] The building programme was overseen by Charles Barry Jr, who had assumed the position of consulting architect to the hospital in 1870. The House Committee had reorganized Barry’s responsibilities amid concerns that he was ‘too much engaged in other directions to give sufficient personal attention to his duties’.[^59] He was invited to adopt an advisory role and to delegate supervision of repairs to a salaried surveyor. This task was assigned to J. A. Thornhill, the clerk of works during the construction of the Alexandra Wing.[^60] </p>\n\n<p>The centrepiece of this wave of hospital expansion was the Grocers’ Company’s Wing, named in recognition of a donation from the City livery company. Their gift was accompanied by various conditions, including that the wing should be completed within three years.[^61] While the House Committee had intended to postpone building work until the fundraising campaign had realized its target, the Company stipulated that construction should begin immediately.[^62] As the projected expense of the wing exceeded £25,000, it was reasoned that sole responsibility for its design should be entrusted to Barry. He planned a three-storey wing with a basement and attics, with an L-shaped plan composed of two blocks; a north range extending east from the front block in line with Whitechapel Road, and a south range running along East Mount Street. This arrangement preserved a yard between the extension and the main building, with the benefit of supplying light and ventilation to the inward-facing wards. The principal floors followed the pattern of the earlier ward wings in plan, comprising paired back-to-back wards separated by a central spine wall with fireplaces. Partitions at the west end of the wards formed linen stores and areas for water closets, kitchens and sinks. The attics provided dormitories for seventy nurses.[^63] </p>\n\n<p>The foundation stone was laid on 27 June 1874. Construction by Perry & Co. was complicated by the intended route of the East London Railway, set to curve beneath the north-east corner of the wing. As a precautionary measure, the foundations nearest the railway line were excavated to a depth of thirty-five feet and filled with concrete. The outward appearance of the wing matched the austerity of the Alexandra Wing, with plain brick elevations decorated by a string course and a dentil cornice of Portland stone. Its tiled roof was punctuated by pedimented dormer windows and tall brick chimneys with oversailing tops. Two rear sanitary towers rose above the roofline of the wing with louvred openings and steeply pitched roofs; one contained a water tank and the other was fitted with a ventilation shaft. There were fireproof floors. At street level, a wooden carriage shed built in 1876 occupied the narrow stretch between the north front and Whitechapel Road.[^64] </p>\n\n<p>The Grocers’ Company’s Wing was formally opened by Queen Victoria in March 1876, in a celebration reported to have lent ‘an attractive and joyous aspect to (an) ordinarily dull and dingy but busy quarter’.[^65] In the following months, patients were moved gradually into the new wards, which were praised for their ‘light and pleasant aspect’.[^66] The wards were fitted with specialized ventilation systems devised by Thomas Elsley and George Jennings. Two rows of evenly spaced beds extended across the long walls of each ward. This utilitarian arrangement was relieved by potted flowers and pictures on the walls, and formal plaques bearing the name of each ward. At the time of writing (2019), the appearance and plan of the north range of the Grocers’ Company’s Wing had survived with only minor alterations, despite adaptation and changes in room use.[^67] </p>\n\n<p>The scale and siting of the Grocers’ Company’s Wing precipitated improvements elsewhere in the hospital. The new wing was preceded by the reconstruction of the post mortem and pathological departments in 1873–4. These departments were formerly housed in the old medical college, and set to be displaced by its demolition (see below). Their new base was a single-storey building in East Mount Street. As no drawings survive, little is known about the form of the post mortem department aside from its provision of a pathological room and a post mortem theatre. The building was constructed by Perry & Co. to Barry’s design. Plans for the new wing also gave rise to a scheme for the hospital’s first purpose-built nurses’ home.[^68]</p>\n\n<p>[^52]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/26/32, <em>Programme for the Ceremony of Opening the Grocers’ Company’s Wing of the London Hospital</em>(7 March 1876); RLHLH/A/5/37, p. 11; <em>The Builder</em>, 17 October 1874, p. 877. </p>\n\n<p>[^53]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/35, p. 58. </p>\n\n<p>[^54]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/35, p. 439. </p>\n\n<p>[^55]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/35, pp. 425, 439. </p>\n\n<p>[^56]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/34, p. 484; RLHLH/A/5/35, pp. 86, 110–1, 123, 208, 439: DSR. </p>\n\n<p>[^57]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/35, p. 439. </p>\n\n<p>[^58]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/35, p. 439; RLHLH/A/5/36, pp. 143–4. </p>\n\n<p>[^59]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/34, p. 426. </p>\n\n<p>[^60]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/34, pp. 426, 460, 465–6, 469–70, 522: DSR. </p>\n\n<p>[^61]: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/36, pp. 437, 191–3. </p>\n\n<p>[^62]: <em>ILN</em>, 11 March 1876, p. 258: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/36, pp. 143–4. </p>\n\n<p>[^63]: <em>ILN</em>, 11 March 1876, p. 258: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/36, p. 204. </p>\n\n<p>[^64]: DSR: RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/36, pp. 235–6, 386–7, 437: <em>ILN</em>, 11 March 1876, p. 258. </p>\n\n<p>[^65]: <em>ILN</em>, 11 March 1876, p. 242. </p>\n\n<p>[^66]: <em>Reynolds’s Newspaper</em>, 12 March 1876. </p>\n\n<p>[^67]: DSR: RLHA, RLHTH/S/10/16: <em>ILN</em>, 11 March 1876, p. 258: <em>Reynolds’s Newspaper</em>, 12 March 1876. </p>\n\n<p>[^68]:RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/36, pp. 159, 173–4: DSR: Goad.</p>\n",
"created": "2019-04-29",
"last_edited": "2021-05-10"
},
{
"id": 267,
"title": "Whitechapel Gallery since 1914",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 388,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.070444999065034,
51.516268747815374
],
[
-0.070444987924411,
51.51626873485329
],
[
-0.070191183413983,
51.515943931980686
],
[
-0.07030660834808,
51.51590379026539
],
[
-0.070366244631028,
51.515976197771835
],
[
-0.070382361693267,
51.515991401135054
],
[
-0.070520839263358,
51.51595250664741
],
[
-0.070554830739485,
51.51599269532529
],
[
-0.070536539383068,
51.51600061037052
],
[
-0.070670856421127,
51.51616489931219
],
[
-0.070742289448097,
51.51614590797361
],
[
-0.070776212105595,
51.51618683122123
],
[
-0.070667546631979,
51.51621488771394
],
[
-0.070691375516433,
51.5162459029802
],
[
-0.070587290171224,
51.51627187207374
],
[
-0.070551087840537,
51.51627061113889
],
[
-0.07048764157752,
51.51628876524349
],
[
-0.070470164368826,
51.516262702692195
],
[
-0.070444999076386,
51.51626873811411
],
[
-0.070444999065034,
51.516268747815374
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "77–82",
"b_name": "Whitechapel Gallery, 77–82 Whitechapel High Street",
"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
"address": " 77–82 Whitechapel High Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 13,
"search_str": "Whitechapel Gallery, 77–82 Whitechapel High Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p><em>The Gallery in war and peace, 1914-39</em></p>\n\n<p>The shows were emblematic of an attempt to shift away from the over-arching pedagogic tone and paternalistic governance of the early years. After the First World War which claimed the lives of Gilbert Ramsay and his successor, Samuel Theed, though, the gallery was to be hampered on and off for more than 50 years by financial difficulties. As early as 1904 Barnett had succeeded in interesting the LCC in taking it over, a proposal that failed only when it became clear that in ceasing to be a charity, the gallery would lose £1000 a year of its funding from the London Parochial Charities and others. Instead, a grant from the LCC of £350 a year was agreed in 1908, for which the LCC was granted use of the upper gallery for exams and exhibitions illustrative of educational work three months of the year.[^31] This grant had been reduced to £250 by 1916, when the war curtailed the LCC’s work, and was discontinued entirely in 1922.[^32] The loss of this and the low ebb of donations meant that with an income under £1000 a year closure, at least for part of the year, was a possibility, though the London Parochial Foundation stepped in with an extra £500 in 1923, and the secretary/curator, J.N. Duddington, continued in a hand-to-mouth fashion throughout the 1920s, 30s and 40s, scraping together donations and bequests to sustain three exhibitions a year.</p>\n\n<p>The financial precariousness of the Gallery meant few changes to its structure beyond maintenance and decoration for many years. In 1918 two murals either side of the entrance hall by Elsie McNaught were created as a memorial to Samuel Barnett.[^33] In 1924 the lower galleries ‘which had become very depressing in appearance’, were whitewashed and the walls matchboarded and painted with cream Sanotex ‘which gives a good background to all works of art’.[^34]</p>\n\n<p>A notable event in the 1930s, a decade when shows were aimed principally at a local audience once again, was the display in January 1939, in the final months of the Spanish Civil War, of Picasso’s Guernica, which attracted a large audience and raised funds for ‘Aid Spain’.</p>\n\n<p><em>A shift in direction, 1945-76</em></p>\n\n<p>During the war the building had been requisitioned by the Ministry of Works and the roof sustained some damage, repaired after the war by grant from the newly founded Arts Council of Great Britain.[^35] The following 30 years saw a renewed negotiation between the needs of the gallery as a local resource in a period of constantly changing Whitechapel demographic and successive directors’ desire to develop an adventurous exhibitions’ programme. An editorial in the Burlington Magazine in 1951, ‘the Whitechapel Gallery can no longer draw the same crowds, nor serve quite the same purpose as before. In 1900 the East End had little in the way of entertainment except public houses, whereas now the Gallery has to compete with film, the wireless, television, football pools and greyhound racing….to-day residents of Whitechapel tend to travel to the West End for entertainment.’[^36] Visitor numbers had fallen to less than 13,000 a year by the time Hugh Scrutton was appointed director in 1947 but he succeeded, with renewed grant aid from the LCC, the local East London boroughs, the newly founded Arts Council, and private donations in raising this to 41,000 by 1953. The year before a new young Director, Bryan Robertson had been appointed and radically shifted the gallery’s focus in his 17-year tenure from the parochial to the international with a series of what would now be called blockbusters of contemporary art, including, one-person shows of Mark Rothko, Bridget Riley and Jackson Pollock, as well as This is Tomorrow in 1956, a collaboration between artists, sculptors and architects often cited as the founding of Pop Art in Britain as it included Richard Hamilton’s collage <em>Just What is it That Makes Today’s Homes so Different, So Appealing</em>?[^37] </p>\n\n<p>From 1949 to 1970 the upper gallery was rented by the LCC London Education Services (then, from the LCC’s demise in 1965, by the Inner London Education Authority) for exhibitions aimed at school parties (‘The Artist in the Theatre’, ‘A creative approach to printmaking’) and for classes in printmaking, pottery, etc.[^38] But while these shows raised the gallery’s profile and visitor numbers, it did not connect with the local authorities, who cut their grants. Mark Glazebrook, Robertson’s successor in 1968, cemented this change in direction by taking back into gallery use in 1970 the upper gallery. He felt that the distinction between ‘education’ and ‘non-educational’ art was undesirable, and saw the upper gallery as ‘potentially one of the most desirable galleries in London. Cleared of its present screens and cubicles, so that one could see the architectural shell, and rejoined to the Lower Gallery, it would add up to being by far the finest set of galleries in London for certain exhibitions…. [and] could put the Whitechapel “back in business”’.[^39] </p>\n\n<p>Glazebrook resigned in 1971, and there followed a difficult period when the gallery was dependent on a reluctant GLC (its Conservative Leader, Desmond Plummer, had observed in 1970 ‘I very much doubt the value of this Art Gallery and am dubious of its management’), the Arts Council and private donations via the Whitechapel Gallery Society had fallen to £68.</p>\n\n<p><em>Whitechapel Gallery First extension, 1984-5</em></p>\n\n<p>By the mid 1970s the Whitechapel Gallery was in poor condition: ‘The problem here is mostly one of maintenance. It is a strongly built building but expensive to keep up, and the architect did not consider this necessity in his design’.[^40] ‘The gutters are asphalt with absurdly small outlets’, the windows were leaking and the terracotta frontage with dark with grime.’</p>\n\n<p>It was Nicholas Serota, appointed director in 1976, who dealt comprehensively with the chronic financial shortage, both by securing commercial sponsorship and increasing grant aid, and with a change in the Gallery’s constitution allowing him to charge for exhibition entry.[^41] This made possible much-needed improvements to the building. The first idea was to adapt the former George Yard Mission infants school of 1886 on the west side of the Gallery adjoining Angel Alley, a building first considered for acquisition in 1923.[^42] A feasibility study by Colquhoun & Miller, architect, in September 1976, proposed extending the café then in what had been the small side gallery westwards on to the site of Shaftesbury House, Angel Alley, adding a new staircase accessing the school building. The school was to have a ground-floor bookshop and first-floor lecture theatre whose east windows looked down into the ground-floor gallery whose side rooflight were to be raised to create a lightwell between gallery and school. Two bridges linked school building and first floor gallery across this. The original staircase at the north end, reputedly so hard to locate that some visitors missed entirely the first-floor gallery, was to be opened into the gallery aisle.[^43] A further scheme of December 1976 by A.J. Goddard Partnership, architects, proposed filling in the main lightwell next to the main front staircase, with a shop and store, and office above.[^44] A final version of the Colquhoun & Miller scheme in January 1979 adopted this filling-in proposal and moved the staircase to beside the main entrance, with a new lift.[^45]</p>\n\n<p>In the event only minimal adaptation of the school as a lecture theatre and bookshop was carried out , and further funds were secured over the next three years for a new wing on its site to a design of 1982-3 also by Colquhoun & Miller (job architect: R.J. Brearley).[^46] This was built by R. Mansell (City) Ltd in 1984-5, necessitating closure of the gallery for a year, at a cost of £1.6m.[^47] </p>\n\n<p>The final design followed the broad principle established in 1976 but the school and former side gallery and main staircase were replaced by a new T-plan building, wider than the school building. This housed, on the school site, a lecture theatre to the ground floor, with café, education room and offices on three floors above. Adjoining to the north on the site of the old main staircase, side gallery and part of the Shaftesbury House site were four stories with ground-floor storage/loading bay, first-floor meeting and audio-visual room and second-floor top-lot gallery. The two parts of the plan were linked by a new straight east-west staircase rising east to west, made monumental by a slight narrowing along its length, its bottom steps spilling into the main gallery to signify its presence. The idea of shifting the Gallery’s main front staircase to the lightwell was implemented, the space at the front taken up with a bookshop to ground floor and workshop and mechanical services above. The manner was 1980s Postmodern, the exterior to Angel Alley clad in yellow brick with bands of red broadly reflecting the floor levels, and quasi-classical oriels, that to the south front of the extension a tall, narrow semi-cylinder, that to the west front a huge shallow bay lighting the café. Inside small-paned semi-circular lunettes over internal doors both referenced Harrison Townsend’s window manner, but also had a fashionable hint of Charles Rennie Mackintosh.</p>\n\n<p><em>A doubling in size since 2001: the incorporation of the Passmore Edwards Library</em></p>\n\n<p>If the 1980s represented a rejuvenation for the Whitechapel Gallery through commercial links, then the 2000s was the age of the Heritage Lottery Fund. Although the 1984-5 extension had improved the physical environment of the gallery and its circulation, lack of space meant it had to close for 10 weeks a year to allow exhibitions to be installed.[^48] An opportunity to expand arose in 2003 with the Passmore Edwards library adjoining the gallery to the east, scheduled to close in 2005 with the opening of the new Idea Store on Whitechapel Road and the possibility for funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund established in 1994. A further £2.8m was raised in 2006 by a sale of work donated by, inter alios, Damien Hirst, Lucian Freud and Julian Schabel.[^49] </p>\n\n<p>Iwona Blazwick, who had become director in 2001, agreed to buy the library building and a shortlist of architects was invited to submit ideas, with Foreign Office Architects, Caruso St John, Patel Taylor, dRMM, Lacaton and Vassal and Robbrecht en Daem submitting.[^50] The Belgian partnership of Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem were chosen, with the help of a panel including the artists Michael Craig-Martin and Rachel Whiteread, on the strength of their experience in adapting existing buildings, such as the Katoen Natie cultural centre in Antwerp, and because, as Blazwick put it, they were the only firm not to suggest ‘bringing the street into the gallery’; she preferred that it be a ‘refuge’, as both it and the library had been since for the people of Whitechapel they were built.[^51] </p>\n\n<p>The new layout integrated the two buildings by removing the Gallery’s 1980s staircase, and knocking through to the entrance hall of the former library, whose slightly higher level was maintained. This distinction of the separateness of the buildings was underlined by the varying treatment of the spaces, the original gallery’s architectural character generally respected (although the entrance wall of the main gallery and its 1980s doors were removed to increase its size), the library treated in a more interventionist manner. This is evident in the stripping away in the former library reading room, the main room at the rear of the ground floor, to reveal bare brick, only the vaguely Tudoresque pilasters and columns retained. In this room large corner pyramidal rooflights were inserted, that to the northeast corner inverted, a Mannerist conceit, but one intended to respect the rights to light of buildings on Osborn Street. This room became the Commissions Gallery, to display changing installations created especially for the space. Office spaces either side of the library’s entrance became a café, the 1980s café overlooking Angel Alley becoming more gallery space.</p>\n\n<p>The library’s existing staircase became the main access to the first floor, with the former reference library across the front of the first floor turned into an archive study room and archive gallery separated by a glazed wall: one condition of the Heritage Lottery Fund grant was that the redevelopment should include space for studying and displaying the Gallery’s archive. [Hall, op. cit.] should make use of its archive and new access from a first floor landing through to the original Whitechapel Gallery’s upper gallery and the library’s former museum space, its queen-post roof with curved braces exposed. This is the Collections Gallery, to display work from private and public collections lacking exhibition space of their own. The most substantial changes was a new study space added to the top floor of the library, behind the shaped gable of the original building, made a feature hard up against the room’s south window. This apparent retention of original fabric is in fact a reinstatement of the gable which had been taken down in the 1970s. Large windows opposite look across the complex roofscape of the building towards Spitalfields. Further access to this and all floors is provided by a service stair and lift behind the two café rooms. A further lift was added off the 1980s staircase to the rear of the original gallery. The building was topped off by a copper and steel weathervane by the Canadian artist Rodney Graham depicting Erasmus riding backward on a horse, reading his The Praise of Folly.[^52] </p>\n\n<p>Construction began in the summer of 2007, with Witherford Watson Mann architects as executive partners, and Wallis Special Projects as main contractor.[^53] The total cost of the project was £13.5m.[^54] </p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/01/25/tree-of-life-photo-roger-jones.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>Rachel Whiteread's Tree of Life sculpture on Whitechapel Gallery, 2012. © Copyright <a href=\"http://www.geograph.org.uk/profile/62944\">Roger Jones</a> and licensed for <a href=\"http://www.geograph.org.uk/reuse.php?id=2993498\">reuse</a> under this <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/\">Creative Commons Licence</a>.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>Since the Gallery reopened on 5 April 2009 the only substantial intervention has been the Rachel Whiteread ‘Tree of Life’ sculpture added to the frontage as part of the London 2012 embellishments of Whitechapel High Street for the London Olympics. The work elaborates Townsend’s original decoration of stylised trees, gilding some his terracotta leaves and adding gilded bronze leaves (made in the Whitechapel Bell Foundry) cast from Townsend’s leaves, in loose bunches (a scheme partly inspired, according to Whiteread by the ‘Hackney weed’, buddleia), breaking free from his regimented ranks of tree to scatter across the towers and the blank panel intended for the Crane mosaic. That panel is further embellished with four casts of the small first-floor windows in relief, the play of negative/positive space a Whiteread signature motif.[^55] </p>\n\n<p>[^31]: London Metropolitan Archives [LMA], GLC/AR/HB/01/340</p>\n\n<p>[^32]: LMA, LCC/EO/HFE/05/285</p>\n\n<p>[^33]: ibid</p>\n\n<p>[^34]: LMA, LCC/EO/HFE/05/286</p>\n\n<p>[^35]: LMA, LCC/EO/HFE/05/287</p>\n\n<p>[^36]: <em>Burlington Magazine</em>, 93/574 Jan 1951, pp. 3-4</p>\n\n<p>[^37]: Marco Livingstone, 'Reshaping the Whitechapel: Installations from Tomorrow to Today’, <em>The Whitechapel Art Gallery Centenary Review</em>, 2001, pp. 32-6</p>\n\n<p>[^38]: LMA, GLC/DG/AR/07/060; GLC/AR/EOM/15/016</p>\n\n<p>[^39]: LMA, GLC/DG/AR/07/060</p>\n\n<p>[^40]: Architect's report by Dr R.D.H. Gem, inspector, to the Historic Buildings Council for England, 5 June 1975, HEA, historians’ file TH192</p>\n\n<p>[^41]: Janeen Haythornthwaite, ‘Roller-Coasters and helter-skelters, missionaries and philanthropists. A history of patronage and funding at the Whitechapel Art Gallery’, <em>The Whitechapel Art Gallery Centenary Review</em>, 2001, pp. 18-22</p>\n\n<p>[^42]: Whitechapel Gallery Archives [WGA], uncatalogued architectural drawings</p>\n\n<p>[^43]: WGA, uncatalogued architectural plans, d. 19 Sept 1976: Jonathan Glancey, ‘Whitechapel Communities’, <em>RIBA Journal</em>, March 1986, pp. 29-33</p>\n\n<p>[^44]: WGA, uncatalogued architectural drawings</p>\n\n<p>[^45]: ibid</p>\n\n<p>[^46]: WGA, uncatalogued architectural drawings: ‘Gallery extension, Whitechapel, <em>Architectural Review</em>, Jan 1984, p. 23</p>\n\n<p>[^47]: ‘Extending an artistic tradition: The Whitechapel Gallery’,<em> Architects' Journal</em>, 23 Oct 1985, pp. 35-50</p>\n\n<p>[^48]: Rob Sharp, ‘Whitechapel set to grow’, <em>Architects' Journal</em>, 4 May 2006, p. 14</p>\n\n<p>[^49]: Michael Hall, ‘The New Whitechapel: A Lantern & Refuge’, <em>Apollo</em>, April 2009, pp. 20-24</p>\n\n<p>[^50]: Kester Rattenbury, ‘Vanishing trick’, <em>Architects' Journal</em>, 26 March 2009, pp. 30-39: Andrew Mead, ‘Belgian stars to light up London’, <em>Architects' Journal</em>, 20 Sept 2007, pp. 14-15: ‘Who is Lacaton & Vassal’, <em>RIBA Journal</em>, Oct 2003, p. 9</p>\n\n<p>[^51]: Hall, op. cit.</p>\n\n<p>[^52]: ‘White Space’, <em>RIBA Journal</em>, April 2009, pp. 50-56: Hall, op. cit.</p>\n\n<p>[^53]: Rattenbury, op. cit.</p>\n\n<p>[^54]: Hall, op. cit.</p>\n\n<p>[^55]: ‘Whiteread at Whitechapel’, <em>RIBA Journal</em>, March 2012, p. 11: <a href=\"‘Whiteread at Whitechapel’, RIBAJ, March 2012, p. 11: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18432744]\">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18432744</a></p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2017-01-25",
"last_edited": "2020-09-14"
},
{
"id": 877,
"title": "Hog Lane and Rosemary Lane: Royal Mint Street's early history to 1700",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1700,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.070945132337544,
51.51021419997014
],
[
-0.070951067578723,
51.5102277140376
],
[
-0.070898811199882,
51.51023714629324
],
[
-0.070917381971465,
51.51027716141803
],
[
-0.070881130885056,
51.51028295731296
],
[
-0.070862738106381,
51.510248608310874
],
[
-0.070769476297735,
51.51026743533961
],
[
-0.070788252129627,
51.510301925514284
],
[
-0.070753203361862,
51.51030775757811
],
[
-0.070735310409513,
51.51027458406735
],
[
-0.07068160237232,
51.51028211859123
],
[
-0.070640721365031,
51.51018467843966
],
[
-0.070890187021744,
51.510140890147795
],
[
-0.070889379574192,
51.510138140235156
],
[
-0.070901160084848,
51.510135712013096
],
[
-0.070945132337544,
51.51021419997014
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "23-29",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Royal Mint Street",
"address": "23-29 Royal Mint Street, Royal Mint Estate",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 7,
"search_str": "23-29 Royal Mint Street, Royal Mint Estate"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>On the site east of Tower Hill that later became that of the Royal Mint, Edward III founded the Cistercian abbey of St Mary Graces in 1350. The abbey and an outer precinct of gardens and open lands extending eastwards were bounded to the north by a road that was called Hachestrate by 1250 then Hoggestreet in the fourteenth century and known by the time of the abbey’s suppression in the 1530s as Hog Lane. Only the more easterly parts of the abbey’s lands (those lying beyond the present-day line of Blue Anchor Yard) were in Whitechapel parish (see Wellclose Square). Abbatial property became the manor of East Smithfield and was acquired by Elizabeth I in 1560 for the formation of a depot for supplying the navy on the abbey site. That continued to 1785, after which the site was redeveloped as premises for the Royal Mint’s move out of the Tower of London. Hog Lane itself was later described as being 84 perches (1,386ft) long and 8ft wide, and as having been used during the reign of Elizabeth I to take cannon from Tower Hill to a place called Gunfield where ordnance was tested. Most of the land on the north side of Hog Lane (from just west of where Mansell Street runs) was in Whitechapel parish and was known as Homefield before it became Goodman's Fields.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>East Smithfield had more resident foreigners than any other part of London’s eastern suburbs in the 1570s. In that decade eight acres on the north side of Hog Lane appear to have been held and improved by Benedict Spinola (1519/20–1580), an eminent and wealthy Genoese merchant who exported woollen cloth, imported sweet wine, lived in the City parish of St Gabriel Fenchurch and held other property outside the City further north. John Stow’s <em>Survey of London</em> refers only passingly to what he calls Hog Street, as distinct from Hog Lane (now Middlesex Street), mentioning the Merchant Taylor’s almshouses that were built in 1593 on the road’s north side at the Tower Hill end that is outside Whitechapel. However, John Strype’s revision of Stow in 1720 has a substantial addition immediately following the account of the almshouses. This has since been linked to Middlesex Street, but from its place in the text it seems clear that it has to do with the southerly Hog Lane; the paragraph that follows returns to Tower Hill.[^2] The passage reads:</p>\n\n<p>‘In this Hog Lane, now mentioned, lying on the back side of Whitechapel, were eight Acres of Land, which about the Year 1574 were in the Possession of one Benedict Spinola, a rich Italian Merchant; whereof he made twenty Tenter Yards and certain Gardens. These, some pretended, were first enclosed by him, being before open and common. And hence it came to pass, that in the Year 1584 it was presented as an Annoyance to the Archers, and all the Queen’s Liege People. And a Precept was awarded to the Tenants and Occupiers of the Premisses to remove their Pales and Fences, and all Buildings made thereupon: For now many Clothiers dwelt here, who, hereupon applied themselves to the Lord Treasurer of England, and brought Witness to the contrary: Shewing, that the same Field, before it was so converted as then it was, was a Piece of Ground several, not common, nor never commonly used by any Archers, being far unmeet for Archers to shoot in, by reason of standing Puddles, most noisome Laystals, and filthy Ditches in and about the same. Also the Way called Hog Lane was so foul and deep in the Winter time, that no Man could pass by the same. And in Summer time Men would not pass thereby for fear of Infection, by means of the Filthiness that lay there. So that the Presenters were utterley deceived, and not well informed in their Presentments. Afterwards Benedict Spinola bestowed great Cost and Charges upon levelling and cleansing the Premisses; and made divers Tenter Yards, by means whereof the common Ways and Passages about the said eight Acres were greatly amended and enlarged, that all People might well and safely pass. And poor Clothworkers by the Tenter Yards were greatly relieved: For that of late time divers Tenter Yards in and about London were decayed and pulled down, and the Ground converted to other Uses. And because the Queen had lately by Proclamation restrained all future Buildings and Enclosures in the Suburbs, they shewed that the Tenter Yards and Gardens were made long before the said Proclamation.’[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Division of the Whitechapel section of the north side of the Hog Lane here under consideration into twenty large plots, averaging around four perches (66ft) width each, is roughly borne out by the earliest reliable map, William Morgan’s of 1682. By then, however, much had transpired. </p>\n\n<p>In 1582 Henry Browne was prosecuted for making a sawpit on Hog Lane that was deemed a nuisance, and in 1607, John Dale, a ‘millener’, and Owen Hore, yeoman, were charged before Sir William Wade (Waad), Lieutenant of the Tower, with contravention of a royal proclamation against the erection of timber buildings outside the City walls by the building of houses on the Whitechapel part of what was now being called Rosemary Lane. The name change itself seems to chime with ‘cleansing’ (presumably draining), possibly also referring to a public house called the Rosemary Branch that was just east of the parish boundary inside Whitechapel, where Mansell Street now runs.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The property on the road’s north side had passed to Thomas Goodman by 1597–8 when he leased five garden plots in the western part of what lay in Whitechapel parish with an overall length of 322 or 325ft (not quite twenty perches), previously occupied by a feltmaker, a baker and a vintner, to Horatio Franchiotto (or Franchiotti) and Sir James Deane for a term of fifty years. Franchiotto was another Italian merchant, from Lucca, who had a house in the City in Mark Lane, and Deane (1546–1608) was a wealthy draper. They built a ‘great house of brick’ with a brick wall to the rear separating the property and its garden or orchard from Goodmans Fields. Set well back from the frontage, at the end of a passage from which it was entered from the east, this house, which came to be known as Swallows after a later resident (see below), was assessed for sixteen hearths in 1666. Franchiotto lived in it with Mary Pickering (née Frankham), otherwise married and ‘reputed his wife, servant or concubine’. She also leased another garden plot and ‘cottage’ from Goodman in 1598, and continued to live in the big house in 1623 after Franchiotto had died. Through Thomas Jay, knighted in 1625 and appointed Master of the Armoury in the Tower of London in 1628, the Crown had gained an interest in Franchiotto’s Rosemary Lane property. This was transferred in 1621 to William Bawdrick and Roger Hunt.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>In 1620 William Goodman and his wife Mary sold the freehold of a number of pieces of ground, largely gardens, that together made up most of the north side of Rosemary Lane in Whitechapel. The purchaser was William Abell who was rising to prominence as a wealthy vintner. Adding up to an overall frontage of almost 800ft, but not all contiguous, Abell’s take comprised: an 84ft (just over five-perch) frontage to the west that was built up with twelve tenements close to the Rosemary Branch; the land in front of Franchiotto and Deane’s property; and three more large plots further east that included the premises of a baker and a vinegar-maker and extended almost to where Leman Street now ends. An alleyway between the two easternmost plots was probably that which came to be known as Three Tobacco Pipe Alley, later Abel’s Buildings, which survives as a passage from Royal Mint Street to Chamber Street, opposite and continuing the line of John Fisher Street. Alderman William Abell fell to notoriety in 1641, disgraced as having profited from monopolistic trading. His son Richard Abell (born around 1609) worked for John Lenthall in 1652, by when he had possession of the Rosemary Lane property.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>The house that had been Franchiotto’s had passed, presumably through connections at the Tower of London (Jay, allegedly corrupt, had been replaced in 1638), to Thomas Swallow, a senior official at the Mint, which was then in the Tower. Swallow held the composite position of Clerk of the Irons and Surveyor of the Meltings; a Paul Swallow had been Surveyor of the Meltings in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Though ousted through the Interregnum, Thomas Swallow retrieved his post and continued in it until his death in his 80s in 1676. Swallow’s house was assessed as having fifteen hearths in 1674–5 when he also had another nine-hearth property adjoining. The large house stood west of what was identified as Swallow Court in 1682 with land that retained the name Swallows Garden.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>Richard Abell lived in a ten-hearth house near the east end of Rosemary Lane’s north side in 1666 when he built a group of four more ten-hearth houses immediately west of the entrance to Swallow Court. One of these was leased for 21 years to Robert Tough, a citizen gunmaker. In 1674–5 the group of four was assessed as having only eight hearths each and five more eight- and ten-hearth properties stood together further east. Among these, one held by Samuel Warner, a citizen victualler, had been tenanted by John Skynner, another citizen gunsmith, who had been burnt out of his City house by the Great Fire. Otherwise there were numerous much smaller (two- to four-hearth) dwellings with many yards and courts, from west to east: Abell’s Court, Catherine Wheel Yard (later White Horse Court), Rosemary Branch Alley (later Little Prescot Street), Garrards Yard, Swallow Court, Bakers Arms Alley, Three Tobacco Pipe Alley (Abel’s Buildings), Sugar Loaf Alley and Mill Yard, which last survives to the east of Leman Street. White Lion Street was formed in the 1680s to connect Rosemary Lane to Goodmans Fields and Leman Street. To its west was a public house called the Tobacco Rolls.</p>\n\n<p>In the late 1680s a large former orchard and garden with associated buildings between Swallows Garden and Three Tobacco Pipe Alley (Abel’s Buildings) on the Abell holding and adjacent property on the south side of newly laid out Chamber Street held by Sir Thomas Chamber were taken by the Board of Ordnance, based at the Tower of London, and developed by William Chapman, carpenter, to be a storage facility for 300 waggons or ‘timbrells’, storehouses ranged round a yard opening off Rosemary Lane.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>Rosemary Lane was densely built up and generally humbly populated. One resident who gained notability was Richard Brandon, the executioner of Charles I, who was buried in Whitechapel parish churchyard. The hearth-tax return of 1674–5 itemises 115 premises along the north side of Rosemary Lane and another eighty on the courts and yards. Twenty years later John Bankes had four empty houses on the street, perhaps new-built, and Thomas Chambers had an undeveloped 64ft frontage. Prohibitions notwithstanding, timber building continued into the eighteenth century, sometimes with gable fronts, and the street was lined with shops. Lands to the south, most of them outside Whitechapel, were yet more densely built and poorly inhabited. Thomas Swallow and Richard Abell, both justices of the peace, were unusually active in pursuing prosecutions in the locality as it became a haven for criminality.[^9]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Ian Grainger and Christopher Phillpotts, <em>The Cistercian abbey of St Mary Graces, East Smithfield, London</em>, MOLA monograph 44, 2011: Historic Towns Trust, <em>A Map of Tudor London</em>, 2018: <em>Calendar of Treasury Books, vol. 3, 1669–1672</em>, 1908, p. 936: The National Archives (TNA), E40/2543–4</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)</em> for Spinola: John Stow, <em>A Survey of London. Reprinted from the Text of 1603</em>, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 1908, vol. 1, p. 125, vol. 2, p. 71: M. Dorothy George, <em>London Life in the Eighteenth Century</em>, 1925 (1964 edn), p. 341: ed. F. H. W. Sheppard, <em>Survey of London</em>, vol. 27: <em>Spitalfields and Mile End New Town</em>, 1957, p. 237</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: John Strype, <em>A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster</em>, 1720, vol. 1, book 2, p. 14</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Middlesex County Records: Sessions Rolls</em>, vol. 1, 1886, p. 134; vol. 2, 1887, pp. 29,31: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Q/HAL/298: Ogilby and Morgan's map, 1676: William Morgan's map, 1682</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: TNA, C3/360/39; E134/20JasI/Mich25; E179/252/32,f.22v: ed. R. A. Roberts, <em>Calendar of the Cecil Papers in Hatfield House: volume 4, 1590–1594</em>, 1892, pp. 521–42 (30 May 1594): LMA, Q/HAL/298: <em>Calendar of State Papers Domestic: James I, 1619–23</em>, 1858, p .305: Charles J. ffoulkes, <em>Inventory and survey of the armouries of the Tower of London</em>, vol. 1, 1916, p. 63: Ogilby and Morgan's map, 1676: John Rocque's map, 1746</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LMA, Q/HAL/298; M/93/157, pp.56–7: <em>ODNB</em> for William Abell: Morgan's map, 1682</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>Calendar of Treasury Books, vol. 1, 1660–1667</em>, 1904, 7 July and 5 Sept. 1660; <em>vol. 3, 1669–1672</em>, 1908, 26 Sept. 1671: TNA, E179/143/370, f.35: <em>The Rulers of London 1660–1689: A Biographical Record of the Aldermen and Common Councilmen of the City of London</em>, 1966, p. 159: ed. C. E. Challis, <em>A New History of the Royal Mint</em>, 1992, pp. 269,325,357,740: LMA, COL/CCS/SO/08/01/003: Morgan's map, 1682: Richard Horwood's map, 1813</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: TNA, C5/148/42</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: LMA, Q/HAL/299; Collage 22376: TNA, C9/43/87; E179/252/32, ff.22v–23; E179/143/370, ff.35–6: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/SLC/2/16/43: William Morgan's map, 1682: <em>ODNB</em> for Brandon: Robert B. Shoemaker, <em>Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex,</em> c.<em>1660–1725</em>, 1991, p.283</p>\n",
"created": "2019-04-25",
"last_edited": "2020-09-15"
},
{
"id": 835,
"title": "Well Street's theatres (demolished)",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1385,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.067575803709333,
51.51021492278667
],
[
-0.067783647338447,
51.51017527172947
],
[
-0.067828706900756,
51.510167293395675
],
[
-0.067884358000762,
51.51028332470727
],
[
-0.068021222270461,
51.51026117174896
],
[
-0.068027105232624,
51.51027869995762
],
[
-0.068059007104689,
51.51027341168682
],
[
-0.068045803249401,
51.51025517119752
],
[
-0.068185711037114,
51.51022956959143
],
[
-0.068302205657116,
51.51049311218949
],
[
-0.068154065018083,
51.51051508999573
],
[
-0.068142111677326,
51.51048931210634
],
[
-0.068158013519995,
51.51048782991857
],
[
-0.0680993992664,
51.51035372697415
],
[
-0.068063773094401,
51.51035895389879
],
[
-0.068055396596396,
51.510336723241444
],
[
-0.067963562571312,
51.510349163498944
],
[
-0.067961653646245,
51.510339150568754
],
[
-0.067909585576321,
51.510347692789416
],
[
-0.067933270683552,
51.5104044774377
],
[
-0.067674158297256,
51.51045078856997
],
[
-0.067629160671485,
51.51036923447038
],
[
-0.067652633918951,
51.51036497018876
],
[
-0.067575803709333,
51.51021492278667
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "7",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Dock Street",
"address": "Wombat's City Hostel, 7 Dock Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 25,
"search_str": "Wombat's City Hostel, 7 Dock Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>In the late Georgian period large theatres enhanced and dominated the west side of Well Street. Theirs is an ill-starred history. The <strong>Royalty Theatre </strong>was built in 1785–7 replacing Loades Court, immediately north of and no doubt (against depiction) overshadowed by Maud’s seven-storey sugarhouse. John Palmer (1744–98), an actor known as ‘Plausible Jack’ who had a flourishing career at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, had decided to run his own company and open a new theatre in east London along the lines of Sadler’s Wells. He planned this with the Rev. William Jackson, the politically mutable editor of the <em>Morning Post</em>. Palmer obtained a licence for music and dancing from the authorities of the Tower Liberty at the Court House in Wellclose Square, having first petitioned and gained some kind of approbation from Charles (Lord) Cornwallis, the Constable of the Tower. Resort to this jurisdiction was an attempt to bypass legislation that confined stage-plays to the West End’s patent theatres. It explains the otherwise improbable siting of the theatre. Magistracy’s role in the project was not mere passive consent. It was James Robinson, a Tower Hamlets magistrate living on the New Road in the parish of St George in the East, who agreed a 300-year lease of the Well Street property with John Ekins and others in September 1785, undertaking to spend £1,000 within two years on a substantial building. This was executed in November 1788 and backdated to March 1786, taking into account Robinson’s expenditure building the theatre that was tenanted by Palmer. Robinson was at this point in league with Daniel Williams, a Tower Liberty magistrate known to have been a ‘trading’ (corrupt) justice.</p>\n\n<p>All involved would have been aware of a history of opposition to attempts to establish theatres in east London. Western monopolists aside, this had been informed by fears associated with the area’s largely working population. The attraction for the promoters was potentially huge audiences, the anticipated solution a site in the Tower Liberty. A generation later the project was characterised as ‘the Quixotic attempt of a celebrated performer to raise his fame and fortune by a bold venture’.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Palmer claimed to have raised £5,000 by subscription and to have borrowed extensively to meet building costs that he said exceeded £15,000. A foundation stone was laid in December 1785 after a procession from the Wellclose Square Court House and lavish Masonic ritual. It credited John Wilmot as the ‘Architect and Builder’. He was the brother of David (Davy) Wilmot, another notoriously corrupt Tower Hamlets magistrate. The Wilmot brothers had earlier been partners as Bethnal Green builders, and were responsible for much poor-quality housing in that area. John Wilmot had been appointed a district surveyor, to enforce the Building Act of 1774 in Bethnal Green, a position no doubt gained through his brother’s influence. Working with Wilmot as the theatre’s ‘surveyor’ was John Robinson, the London Hospital’s surveyor who lived on Wellclose Square, and who was doubtless related to James Robinson. Cornelius Dixon was the Royalty Theatre’s scene-painter, seemingly responsible for décor more generally in what was praised as an impressive interior.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The Royalty Theatre was a surprisingly substantial building given its location and fragile grounding. Behind a scarcely embellished, even severe, three-storey nine-bay brick façade there was a spacious and elegantly finished auditorium with a capacity of 2,594; by way of comparison, Henry Holland’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane of 1791–4, the largest theatre in Europe, had seating for 3,919. The Royalty was hailed as being on a par with the great West End houses, its semi-circular balconies ‘infinitely superior’, its stage larger than that of Covent Garden’s Opera House. A rich decorative scheme, finished with red and gold, had Doric and Composite orders rising to third-tier columns ‘not within any of the architectonic orders, but of the fancy kind’.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The Royalty Theatre opened on 20 June 1787 with <em>As You Like It </em>as a benefit for the London Hospital. Managers of the West End’s patent houses led by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, under whose management Palmer had acted at Drury Lane, immediately undermined the place. They had gained the support of the Lord Chamberlain in deeming Palmer’s licence ineffectual. This deterred well-known performers from taking up engagements. A prevailing view that the theatre was illegal stymied Palmer and Jackson from staging further plays, despite strong local support. Varieties were staged, but performers and Tower Hamlets magistrates were prosecuted, James Robinson charged with having acted corruptly. From February 1788 the theatre was shut for long periods. Palmer spent a spell in debtors’ prison in 1789, turned his back on the Royalty and died on stage in 1798. Jackson fled to France from where he returned in 1794 as a spy with a mission to foment revolution. Caught and convicted, he committed suicide in 1795, dying in the dock of the King’s Bench. James Robinson died less spectacularly in 1799.</p>\n\n<p>The theatre saw intermittent use through the war years for pantomimes and the like, including by Philip Astley who also staged an exhibition of ‘hydraulics’ at the beginning of 1804, probably anticipating Sadler’s Wells’s ‘aquatic theatre’. The establishment was criticised as a magnet for prostitutes and thieves. Daniel Williams, now the senior magistrate at the Whitechapel Police Office, had changed horses. He wrote in 1802 to oppose an application for renewal of the Tower Liberty licence, stating ‘that the allurements held out by the Performances at that Theatre, to the Workmen and Servants of the numerous Manufacturers in that Neighbourhood, may induce them to live in habits of dissipation and profligacy, become idle and disorderly and in consequence may be tempted to rob their Employers: when also the immense number of Sailors returned in consequence of Peace and resident near that situation and the Laborers employed in the New Docks are considered as the probable Audiences of that Theatre, the Publick Peace stands in great danger of being frequently interrupted’.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>In 1814 Joseph Vickers built the East London Gas Works in a small yard between sugarhouses immediately west of the theatre’s north end. He soon took on the theatre as well, and, opposition having softened, opened it as the East London Theatre. From 5 August 1816 the theatre was lit by gas, including the stage in what has been claimed as a world first. Staging comic operas and the like, it became a ‘fashionable lounge’.[^5] </p>\n\n<p>Here Clarkson Stansfield, who had been a seaman, found work as a scene-painter until 1819. In that year Joseph Glossop, proprietor of the Royal Coburg Theatre (later the Old Vic), took on the management and had the interior thoroughly remodelled, probably to designs by one T. Cooper, an architect. The whole property was sold to the Chartered Gas Light and Coke Company and Glossop relaunched the theatre as the Royalty in 1821, opening with <em>The Sailor’s Frolic</em>. He departed a year later and his associate James Dunn carried on as proprietor, only to face ruin when the theatre and the gas works were destroyed by fire on 10 April 1826 after, it was said, stage lights were left improperly extinguished.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>Jacob Schlenker, a Dock Street sugar refiner, took a 35-year lease of the theatre and gasworks sites in 1827, with the gasometer still standing. The remains of the theatre, which had been to some extent insured, was quickly transferred to David Samson Maurice, a Fenchurch Street printer who lived on Prescot Street, and John Carruthers, a Bishopsgate Street tea dealer, though bankruptcy proceedings had been launched against Carruthers in 1826.[^7] Maurice and Carruthers rebuilt ambitiously and far more grandly, with architectural sophistication and innovative iron construction. The <strong>Royal Brunswick Theatre</strong> (sometimes New Brunswick Theatre) was begun in August 1827 and opened, remarkably quickly, on 25 February 1828. Three days later its iron-framed roof failed and the whole building collapsed catastrophically during a morning rehearsal causing thirteen deaths, including that of Maurice, and widespread horror. The architect had been Thomas Stedman Whitwell, who had worked around 1811 at the nearby London Docks, where the structurally innovative architect Daniel Asher Alexander had been in charge. Whitwell then established a practice in the Midlands before returning to London. His career was effectively ruined by the theatre’s collapse, for which he was held responsible, though he blamed it on the suspension of heavy machinery from tie beams. Philip Hardwick, architect at the neighbouring St Katharine’s Docks, then building, was reportedly the first on the scene of the disaster to take responsibility for the rescue operation.</p>\n\n<p>Whitwell’s façade had taken inspiration from that of the Teatro di San Carlo opera house in Naples. Without space for a portico, he set seven entrance bays in a rusticated ground-level basement under a continuous balcony to a piano nobile. The five central upper-storey bays had a Giant Order pilastrade, the capitals of which bore theatrical masks, the pilasters linked by a bronze treillage screen. Channelled rustication to the outer bays rose to friezes supporting a shallow arch in a pedimental gable, the arch flanked by low-relief representations of literature and painting. The stage was to the south, and the auditorium was laid out on elegantly curved lines with two circles and a gallery. There was a capacity of 2,000. Fire-resistant construction had been pursued, with the roof reported as being of wrought iron. Given the date and the collapse, cast iron seems more likely. Before it failed, this roof ‘excited general notice from its lightness and ingenious construction’.[^8] All that survives is a row of (listed) cast-iron bollards with crowned ‘RBT’ monograms on the Ensign Street pavement. That said, the parti of the Royal Brunswick Theatre had a clear influence on the building that succeeded it on the site.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Robert Wilkinson, <em>Londina Illustrata</em>, vol. 2, 1825, p. 299: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive (THLHLA), P/LEL/1/1 and P/MMD/2/1–2: The National Archives (TNA), PRO30/55/87/107: <em>Gentleman’s Magazine</em>, vol. 56, pt 1, March 1786, p. 224: <em>The World</em>, 3 Dec 1787: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) </em>for Palmer and Jackson</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Gentleman’s Magazine</em>, vol. 56, pt 1, Jan 1786, p. 74: <em>The Times</em>, 9 May 1787, p. 4: TNA, PRO30/55/87/107: Wilkinson, pp. 299–300: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MR/B/SM/013: H. M. Colvin, <em>A Biographical Dictionary of English Architects, 1660–1840, </em>4th edn, 2004, p. 305: Julian Woodford, <em>The Boss of Bethnal Green: Joseph Merceron, the Godfather of Regency London</em>, 2016, pp. 19,37,83 </p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>T</em><em>he Times</em>, 9 May 1787, p. 4: THLHLA, cuttings 795.1: ed. F. H. W. Sheppard, <em>Survey of London</em>, vol. 35: <em>The Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and the Royal Opera House Covent Garden</em>, 1970, p. 52</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Diary</em>, 23 May 1789: <em>Morning Post</em>, 10 Jan 1804: TNA, HO42/66/111, ff. 317–8; HO42/21/99, f. 232; PRO30/55/87/107; PROB11/1319/148: LMA, MJ/SP/1787/07/111: THLHLA, cuttings 795.1: M. Dorothy George, <em>London Life in the Eighteenth Century</em>, 1925 (edn 1964), pp. 287–8, 395–6: <em>Copartnership Herald</em>, vol. 4/39, May 1934: <em>ODNB </em>for Palmer and Jackson: Julian Woodford, ‘At the Royalty Theatre, Wellclose Square’, Spitalfields Life, 4 Nov. 2016, http://spitalfieldslife.com/2016/11/04/at-the-royalty-theatre-wellclose-sq/</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>Morning Post</em>, 5 Dec 1817: Pieter van der Merwe, ‘A Great Light in the East: Gas and the Wellclose Square Theatre 1816’, paper at the Society for Theatre Research conference on Regency Theatre, Downing College, Cambridge, 29–31 July 2016, see <a href=\"https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/guest-post-the-first-gas-lit-stage\">https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/museum-life/guest-post-the-first-gas-lit-stage</a></p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Morning Post</em>, 7 Sept. 1819; 13 Dec 1821: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 10 June 1820; 12 April 1826: <em>Clarkson Stansfield 1793–1867</em>, exhibition catalogue, 1979, pp. 14,47: <em>The Drama or Theatrical Pocket Magazine</em>, vol. 1, 1821, pp. 302–3: E. W. Brayley, <em>Historical and Descriptive Accounts of the Theatres of London</em>, 1826, pp. 8–82: Colvin, p.270 </p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>John Bull</em>, 11 April 1826: THLHLA, P/MMD/1/8: <em>The Standard</em>, 19 Oct 1827: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>Ipswich Journal</em>, 13 Oct 1827: <em>Morning Post</em>, 23 Aug 1827: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 29 Feb and 1 March 1828: <em>Portfolio of Amusement and Instruction</em>, 1 March 1828, pp. 145–60: <em>The Mirror</em>, 8 March 1828: G. C. Smith, <em>A Narrative of the Falling of the Brunswick Theatre</em>, 1828: LMA, SC/SS/07/024/297–8; SC/PZ/ST/01/186: Colvin, p. 1047 </p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-01",
"last_edited": "2020-12-11"
},
{
"id": 767,
"title": "Pector's restaurant at 64 New Road",
"author": {
"id": 261,
"username": "RozinaCowan"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1166,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.062351470894244,
51.51718815629615
],
[
-0.061292929801261,
51.51728379235413
],
[
-0.061222794483401,
51.51696856036261
],
[
-0.062282192019856,
51.516876806223415
],
[
-0.062351470894244,
51.51718815629615
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Stepney Way",
"address": "Dental Hospital and Institute of Dentistry",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 13,
"search_str": "Dental Hospital and Institute of Dentistry"
},
"tags": [
"Dental Institute",
"London Hospital",
"Royal London Hospital",
"Stephen Statham & Associates",
"Students' Union"
]
},
"body": "<p>My Booba and Zaida had a restaurant at this address. Their names were Chava and Usher Pector My Dad came into the restaurant one day, saw my Mum and the rest is history.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-31",
"last_edited": "2021-02-23"
},
{
"id": 80,
"title": "28 Nelson Street",
"author": {
"id": 21,
"username": "IsobelWatson"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1260,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.060071493933487,
51.515258337381574
],
[
-0.06006361028193,
51.51523153503032
],
[
-0.060044966435695,
51.51515486133312
],
[
-0.060098095337008,
51.51515033087191
],
[
-0.060107893844699,
51.51518949884233
],
[
-0.060127803427761,
51.51518761420671
],
[
-0.060144082840979,
51.515250481031714
],
[
-0.060071493933487,
51.515258337381574
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "28",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Nelson Street",
"address": "28 Nelson Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 1,
"search_str": "28 Nelson Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>In 1904/1905 Abraham Davis (the second of the seven builder sons of Woolf Davis) was granted building leases of 28 Nelson Street and 95-97 Commercial Road. His building at the latter site has gone, as have contemporary buildings of his at 12-14 Turner Street and 31-33 Nelson Street ('Turner House'), and (though many large blocks of flats of his still stand near Kings Cross and in St Johns Wood) of all his buildings in East London this is one of a very few that survive. It is his only known surviving domestic building in east London. Despite its frontage it appears to be laid out as flats. His younger brothers Israel and Hyman (trading as Davis Brothers) had revised their approach to building flats when the LCC succeeded in showing that buildings of theirs in Brick Lane fell foul of the London Building Act because they were (in effect) self-contained[^1]; this could be (and thereafter was) avoided if the design showed they were intended to be let as a whole. It would be interesting to know how 28 Nelson Street (the architect for which may have been Frank Dolley) was designed originally to be configured, as the side elevation indicates a flatted pattern.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: L.C.C. v Davis, 1898 QB; LCC minutes, 22 November 1896,</p>\n",
"created": "2016-07-04",
"last_edited": "2016-07-15"
},
{
"id": 219,
"title": "Whitechapel station in 1975",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 600,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.061413498468456,
51.51948771437207
],
[
-0.061020987937437,
51.51958959484296
],
[
-0.06099769631402,
51.519553659472216
],
[
-0.060897484939094,
51.51939921490023
],
[
-0.061301026679702,
51.51930018671317
],
[
-0.061413498468456,
51.51948771437207
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "",
"b_name": "Whitechapel Station",
"street": "Durward Street",
"address": "Whitechapel Station",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 3,
"search_str": "Whitechapel Station"
},
"tags": [
"Metropolitan and District Railway",
"Whitechapel & Bow Railway"
]
},
"body": "<p>A newly digitised colour slide from the Tower Hamlets Archives collection:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/793851644068958208\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/793851644068958208</a></p>\n",
"created": "2016-12-16",
"last_edited": "2017-11-28"
},
{
"id": 221,
"title": "Halal restaurant in 1966",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 39,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.071664079468146,
51.51343051902844
],
[
-0.071600413466814,
51.513454875943125
],
[
-0.071534942236408,
51.51337367949251
],
[
-0.071598443192382,
51.51335322818265
],
[
-0.071664079468146,
51.51343051902844
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "2–6",
"b_name": "",
"street": "St Mark Street",
"address": "2–6 St Mark Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 6,
"search_str": "2–6 St Mark Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>A digitised colour slide from the Tower Hamlets Archives collection:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/793843253057556480\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/793843253057556480</a></p>\n",
"created": "2016-12-16",
"last_edited": "2020-08-04"
},
{
"id": 766,
"title": "Pesach at my grandparents' house",
"author": {
"id": 250,
"username": "Spring"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1637,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.056097932215228,
51.51640621071044
],
[
-0.055533086127811,
51.51639900462145
],
[
-0.055536473716316,
51.51631947461333
],
[
-0.056099172252204,
51.516329702641734
],
[
-0.056097932215228,
51.51640621071044
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": null,
"b_name": null,
"street": null,
"address": "Greater Whitechapel",
"feature_type": "GREATER_WHITECHAPEL",
"count": 1,
"search_str": "Greater Whitechapel"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>I was born in 1945 and my parents lived in <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1751/detail/\">Brune House</a> off Wentworth Street. I remember having Pesach at my grandparents' house in Clark Street. I can still remember their homemade cherry brandy and pickles. My grandmother was very famous for her cooking and baking and everybody called her Mrs Jacob, which was my grandfather's first name, not Rubinstein, their surname; very strange.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-31",
"last_edited": "2018-10-31"
},
{
"id": 701,
"title": "Whitechapel High Street frontage between Goulston Street and Middlesex Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 412,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.074012377775073,
51.51467748481298
],
[
-0.073983102664757,
51.51468897957842
],
[
-0.073892347597563,
51.51462748821428
],
[
-0.073737883579577,
51.514681742397556
],
[
-0.07371880686675,
51.51466591527795
],
[
-0.073900376177773,
51.51460205045548
],
[
-0.074012377775073,
51.51467748481298
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "141 to 143",
"b_name": "hoarding on site of 141-143 Whitechapel High Street",
"street": "Whitechapel High Street",
"address": "141-143 Whitechapel High Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 8,
"search_str": "hoarding on site of 141-143 Whitechapel High Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>The site at the High Street’s western extremity is a scene of long-standing dereliction, notable for the overgrown remains of the original Aldgate East station visible through gaps in the hoardings. From the 1680s to the 1880s it had nine shop-houses, two at the west demolished for the widening of Middlesex Street in 1883, five at the east for the building of the original entrance to Aldgate East in 1884. </p>\n\n<p>That and the remaining two houses were damaged beyond repair in the Second World War, the remains cleared in the 1950s, replaced with single-storey shops demolished in the late 1980s. The usage of this portion of the High Street is unusually well recorded.</p>\n\n<p>Before the street improvements of the 1880s, nine houses occupied the frontage, bracketed following the creation of Goulston Street in the 1680s by inns at the corners of Goulston Street and Petticoat Lane, the hinterland occupied from the sixteenth century and probably earlier by Boar’s Head Yard, with an entry to it between two houses (see xx). At the eastern corner, probably from the creation of Goulston Street in the 1680s and certainly by 1730, was the <strong>Coach and Horses</strong>, part of the residual Goulston estate. As the name suggests it was a coaching inn, offering the commuter daily trips to and from West Ham in the 1760s.[^1] The remainder of William Meggs’ 1000-year lease of 1595 of the inn and three (later two) houses adjoining in Goulston Street was acquired in 1780 from John Burnell, buyer of the Goulston estate in 1776, by Henry Pedley, part of a family of cordwainers with substantial holdings around the High Street into the twentieth century.[^2] In 1802 the landlord, Joseph Walker, gave evidence at the trial for high treason of Edward Marcus Despard, who had met in the Coach and Horses with his fellow conspirators in a plot to assassinate George III as a prelude to a popular uprising; Despard was executed in 1803.[^3] In 1807 the inn was described as ‘a substantially built roomy house and wine vault’ with ‘spacious double-fronted liquor shop’.[^4] In 1867-8 the pub, with ‘a large and lucrative counter trade’, was rebuilt ‘with great taste and judgment’, but on the same small scale and renamed The Clock House, by Joseph Pedley’s lessee, the licensee Edward Wells Russell, only to be demolished in 1884 for the entrance to Aldgate East station.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>The new building, although set back from the High Street to align with the new tube-entrance building, was substantial, its site including the two adjoining houses in Goulston Street where it had its main frontage. It was a typical ‘railway tavern’ of the period, three storeys over basement of stock brick with large windows and liberal cement dressings, and a glazed frontage to Goulston Street. It was built in 1885-6 for the brewers Truman & Hanbury, mortgagees of the former owner, to the designs of George Low (1824-1906), an architect much involved in railway-related property acquisition.[^6] The new pub took the name Aldgate Distillery and hosted a variety of social events.[^6] In 1892 management was taken over by Barnes & Co., with Morris Abrahams, who had overseen the transformation of the Earl of Effingham into the Wonderland, as landlord, placing adverts, written partly in Hebrew, presenting ‘their compliments to the Jewish community’, and offering wines and spirits for Passover.[^7] Abrahams’ brother-in-law barman, Reuben Philips, was both a Freemason and a boxing promoter, and in the late 1890s and early 1900s the Masonic Friars Lodge, a Lodge with a high Jewish membership from its origins in 1871, met in this pub. Inter alia, there was a benefit concert in 1899 at the pub for Pluto, the ‘coloured boxer who made a bold stand against Bill Fielder at the Goodwin Club’.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>In 1901 a change of tone came when Richie Thom, former manager of the Scotia Music hall in Glasgow arrived as manager - ‘Frae Glesca tae Whitechapel’ starring ‘Richie Thom, The Boss, A Scotchman of Scotchmen’, though boxing continued, along with competition snooker.[^9] In 1904 it became the Aldgate East Tavern and was later known variously as the Aldgate Wine Stores, Aldgate Tavern and Aldgate East tavern, before succumbing to war-time bombing, remaining as a shell until cleared in the early 1950s.[^10] </p>\n\n<p>By the 1670s just west of the site of the Coach and Horses was an alley to Boar’s Head Yard, separated by a narrow deep house, the alley blocked in rebuilding the house by 1733. From the 1740s to the 1840s it (<strong>No. 141</strong>) was occupied by a series of apothecaries and surgeons, by 1819 by Frederick Ager who in the 1830s worked additionally as a vaccinator for the Vaccine Board, established in 1808 to promote vaccination against smallpox.[^11] The rebuilt house still had access to Boar’s Head Yard, and title to five small cottages on its east side in 1841.[^12] It and <strong>No.</strong><strong>142 </strong>next west, previously occupied by the cutler William Hems, though mostly also occupied by linendrapers in the eighteenth century, were amalgamated in 1849 as a single linendrapers, John Vaughan succeeded in the early 1860s by George Keillor Marshall till demolition in 1884.[^13]</p>\n\n<p>In the early eighteenth century the modestly sized <strong>No.</strong><strong>143 </strong>was a glazier’s shop, then from 1748 till demolition in 1884, it housed a succession of tobacco and snuff manufacturers, the longest tenure, from 1794 to 1846, being of Joseph Pinheiro, followed by his son and daughter-in-law.[^14] The final occupant, Edward Toplis, recovered from bankruptcy in 1868, acquiring railway surplus land to the rear of Nos 143 and 144 when they were demolished, accessed from the south side of Boar’s Head Yard, on which he built a tobacco factory in 1884 which survived till the Second World War.[^15]</p>\n\n<p>Next west, probably on the site of the later <strong>No.</strong><strong>144</strong>, was a house in the occupation of three generations of the Quaker Napton family, salters, from the 1660s to the 1710s.[^16] It was variously a grocers and linendrapers and from1802 to demolition an apothecary’s shop (Michael Colesworthy, later Samuel Cheshire), by 1850 J.G. Gorton & Sons, who moved to No. 146 when No. 144 was demolished in 1884.[^17]</p>\n\n<p>Next door were the two houses, Nos 145 and 146, that survived road widening and railway expansion in the 1880s until destruction in the Second World War. The first, site of <strong>No.</strong><strong>145</strong>, was a house in the occupation of ironmongers for fifty years (John Ward, d. 1681 and William Grace, d. 1718) from the 1660s to the 1710s; John Ward left money to the parish church in 1681 on condition that the authorities settle debts to him for goods delivered for the rebuilding of the church in 1672-3.[^18] By the 1730s a cheesemonger William Cheslyn was in occupation, succeeded c. 1750 by an oil and colourman, Luke Alder, replaced once more by cheesemongers in the 1770s. </p>\n\n<p>No. 145 was acquired after the death in 1853 of the final cheesemonger, Abraham Goymer, by the Great Central Gas Consumers’ Company, and part of the basement and ground floor partitioned off to house a gas governor station (a bell floating in an iron tank, to regulate gas pressure near the points of delivery).[^19]</p>\n\n<p>Goymer had acquired premises to the rear and built a stable and chaise house on the site of three tenements formerly associated with No. 146 opening on to a yard entered from Boar’s Head Yard.[^20] By 1860 the building stretched back 120ft, with a warehouse to the front, stretching back enfilade through a counting house, small enclosed yard, two more small warehouses and a stable entered directly from Boar’s Head Yard, with Goymer’s chaise house, stable and chaff house adjoining west with a larger yard containing a cistern dated 1733. A survey and correspondence between the gas company and Benjamin Hyam and Son, clothiers, their lessee from 1860 in the rest of the building, throws some light on the conditions of rag-trade workers at the period.[^21] Hyams was a substantial firm with large shops, catering mainly for children and youths, in Glasgow, Liverpool, Dublin and Manchester, but 145 Whitechapel High Street was purely a workshop. In 1860 the house extended 120ft and a surveyor found it throughout ‘very dirty, every room is converted into a workshop’, the long list of dilapidations to be attended to by the tenant.[^22]</p>\n\n<p>The building was sold in 1884 and the rear portions demolished as part of the widening of Middlesex Street and repositioning further south of the truncated Boar’s Head Yard. The shop remained in use by clothing trades till the 1890s when it became dining rooms, the upper floors a ‘gentleman’s hotel’, and later a dental surgery.[^23]</p>\n\n<p>The final occupant of the shop before the building’s wartime destruction, from 1938, was Albert’s menswear, now at No. 88 (see xx), refitting done by Frederick Sage & Co. Ltd of Gray’s Inn Road.[^24] </p>\n\n<p>The next house (later <strong>No.</strong><strong>146</strong>) was occupied in the 1690s and early 1700s by John Obbinson, a tallowchandler who moved to ‘Lumbard Street in the Mynt’ by 1705, succeeded by Augustin Morr.[^25] Like No. 145, which it resembled, rebuilding in the early eighteenth century seems likely. It was in varied use in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries though with a mix of ironmongers (Richard Burbidge, Peter Gilbert), chinamen (William Carter in the 1820s and early 1830s offering ‘china and glass, for the East and West Indies’ to ‘merchants and captains’) and bootmakers, pastrycooks and confectioners taking over from the 1847 till 1885. Then, Gorton & Sons, chemists, made homeless by the demolition of No. 144, moved to No. 146, now a corner building following the recently widening of Middlesex Street. It was extended then or shortly thereafter to the rear to take advantage of this new exposure, the flank wall rebuilt with three shops (Nos 2, 4 and 6 Middlesex Street).</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/07/11/1900-gortons.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>The rear of Gorton & Sons premises, as extended c. 1885 to create 2, 4 and 6 Middlesex Street, seen from Middlesex Street</p>\n\n<p>Gortons remained till destruction of the building in the Second World War.[^26] The firm claimed on their signage to have been founded in 1720, which may have been only a slight exaggeration: Richard Gorton, chymist of Bethnal Green (d. 1787), was J.G. Gorton’s great-uncle, and that business had moved after his death to Petticoat Lane in the 1790s.[^27] Their building sported a large carved and gilded golden sun, emblem of the Apothecary’s Company symbolising the healing power of Apollo.[^28]Under J.G. Gorton’s son the firm was a specialist veterinary chemists in the 1880s and 1890s, the window sporting equine memorabilia. The shop reverted to more conventional pharmacy under new owners, and remained in that trade till the Blitz.[^29]</p>\n\n<p>Between here and the Bull’s Head at the corner was a shop-house (No. 147) on a site truncated by a stable yard in Boar’s Head Yard and, at around 200 years, perhaps, the longest unbroken usage on the High Street: it was a baker’s by 1675 (Richard Tanner, d. 1696) and remained in that use until the building was demolished along with the Bull’s Head for the widening of Middlesex Street in 1883, when the final baker, Konrad Vellenzer, decamped to Harrow Road.[^30]</p>\n\n<p>Finally, at the oblique corner of the High Street with Middlesex Street (then still called Petticoat Lane) was the site, probably from an early date, of an inn known variously as the Bull Inn and the <strong>Bull’s Head</strong>. The 1666 Hearth Tax shows the corner as a small house of one hearth (1666: Richard Warde, 1675: empty), adjoining a larger one of four hearths, the presumed Bull’s Head, in 1666 in the occupancy of Adam Hill, ‘a man from the barrs’, who died in 1667, succeeded by his presumed widow, Suzan, till the 1670s.[^31]On part of the site two goldsmiths, Thomas Hill and Samuel Embry (d. 1695), appear to have been working in the 1690s.[^32] The Bull’s Head is known by name in 1721 when the landlord, George England, was an agent for the York Buildings lottery.[^33] The licence passed at his death in 1730 to his widow Rachael who married Theophilus Thurogood in 1732, who took over the inn.[^34] He moved to Chelmsford to keep the Black Boy, and eventual bankruptcy. By the 1740s, under the landlord John Dawson (d. 1751) the Bull’s Head was hosting Masonic meetings.[^35] The Bull’s Head, like the Angel and Crown, served as both a pick-up point for those with votes in Essex, and for election rallies.[^36]</p>\n\n<p>The inn, ‘formerly two houses’, was rebuilt in brick, incorporating the small corner house, in 1788-9, when the landlord was John Peacock, but sacrificed along with No. 147 adjoining for the widening of Middlesex Street in 1883, when the building materials were sold.[^37]</p>\n\n<p><em>Aldgate East station original entrance (demolished)</em></p>\n\n<p>Aldgate East station opened on the site of 141-144 High Street on 1 October 1884, the result of efforts in the 1870s by the Metropolitan and District Railway companies to complete the inner circle of London underground lines, and to connect this to the East London Railway at Whitechapel. The entrance building was set back from the High Street, a simple but dignified single-story structure in stock brick, housing booking office and stairs at the rear down to the platforms, with shallow jack arches on cast-iron columns. The M&DR’s works in 1883-4 were overseen by the engineer John Wolfe Barry. </p>\n\n<p>The entrance was rebuilt forward to the High Street’s building line in 1911 in two stories, to the designs of Harry Wharton Ford, architect to the District Railway. It was clad, like several of the stations he designed (eg Baron’s Court), in buff brick-tiles by the Leeds Fireclay Company.[^38] A Lyons tea room occupied two shopfronts and the upper floor, lit by large shallow-arched windows, with a new open entrance to the underground to the east side. This entrance closed on 30 October 1938, the night before three new entrances opened further east.[^39] </p>\n\n<p>These shifts were necessary because of engineering work to make the curve of the line between Aldgate and Aldgate East less tight, enabling an increase in the size of trains to alleviate the congestion, which was increasing by roughly ten per cent a year between 1932 and 1936 at Aldgate East.[^40] At the same time entrances were opened on the south side of the High Street and the need for head room for the underpasses to these meant the tracks had to be suspended from the new joists while the track bed was excavated; the hooks are still evident.</p>\n\n<p>The extended station was refitted in typical style for the New Works Programme of the London Transport Passenger Board in the late 1930s, including randomly scattered relief-moulded tiles of London and Home Counties heraldry and buildings (Houses of Parliament, 55 Broadway, the LTPB headquarters) designed by Harold Stabler (1872-1945) and made by Carter, Stabler and Adams of Poole (later the Poole Pottery).[^41] </p>\n\n<p><em>Postwar developments</em></p>\n\n<p>The closure of the original entrance was followed by bombing to the whole High Street frontage between Goulston Street and Middlesex Street which totally destroyed the eighteenth-century houses at 145 and 146 and left the former station entrance and the adjoining Aldgate East Tavern derelict until 1957.</p>\n\n<p>Four single-storey shops numbered 138, 139 and 141–2 Whitechapel High Street and 1 Goulston Street were erected in 1957 on the site of the station and the Aldgate East Tavern on a short-term basis till more substantial redevelopment became possible. William Clark & Partners, were the architects working for the Adamia Property Company. The largest shop was in rag-trade use, No. 139 sold records (Levy’s, which could trace its roots back to a cycle shop at 19 Whitechapel High Street which branched into importing jazz records in the 1920s, and had recording studios and shops in the West End after the war), and No. 138 shoes.[^42] Plans for a more ambitious office building adjoining on the site of 145 and 146 and 2, 4 and 6 Middlesex Street in 1958 were refused (because it would prejudice the redevelopment of the site after road widening at the south end of Middlesex Street), as was a scheme for a six-storey building on the corner with Goulston Street in 1983.[^43] The ‘temporary’ shop buildings were finally demolished in 1990 and, although permission was granted in 2008 for a 17-storey office building on the site with a hotel to the north, only the hotel portion has been built (see pp. xx) and advertising hoardings of increasing solidity have occupied the site ever since.[^44] In June 2018 a new planning application was submitted by Cromlech Property Co. Ltd, the owner of the site since the 1950s and now a subsidiary of Daejan Holdings Plc, and Unite Students. The proposal is for a building, to the designs of ArchitecturePLB, of between eighteen and twenty-four storeys, faced in varying shades of stock brick, to include 1,052 student bedrooms on the fourth floors and upwards, and offices below, with shops on the ground floor.[^45]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MR/LV/5/26: <em>The Compleat Compting-house Companion</em>, London 1763, p. 288</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: LMA, Land Tax returns (LT): Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: J. and W.B. Gurney, eds, <em>The Trial of Edward Marcus Despard</em>, 1803, pp. 92-3, 236, 257, 269, 262</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 03 June 1807, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Transport for London Group Archives (TfLGA), LT002051/474, LT002051/809-/814: Post Office Directories (POD):<em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 23 Oct 1868, p.1</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>The Builder</em>, 4 July 1885, p. 370; 19 May 1906, p. 560: TfLGA, LT002051/809, /811-/813: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>East London Observer (ELO)</em>, 13 Nov 1886, p. 5, 26 March 1892, p.2, 1 April 1893, p. 3</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>ELO</em>, 21 Jan 1899, p. 5, 8 April 1899, p. 5, <em>Sporting Life</em>, 8 Dec 1899, p. 1: <em>ELO</em>, 20 Jan 1900, p. 5: <em>Sporting Life</em>, 23 Feb, 1900 p. 1: <em>ELO</em>, 24 Feb 1900, p. 5, 31 March 1900, p. 7, 16 Feb 1901, p. 5: https://friars.freemasons.london/about/</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: <em>Music Hall and Theatre Review</em>, 16 Aug 1901, p. 11</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>Daily Telegraph and Courier</em>, 17 Oct 1904, p. 5: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: <em>Report from the Select Committee on the Vaccine Board</em>, London 1833, p. vi: <em>London Medical Gazette</em>, 13, 1834, pp 123-30: <em>The Royal Kalendar and Royal and City Register</em>, London 1835, p. 332: <em>The British Medical Almanac</em>, London 1837, p. 80 </p>\n\n<p>[^12]: LT: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 1 Sept 1841, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: POD: LT</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: The National Archives (TNA), PROB 11/2026/63, PROB 11/1935/175: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: POD: LT: Ancestry: LMA, District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): Goad insurance maps: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes (MBW), 28 Sept 1883, p. 400: TNA, PROB 11/1935/175: Historic England Archive (HEA), Aerofilms EPW055309, EAW011144</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: POD: LT: Ancestry: <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em>, July 1904, pp. 133-4</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: TNA, E 44/516; PROB 11/562/253: Hearth Tax returns (HT), 1666, 1674-5: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: TNA, PROB 11/562/253: HT 1666 and 1674-5: LT: POD: LMA, Four Shillings in the Pound Aid assessment, 1693–4 (4s£)</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: LMA, B/NTG/0540, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/512/1078687, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/526/1115690: TNA, PROB 11/2174/238: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 9 June 1853, p.8: William Hosgood Young Webber, <em>Town Gas and its Uses</em>, 1907, pp. 58-9: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: LMA, B/NTG/0540; LT; DSR</p>\n\n<p>[^21]:[LMA, B/NTG/0540-544</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: LMA, B/NTG/0541, 542</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: POD: DSR</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: POD: <em>The Builder, 4</em> July 1884, p. 41: Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives (THLHLA), Building Control file 15911, location 103</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: Ancestry: HT 1666, 1674-5: 4s£</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: MBW, 11 Jan. 1884, p. 51: <em>The Builder</em>, 4 July 1885, p. 41</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: LMA, MS 11936/395/617316MS 11936/514/1065420: TNA, PROB 11/1151/309</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: POD: LT: <em>Gentleman's Magazine</em>, July 1904, pp. 133-4</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: LT: POD</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: HT 1674-5: 4s£: POD: LT: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^31]: HT 1666, 1674-5: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^32]: 4s£</p>\n\n<p>[^33]: <em>Weekly Journal or Saturday’s Post</em>, 28 Oct 1721</p>\n\n<p>[^34]: LMA, Licensed Victuallers Returns; LT; London and Surrey Marriage Bonds and Allegations, 1597-1921, via ancestry.co.uk</p>\n\n<p>[^35]: John Lane, <em>Masonic Records, 1717-1894</em>, London 1895, p. 57</p>\n\n<p>[^36]: <em>Morning Herald</em>, 24 March 1784</p>\n\n<p>[^37]: THLHLA, PP/SLC/1/17/9: MBW,16 Nov 1883, p. 756: LMA, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/361/557361</p>\n\n<p>[^38]: HEA, Bedford Lemere</p>\n\n<p>[^39]: LMA, MR/UP/1094, MR/UP/1168: Alan Jackson, <em>London’s Metropolitan Railway</em>,</p>\n\n<p>[^40]: TfLGA, Lt/273/047</p>\n\n<p>[^41]: THLHLA, L/SMB/G/1/38/1 and 2: John P. McCrickard, ‘LPTB New Works Programme 80thAnniversary: A Tribute to a Major Expansion of the Underground Network, accessed at lurs.org.uk: <a href=\"https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2013/04/aldgate-east.html\">https://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2013/04/aldgate-east.html</a>: <a href=\"https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Carter,_Stabler_and_Adams\">https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Carter,_Stabler_and_Adams</a>: Hans van Lemmen, <em>1000 years of tiles in Europe</em>, 1991, p. 176: <em>London by Design</em>, London Transport Museum, 2016, p. 185</p>\n\n<p>[^42]: THLHLA, P14548:<a href=\"http://colinville.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-home-of-music.html\">http://colinville.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-home-of-music.html</a></p>\n\n<p>[^43]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online (THP): LMA, COL/PLD/AD/01/4038: THLHLA, Building Control files 15911 and 15912 location 103</p>\n\n<p>[^44]: THP: THLHLA, P14547, P14548</p>\n\n<p>[^45]: THP </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-06",
"last_edited": "2018-07-11"
},
{
"id": 681,
"title": "Ahmed House, 48 Fieldgate Street",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 701,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.064324273879217,
51.51681805875195
],
[
-0.064324279250597,
51.51681805344111
],
[
-0.064411435349949,
51.516814625199366
],
[
-0.06442639762912,
51.51694391559287
],
[
-0.064370547672067,
51.51694822213517
],
[
-0.064324290486691,
51.516818056674765
],
[
-0.064324273879217,
51.51681805875195
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "48",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Fieldgate Street",
"address": "Ahmed House, 48 Fieldgate Street",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 1,
"search_str": "Ahmed House, 48 Fieldgate Street"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>Getzel Rossen, a chandler, had this shophouse up to 1905 when Max Rosin established a kosher bakery on the premises. His successor, Woolf Rosin, redeveloped in 1929 with Ernest and James Cannell as his architects, and continued the business, with a new bakehouse to the rear. All that was cleared in the 1960s. The present red-brick block, of similar proportions to its three-storey flat-roofed predecessor was built in 1983–5 for B. Ahmed to designs by Abdul Khaliq Samee of the Design and Construction Group of Ilford, for garment-industry use with machine rooms above showrooms. A conversion to form flats over shops followed in 1992–3.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's Returns: Royal London Hospital Archives, RLHLH/S/1/4: Ordnance Survey maps: Goad insurance maps: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control files 40646,40655</p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-02",
"last_edited": "2018-07-02"
},
{
"id": 619,
"title": "108 Whitechapel Road",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 863,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.064384724399438,
51.51786619081957
],
[
-0.06431433543884,
51.51788893313536
],
[
-0.064262018014728,
51.517824347365654
],
[
-0.064192285147779,
51.51772961480111
],
[
-0.064269624814249,
51.5177054845063
],
[
-0.064340084650314,
51.51780310144721
],
[
-0.064384724399438,
51.51786619081957
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "108",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "108 Whitechapel Road",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 1,
"search_str": "108 Whitechapel Road"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>Thomas and James Jennings, plumbers, were probably responsible for erecting this building in place of its set-back eighteenth-century predecessor in the 1860s when they took occupancy of the site. James Jennings, a locally prolific builder/contractor, was based here with a small builders’ yard to the rear up to the First World War. The upper-storey window openings in the stuccoed façade, incised as ashlar, were altered in 1937. The yard had been built over and a two-storey warehouse to the rear on Vine Court was rebuilt in 1922–3, for David Taub, a woollens merchant, the occupant and freeholder. The rear block was rebuilt again in 1960–3 for Alfred Cox Ltd, makers of surgical and orthopaedic appliances.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 41898; P33681: District Surveyors Returns</p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-19",
"last_edited": "2018-04-19"
},
{
"id": 141,
"title": "Mail Rail",
"author": {
"id": 44,
"username": "dan"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1227,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.058796596412285,
51.51912310433929
],
[
-0.057896913703648,
51.51929776742821
],
[
-0.057646155790783,
51.51878891291734
],
[
-0.057726960269829,
51.518773414154225
],
[
-0.057663251646104,
51.51864413103036
],
[
-0.058003630287349,
51.51857884372657
],
[
-0.058058858263524,
51.51869091551577
],
[
-0.058183402152667,
51.518667026720365
],
[
-0.058192757854339,
51.51868601168758
],
[
-0.058228318266828,
51.5186791908066
],
[
-0.058378536493976,
51.518984017000164
],
[
-0.058419330251411,
51.51897619228836
],
[
-0.058450444692009,
51.51903932977383
],
[
-0.05871794555232,
51.51898801961153
],
[
-0.058796596412285,
51.51912310433929
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "180–206",
"b_name": "East London Mail Centre and E1 Delivery Office",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "East London Mail Centre and E1 Delivery Office",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 14,
"search_str": "East London Mail Centre and E1 Delivery Office"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>Whitechapel Sorting Office was a terminus for Mail Rail, a unique underground railway, which stretched all the way between Whitechapel and Paddington via Farringdon. It was a completely separate system to the London Underground and used tiny electric trains of the right size to carry parcels and letters.</p>\n\n<p>The system is no longer in use and has been mothballed but plans are in place to reopen the line for tourists as a museum in 2017. </p>\n",
"created": "2016-09-17",
"last_edited": "2020-10-20"
},
{
"id": 599,
"title": "Impressions of Whitechapel ",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 1698,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.062755898137067,
51.51857235799611
],
[
-0.058216859270041,
51.51960039921044
],
[
-0.058148482851386,
51.51948612756745
],
[
-0.061091729886378,
51.51883423152082
],
[
-0.061616259170046,
51.51871888429734
],
[
-0.06270768344222,
51.51847582817058
],
[
-0.062755898137067,
51.51857235799611
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "",
"b_name": "",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "Whitechapel Market, Whitechapel Road",
"feature_type": "PLACE",
"count": 48,
"search_str": "Whitechapel Market, Whitechapel Road"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>On the 16th March 2018 the Survey of London collaborated with design consultants make:good and the Whitechapel Gallery in holding a workshop with GCSE students from Swanlea School, on Brady Street. One of the outcomes was the first responses from the students when thinking about Whitechapel. Their comments are posted below, and a fuller description of the workshop is on our blog (tab at top of page).</p>\n\n<p>\"Whitechapel reminds me of things that I do everyday in school and hanging out with my friends after school around the Sainsburys\". (Rukshana Akhtar)</p>\n\n<p>\"I think of Whitechapel as a very busy place. There are too many people during the day and in the afternoon it is very busy\". (Mohammed Abu Sufian)</p>\n\n<p>\"I have crystal clear memories of the crowded place, Whitechapel. Every time I walk by, the concentrated smell of various things hits my face just like a brutal punch. The noises of sirens, people and market stall people is aching\". (Tamim Mazum Der)</p>\n\n<p>\"My memories of Whitechapel lie within helping my mother doing grocery shopping. While she talks about her day with her friends, I just think about going home and wanting to play playstation 3\". (Mohammed Mustakin)</p>\n\n<p>\"Whitechapel reminds me of how much it has changed. There used to be a McDonalds and a Pizza Hut\". (Kamran Miah)</p>\n\n<p>\"What I remember most about Whitechapel is how they moved the station to another place, and how after they regenerated the area around it. For example, they made the overall image of the surrounding area nicer, built a new pathway and stairs and new shops like costa\". (Aksar Islam)</p>\n\n<p>\"I have lived in Whitechapel since birth, I have a wonderful memory of and childhood of Whitechapel\". (Zahra Sarfraz)</p>\n\n<p>\"Whitechapel reminds me of the effort I need to put in to go to school, especially when living far away\". (Nuna Irdina)</p>\n\n<p>\"When I think about Whitechapel, I think about the old Royal London Hospital and why they stop using it\". (Md Saidur Rahman)</p>\n\n<p>\"Whitechapel reminds me of my first day of school. It was raining and my whole uniform was soaked. But I loved how the clouds were looking and dripping of the rain\". (Eusra Mahadi)</p>\n\n<p>\"Whitechapel reminds me of something that I go past every day which is the Booth Memorial statue. It is interesting how it is still in the same condition as it was once buit. It also shows how other people pay tribute to others\". (Adnan Alam)</p>\n\n<p>\"The colour combination of the market reminds me of a rainbow, before it becomes 'overpopulated'. But I think that it is still great\". (Hassan Ahmed)</p>\n\n<p>\"Whitechapel used to be about tradition and cultures that felt close to the people living around but now is having a business meaning to it as it becomes more posh and rich getting rid of the culture.\" (Sofin Islam)</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-04-04",
"last_edited": "2020-10-20"
},
{
"id": 242,
"title": "Blind Beggar in 1973",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
"feature": {
"id": 521,
"type": "Feature",
"geometry": {
"type": "MultiPolygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[
[
-0.057044351749301,
51.52005556326038
],
[
-0.057062845054071,
51.52008733971823
],
[
-0.057006580922032,
51.52009916710701
],
[
-0.056992538373997,
51.520075225540054
],
[
-0.056933469956532,
51.520088559604176
],
[
-0.05684130439071,
51.51992730823853
],
[
-0.056960904550882,
51.519899865751334
],
[
-0.057044351749301,
51.52005556326038
]
]
]
]
},
"properties": {
"b_number": "337",
"b_name": "The Blind Beggar public house",
"street": "Whitechapel Road",
"address": "The Blind Beggar, 337 Whitechapel Road",
"feature_type": "WHITECHAPEL_BUILDING",
"count": 9,
"search_str": "The Blind Beggar public house"
},
"tags": []
},
"body": "<p>A digitised colour slide form the Tower Hamlets Archives collection:</p>\n\n<p><a href=\"https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/712931287615582208\">https://twitter.com/LBTHArchives/status/712931287615582208</a></p>\n",
"created": "2016-12-19",
"last_edited": "2018-01-29"
}
]
}