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"title": "1901 Census residents",
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"body": "<p>Frederick William Horey (b.1860), wife Elizabeth & daughter Grace lived at 12 Whitechapel Road in 1901. He was a builder.<br></p>",
"created": "2017-05-30",
"last_edited": "2017-05-31"
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"id": 84,
"title": "The 7th builder brother",
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"street": "Fordham Street",
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"body": "<p>David Davis was the builder at this corner site in Fordham Street/Settles Street. He was the one among the seven builder brothers Davis who built least in the east End; indeed this is the only known surviving example of his work here, as his main centre of operations was in Goldhurst Terrace, West Hampstead, though before WW1 he had other small-scale projects on the London Hospital estate.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Hospital records, LH/A/9/42, p 130 (1 Jan 1912).</p>\n",
"created": "2016-07-07",
"last_edited": "2016-08-23"
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"id": 53,
"title": "7-8 Manningtree Street",
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"body": "<p>2011-13, office and residential block, replacing a clothing factory of 1930-2. Kyson, architects, for Breanstar Ltd, brick facade with Marley Eternit Cedral weatherboarding return. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: District Surveyors Returns: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 40878: Tower Hamlets Planning</p>\n",
"created": "2016-06-22",
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"id": 333,
"title": "The Buxton (formerly the Archers) public house, 42 Osborn Street",
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"body": "<p>The Archers public house was at the Old Montague Street corner by 1821, and may well date back to the 1780s when Osborn Street was formed. The present building of 1903 was built to plans by J. Douglas Scott, architect, for A. J. Goddard, Whitbread & Co.’s lessee, with J. C. Richards & Co. as builders. The District Surveyor and London County Council insisted that the upper storey be set back on the south side for the sake of light to other buildings. The pub’s nineteenth-century predecessor had not been so constrained.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1}: London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/484/983715; GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/023123: London County Council Minutes, 6 October and 17 November 1903, pp. 1452, 1829: District Surveyors Returns</p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-30",
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"id": 39,
"title": "N & R Davis",
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"body": "<p>Nathaniel and Raphael (Ralph) Davis were the youngest of the seven builder sons of Woolf Davis, and the only ones known to have had some sort of architectural background (they trained as draughtsmen while their ex-furrier elder brothers went into building).</p>\n\n<p>They built mainly housing and flats above shops, on many east London sites, including the north side of Fashion Street, Spitalfields (1896), which survives, and Underwood Street, west of Vallance Road (1896), which doesn’t. Buildings of theirs near this complex - in Alie Street, Rupert Street and Christopher Court - have also gone. As has a commercial building on the east side of Leman Street (nos. 25 and 27; built in 1893, when they were in their early 20s) which they called Woolfray House, punning on a staple warehouse commodity of the district and the first names of father and one of the sons, and underscoring that there was, generally, a great deal of mutual financial support within the family.</p>\n\n<p>The block at 20-30 (even) East Tenter Street and 52-60 (even) Leman Street (1901), is larger than most of the Davis sites surviving in east London, and like their smaller, early project on Mercers’ Company land at 76-78 White Horse Road, Ratcliff (1893), consisted of artisans’ dwellings in flats. With the exception of the latter, and possibly Woolfray House, they appear to have favoured the Davis trademark sound red brick.</p>\n",
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"title": "A History of the Bell Foundry",
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"body": "<p>The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which closed in June 2017, was a remarkable survival. Its business cards claimed it as ‘Britain’s oldest manufacturing company’ and ‘the world’s most famous bell foundry’ – the first not readily contradicted, the second unverifiable but plausible. It had been said that the bell foundry ‘is so connected with the history of Whitechapel that it would be impossible to move it without wanton disregard of the associations of many generations.’[^1] The business, principally the making of church bells, had operated continuously in Whitechapel since at least the 1570s. It had been on its present site with the existing house and office buildings since the mid 1740s.</p>\n\n<p>The foundry’s origins have been traced to either Robert Doddes in 1567 or Robert Mot in 1572, giving rise to a traditional foundation date of 1570. It is said then to have been in Essex Court (later Tewkesbury Court, where Gunthorpe Street is now). There is no continuous thread, but it has also been suggested that the Elizabethan establishment had grown out of a foundry in Aldgate that can be tracked back to Stephen Norton in 1363.</p>\n\n<p><em>To Whitechapel Road</em></p>\n\n<p>From 1701 Richard Phelps was in charge. He made the great (5¼ ton) clock bell for St Paul’s Cathedral in 1716. When he died in August 1738 he was succeeded by Thomas Lester, aged about 35, who had been his foreman. It has been supposed that within the year Lester had moved the foundry into new buildings on the present site on Whitechapel Road, a belief which can be traced to Amherst Tyssen’s account of the history of the foundry in 1923, where he related that ‘according to the tradition preserved in the foundry and communicated to me by Mr John Mears more than sixty years ago, Thomas Lester built the present foundry in the year 1738 and moved his business to it. The site was said to have been previously occupied by the Artichoke Inn.’[^2] That has never been corroborated and it is implausible as such a move would take more than a few months.</p>\n\n<p>Contemporary documentation suggests a slightly later date for the move. An advertisement in the <em>Daily Advertiser</em> of 31 August 1743 reads: ‘To be let on a Building Lease, The Old Artichoke Alehouse, together with the House adjoining, in front fifty feet, and in Depth a hundred and six, situated in Whitechapel Street, the Corner turning into Stepney Fields.’ Those measurements tally well with the foundry site. Stepney Manor Court Rolls refer to ‘the Artichoke Alehouse, late in the occupation of John Cowell now empty’ on 8 April 1743 and to ‘a new built messuage now in possession of Thomas Leicester, formerly two old houses’ on 15 May 1747. A sewer rates listing of February 1743/4 does not mention Lester at the site. The advertised building lease was evidently taken by or sold on to Lester, who undertook redevelopment of the site in 1744–6, clearing the Artichoke. The motive for the move was doubtless the opportunity for a larger foundry and superior accommodation on this more easterly and therefore open site.</p>\n\n<p><em>The Buildings</em></p>\n\n<p>The seven-bay brick range that is 32 and 34 Whitechapel Road is a single room deep with three rooms in line on each storey, all heated from the back wall. It was built to be Lester’s house and has probably always incorporated an office. The Doric doorcase appears to be an original feature, while the shopfront at the east end is of the early nineteenth century, whether an insertion or a replacement. Internally the house retains much original fielded panelling, a good original staircase, chimneypieces of several eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dates and, in the central room on the first floor, a fine apsidal niche cupboard. Behind the east end is 2 Fieldgate Street, a separately built house of just one room per storey, perhaps for a foreman. Its Gibbsian door surround is of timber, as are its back walls.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/11/sol-whitechapel-100735.jpg\"><em>32-34 Whitechapel Road in April 2017 (photograph by Derek Kendall)</em></p>\n\n<p>Outbuildings of eighteenth-century origin to the south are single storeyed, a stables, coach-house and smithery range along Fieldgate Street. The foundry itself was across a yard behind the west part of the house. Facing the street on the former stabling range is a tablet inscribed: ‘This is Baynes Street’ with an illegible date, perhaps 1766. This refers to what became Fieldgate Street. What is now Plumber’s Row bisected property owned by Edward Baynes from 1729.</p>\n\n<p><em>From 1750 to 1810</em></p>\n\n<p>Thomas Lester took Thomas Pack into partnership in 1752 and acquired ownership of the foundry from a younger Edward Baynes in 1767. Lester’s nephew William Chapman was a foundry foreman who, working at Canterbury Cathedral in 1762, met William Mears, a young man he brought back to London to learn the bell-founding trade. Lester died in 1769 and left the foundry to relatives to be leased to Pack and Chapman as partners. After Pack died in 1781 Chapman was pushed out and for a few years descendants of Lester ran the establishment. Their initiative failed and William Mears returned in partnership with his brother Thomas, who came to Whitechapel from Canterbury. Ownership of the property remained divided among descendants of Lester and in 1810 Thomas Mears was still trading as ‘late Lester, Pack and Chapman’. On a promotional sheet he listed all the bells cast at the foundry since 1738, 1,858 in total, around 25 per year – including some for St Mary le Bow in 1738, Petersburg in Russia in 1747 and Christ Church, Philadelphia, in 1754.</p>\n\n<p><em>Later Ownership</em></p>\n\n<p>A son, also Thomas Mears, acquired full control of the foundry in October 1818 when seven parties of Lester descendants sold up. The younger Mears took over the businesses of four rival bell-founders and, it seems clear, undertook works of improvement. By 1840 the firm had only one major competitor in Britain (W. & J. Taylor of Oxford and Loughborough). The next generation, Charles and George Mears, ran the foundry from 1844 to 1859, the highlight of this period being the casting in 1858 of Big Ben (13.7 tons), still the foundry’s largest bell. From 1865 George Mears was partnered by Robert Stainbank. Thereafter the business traded as Mears & Stainbank up to 1968. Arthur Hughes became the foundry manager in 1884 and took charge of operations in 1904.</p>\n\n<p><em>Alterations to 1900</em></p>\n\n<p>Given the ownership history, there was little significant investment in the buildings before 1818. However, the smithery end of the eastern outbuilding does appear to have been altered if not rebuilt between 1794 and 1813. Around 1820 a small pair of three-storey houses was added beyond a gateway that gave access to the foundry yard. There are also two-storey single-room early nineteenth-century additions behind the centre and west bays of the main house, the last room incorporating a chimneypiece bearing ‘TM 1820’. Thereafter, possibly following a fire in 1837 or in the 1850s, the smithery site was redeveloped as a three-storey workshop–warehouse block extending across a retained gateway. The ground-floor openings north of the gateway, once perhaps doors, have been reduced in size. Demand for the casting of very heavy bells increased from the 1830s. In 1846 the foundry was enlarged with a new furnace by enclosing the south end of the yard, this for the making of an 11.5 ton bell for Montreal Cathedral. Another furnace was added two years later and in 1850 Benjamin Price built a 62ft-tall chimney up against the south wall. Rudhalls Gloucester foundry, taken over in 1835, closed in 1848 and its tuning machine was brought to Whitechapel and housed in a specially built room that ate further into the yard, the smithery to the east adapted to house a steam engine. The tuning room’s largely glazed north-facing wall stands little altered, and the timber beam that housed the head of the tuning machine remains in situ below a lantern-lit roof, the machine itself having been replaced around 1920. A large additional workshop or back foundry had been added to the far south-west by the 1870s, by when the pair of houses to the south-east had been cleared for a carpenter’s shop, the front wall retained with its doors and windows blocked. The more northerly part of the Plumber’s Row range has latterly been used for making handbells and timber bell wheels.[^3]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/11/bell-foundry-ground-floor-plan.jpg\"><em>Whitechapel Bell Foundry, ground-floor plan in 2016 (drawing by Helen Jones)</em></p>\n\n<p><em>Late 20th-century repair and rebuilding</em></p>\n\n<p>The back foundry was damaged during the Second World War. Proposals to rebuild entirely behind the Whitechapel Road houses emerged in 1958 by when the foundry was already protected by listing. The workshops were considered expendable, but even then it was suggested that the timber jib crane on the east wall should be preserved. First plans were shelved and a more modest scheme of 1964–5 was postponed for want of capital, though plant and furnaces were replaced and there were repairs that included rebuilding of the east and west inner courtyard walls. In 1972 Moss Sprawson tried to acquire the site for office development. For the foundry, Douglas Hughes (one of Arthur’s grandsons) proposed a move east across Fieldgate Street to what was then a car park owned by the Greater London Council. A move entirely out of London was also considered. The GLC’s Historic Buildings Division became involved in trying to maintain what it considered ‘a unique and important living industry where crafts essentially unchanged for 400 years are practised by local craftsmen.’[^4] But plans came unstuck again in 1976 when the GLC conceded it had no locus to help keep the business in situ. Even so, in the same year the UK gave the USA a Bicentennial Bell cast in Whitechapel. A large new engineering workshop was at last built in 1979–81, with James Strike as architect. At the back of the site, it was faced with arcaded yellow stock brick on conservation grounds. In 1984–5 the GLC oversaw and helped pay for underpinning and refurbishment of the front buildings. The shopfront was grained and the external window shutters were renewed and painted dark green. In 1997 proprietorship passed to Douglas Hughes’s nephew, Alan Hughes, and his wife, Kathryn. The foundry continued to manufacture, but not without growing concerns as to its tenability in Whitechapel.</p>\n\n<p>In December 2016 the Hughes announced the foundry’s closure having agreed to sell the site to Vincent Goldstein, a London-based property developer. He paid £5.1 million and in 2017 sold on for £7.9 million to Raycliff Capital, headed by Bippy M. Siegal, a New York financier. The foundry closed definitively and was emptied of personnel and most plant, in part for redeployment elsewhere through the Hughes’s firm, Whitechapel Bell Foundry Ltd.</p>\n\n<p>Negotiations opened as to the future use of the site and in June 2018 Raycliff Whitechapel LLP made public a scheme for the site that proposed adaptive reuse of the site’s front buildings with a hotel to the south replacing the workshop of 1979–81. This scheme was prepared by 31/44 Architects, working with Malcolm Fryer Architects (conservation) and Alan Baxter Ltd. Raycliff had acquired additional land to the west and south of the expendable workshop for which there were existing hotel consents. At the same time, the Factum Foundation and the United Kingdom Historic Building Preservation Trust presented an alternative proposal seeking to perpetuate manufacturing in an art foundry.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>In November 2019 Tower Hamlets Council approved the Raycliff scheme only for Robert Jenrick, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, to intervene, calling a Public Inquiry in January 2020. The Covid-19 pandemic caused this to be deferred until October 2020 when evidence was presented online. But in June Christopher Pincher, a housing and planning minister, had said in the House of Commons that the Raycliff scheme had been refused consent, later explaining that he ‘misspoke’. There thus arose the possibility of any ultimate refusal being challenged as predetermined. This did not materialize because Paul Griffiths, the Planning Inspector, judged the scheme favourably and the controversial hotel project was approved in May 2021, a decision announced by Luke Hall, a junior minister, that led Jenrick to launch a review of planning policy in relation to heritage. At the time of writing negotiations about the future use of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry were continuing.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>We are grateful to Alan Hughes for showing us round the premises and sharing his knowledge of the foundry.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: D. L. Munby, <em>Industry and Planning in Stepney</em>, 1951, p. 254</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Amherst D. Tyssen, ‘The History of the Whitechapel Bell-Foundry’, <em>Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society</em>, vol. 5, 1923, p. 211</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Richard Horwood's Map of London, 1813: Ordnance Survey map, 1873: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyor's Returns and MBO/Plans/292 </p>\n\n<p>[^4]: London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4441/01/0821</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>The Guardian</em>, 2 December 2017: Spitalfields Life, 21 June 2018: <em>The Observer</em>, 3 March 2019: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Gillian Darley, ‘The Whitechapel Bell Foundry should be a working factory, not a boutique hotel’, <em>Apollo</em>, 19 Sept 2019: Charles Saumarez Smith, ‘The sad, shameful demise of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry’, <em>Apollo</em>, 14 May 2021: <em>Evening Standard</em>, 15 Nov 2019: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 4 Dec. 2019: <em>The Guardian</em>, 4 Oct 2020; 11 May 2021: Spitalfields Life, 15 Nov 2019; 30 May 2021: <em>Planning</em>, 23 June 2020; 17 May 2021: <em>Architects' Journal</em>, 14 May 2021</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>The rectangle of Whitechapel parish that projects north of Old Montague Street as far as Chicksand Street was part of the Halifax or Osborn estate along with much of Mile End New Town to the north and east. In 1643 Edward Montague of Boughton, Northants, and William Montague and Maurice Tresham, both of the Middle Temple, bought this land from William Smith and others at the Middle Temple. The holding passed to George Montague, who became second Baron Halifax and first Earl of Halifax of the third creation, which title lapsed on the death of his son George in 1771. His heir was a nephew, Sir George Osborn, baronet, son of Sir Danvers Osborn of Chicksands Priory, Bedford. Much of the Osborn property was sold in 1849 to redeem mortgages, much of the rest in the twentieth century.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Most of the estate that lay in Whitechapel (twelve acres) was leased around 1643 by Leonard Gurle (<em>c.</em>1621–1685) to make one of London’s earliest general nursery gardens. Supplying fruit trees as well as ornamental plants, Gurle’s ‘great garden’ was London’s largest nursery in the 1660s and 70s, and continued after Gurle became Charles II’s gardener at St James’s Palace in 1677. It included 299 asparagus beds, 11,600 plum, cherry and pear stocks and 127 mulberry trees. In 1719 it was still in the occupancy of a Martin Girle, a son or grandson, though the twelve acres had been leased in 1717 to John Ward and William Mason. By the 1670s Whitechapel's stretch of Brick Lane was solidly built up with thirty-four houses, the largest with ten hearths belonging to Leonard Gurle. Montague (later Manby) Court off the north side of the west end of Mountague Street, close to where Frostic Place succeeded. The Montague Street frontage had been largely built up by 1700. Mason’s Court (later Osborn Place) was a good-quality development of <em>around </em>1720 at what is now the west end of Chicksand Street. In Mason’s ‘Great Garden’ open ground behind, John Wesley preached and was stoned by unreceptive locals in 1742. The place was considered as a possible site for the London Hospital in 1749, but rejected on account of the proximity of a white-lead house.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The Osborn property in Whitechapel that had remained open was humbly developed in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Chicksand Street was cut through and an irregular array of humble ‘places’ (courts) popped up off its south side and to the north of Finch Street (named after Heneage Finch, the second wife of Sir George Osborn, and now Monthorpe Road), which stopped short of Brick Lane where another tiny court, New Mason’s Court (later Hanover Place), was built in the 1780s. What is now Spelman Street was laid out as John Street, Casson Street as George Street (both renamed in 1883). Hope Street linked Finch Street to what had by this time been dubbed Old Montague Street.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The sites of 2–38 Brick Lane were occupied by 1680 by small houses, most likely comparable to and contemporary with what was built to the west on the Fossan Estate in Spitalfields in the late 1650s. Running east from the top end, Mason’s Court, after William Mason, was a superior development of around 1720, eleven good-sized three-storey houses, many of them double fronted and five bays wide. They became Osborn Place in the 1780s when (New) Mason’s Court was formed to the south, about where Hopetown Street is now. Osborn Place was again renamed as the west end of Chicksand Street in 1939. In its early days as Mason’s Court a number of the occupants had French surnames, presumably of Huguenot origin, and the silk industry was an important presence, spilling over as growth out from Spitalfields. Along the north side, a weaver, Abraham Fleury, had No. 2 by 1740, and Samuel Bradford and John Ireland, silk dressers, were at No. 3 around 1790–1800. Among silk throwsters were James Plantier then Peter Merzeau, who had No. 5, with a workshop, in succession through the second half of the eighteenth century. At No. 2 in the 1820s was William Ayres, a carpenter, his wife being a tambour maker. Poverty crept in. At No. 3 Ellen Smiles, age 52 and recently widowed, living in a single room with three children, her eldest Sarah, 18, working as a match-box maker, died in 1864 of what was said, possibly inaccurately but nevertheless tellingly, to be starvation. Two years later cholera deaths in the area were attributed to overcrowding, particularly among Jewish immigrants, and in 1872 a house further east in Chicksand Street was declared wholly unfit for habitation after the death of a cellar-dweller.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>Two of the Mason’s Court houses (originally Nos 6 and 7 at the east end of the south side) survived into the 1960s as 8–12 Chicksand Street. These were for many years the front premises of Robert Womersley & Son, drysalters (dealers in chemical products). In 1797 Robert Womersley, a Yorkshire Quaker and linen draper who had set up a dye house, took an Osborn lease of the property to set up as a drysalter for dying and other purposes in what was still then a textile district. From 1815 the family no longer lived at the chemical factory, which had extended southwards to Finch Street by the 1850s. In later years the works came to be wedged between a school and a hostel. There were new warehouses in 1929 and 1938, but the firm moved away in the 1950s.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>Chicksand Street and Finch Street were formed and humbly and irregularly built up with small two-storey dwellings in the first years of the nineteenth century. By 1812 they were linked (east to west) by George (Casson) Street, Little Halifax (Tailworth) Street, John (Spelman) Street and three small courts – Dowson’s Place, Luntley Place and Eele (later Ely) Place; Stephen Eele was a mason based on the New Road who had a lease of two houses on the south side of Osborn Place and who may thus have been responsible for Osborn Court’s four small houses, Dowson and Luntley were other developers. In the same period Hope Street was formed to connect Finch Street to Old Montague Street. There was sugar refining on Finch Street by 1814, George Brienlech setting up as a preparer of molasses and a cowkeeper. By the 1820s, there was a diamond cutter on Luntley Place. Much of the land was alienated from the Osborn Estate.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>The principal later interventions were schools, first where Dowson’s Place and Luntley Place had been, then replacing part of Osborn Place and Osborn Court. Other nineteenth-century buildings, mostly two-storey dwellings, stood into the 1970s. The Bell public house at 40 Brick Lane, returning on the north side of Chicksand Street, had moved here from its more southerly site around 1785 to make way for the road improvement that created Osborn Street. It was rebuilt in its present form in 1873 for Barclay Perkins & Co. The pub closed and from 1969 to 2013 the premises were Sweet & Spicy, opened as a café by Ikram Butt, and of local renown in later years as a curry house. Factory premises on the north side of Chicksand Street east of Osborn Place were Francis George March Desanges’s silk-dying works from the late 1830s, a successor to Sir Francis Desanges’s Wheler Street premises. By 1850 they had been divided also to accommodate Henry Cox, a manufacturing chemist, and J. H. Heckman, a skinner and furrier. East of these works, Abraham Davis built Helena Terrace, four pairs of back-to-back tenements, in 1889–91.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>As further south, this whole area became poorer and predominantly Jewish by the 1890s. There were many tailors, also fur dressers and shoemakers. Booth’s survey, coming here from Spitalfields, noted ‘how the height of the houses gradually increases as Whitechapel is approached’, and the ‘tendency in Jewish districts to increase the accommodation both extensively by occupying other streets and intensively by building higher houses.’ [^8] As if on cue, in 1898–9 the east side of Frostic Place, said to be all brothels over shops, was rebuilt by D. and M. Cohen as four-storey ‘model dwellings’ called Frostic Mansions.[^9]</p>\n\n<p>Abraham Davis put up an open-sided fish-market hall on the east side of Hope Street in 1901–2, along with a row of eight lock-up stores to its south, all with gable fronts. J. Leonard Williams was the architect. This was adapted for occasional use as the ‘People’s Market Cinema’ in 1909–10. There was other development by some among Davis’s brothers to the east on this block in the same period. In 1927 the market was reappropriated to be a Poultry Shechita, or kosher slaughtering yard, a business that dominated both sides of Hope (from 1938 Monthorpe) Street into the post-war period, and drew curious children as spectators. Further west there were miscellaneous factories behind tenements on Finch Street. All this came to be subsumed in the Greater London Council’s clearance plans of the 1960s.[^10]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Survey of London</em>, vol. 27 (SoL 27), 1957, pp. 277–80</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography</em> for Gurle: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), MDR1725/6/491: The National Archives (TNA), E179/143/370, r.33: William Morgan's map, 1682: John Rocque's map, 1746: G. Reginald Balleine, <em>The Story of St. Mary Matfelon</em>, 1898, p.30: John H. Harvey, ‘Leonard Gurle’s Nurseries and Some Others’, <em>Garden History</em>, vol.3/3, 1975, pp.42–9: Derek Morris, <em>Whitechapel</em>, pp. 43–4: Royal London Hospital Archives, RLHLH/A/5/3, p.118</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Richard Horwood's maps, 1799-1819: Land Tax: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), Osborn Estate map, 1859</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: SoL 27, p. 245: <em>The Builder</em>, 1 Sept. 1866, p. 655: Land Tax: LMA, CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/503/1033583: ‘Shocking Starvation of a Family in Whitechapel’, <em>Reynolds’s Newspaper</em>, 26 June 1864: London County Council (LCC) Minutes, 1 Nov 1872, p. 495</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, Collage 118089: English Heritage Archives, Survey of London notes, ‘The Story of Robert Womersley & Son’; Osborn Estate map, 1859: District Surveyors Returns (DSR): Ordnance Survey maps: Goad insurance maps</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Horwood: THLHLA, P/SLC/1/17/18; Osborn Estate map, 1859: LMA, THCS/312; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/461/887057; 501/1029982: Bryan Mawer, sugar-refining database online</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: LMA, CLC/210/G/D/039/MS22790: DSR: Spitalfields Life, 27 March 2013: THLHLA, L/THL/J/1/16/5–8: Post Office Directories</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: London School of Economics Archives, Booth/B/351, pp. 153–7</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: DSR: LCC Minutes, 24 Jan 1899, p. 54</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/0646; GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/019534; GLC/MA/SC/03/1425; GLC/AR/BR/22/ES/046633: DSR: Goad; interview with Genie Silverblatt, by Shlomit Flint, 3 Feb 2016</p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-30",
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"id": 324,
"title": "2-6 Old Montague Street",
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"body": "<p>Two-storey buildings on this site were replaced in 1904–5 in their present form – three storeys with plain brick fronts, shops under dwellings latterly converted for offices. This was done for Barclay Brothers by Turner and Holditch, architects, and Albert Monk, an Edmonton builder. These are now the oldest surviving buildings on Old Montague Street.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1] District Surveyors Returns: London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4453/F/01/051: London County Council Minutess, 15 November 1904, p. 2676</p>\n",
"created": "2017-03-30",
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"title": "M.A. Kutchinsky Ltd",
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"body": "<p>No 171 Commercial Road was home from 1914 to c. 1959 of the jewellery business (shop and workshop) of the rabbinic scholar M.A. Kutchinsky (1874-1960), seen in the attached newsreel film (referred to as \"Jo\"). He had moved his business from Cannon Street Road to 171 Commercial Road in 1914 and moved it again to Knightsbridge not long after this film was made.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Further information about Kutchinsky's from the website of the jewellers Hancocks:</p>\n\n<p>\"The Kutchinsky business was established in the 1890s when Joseph Kutchinsky's grandfather fled Poland, bringing his family to England, where he set up a jewellery manufacturing company in the East End of London. They brought with them centuries of experience in the jewellery trade where they had been jewellers to the court of Ludwig of Bavaria. Joseph Kutchinsky, known simply as \"Jo\" was born 27th September 1914. He was the youngest of the four children of Moshe-Aron Kutchinsky and his wife Hannah. He was educated at the Whitechapel Foundation School but left school at the age of just 14 to take up a position in the family jewellery business. By 1928 Joseph was only fourteen years old, but was already an experienced diamond polisher and was soon promoted to oversee the production of platinum and diamond watches. Joe worked his way up through the trade based family business, learning the importance of good client service alongside quality jewellery. Kutchinsky was a natural salesman and thrived in the colourful commercial environment that was the pre-war East End. In 1938 he met Lily Diamond whist they were both on Holiday in Torquay. It was love at first site and despite being the outbreak of the war they were married on 23rd June 1940. By that time Joseph Kutchinsky had been called up and was serving his country with the same enthusiasm as he had previously served his customers. In July 1945 just as the war was drawing to a close their first son Roger was born. His brother Paul arrived in March 1950. As soon as he was demobbed Joseph returned to the task of rebuilding the family business. Kutchinsky pioneered the use of platinum in fine jewellery and the jewellers shop in Commercial Road soon became a mecca for lovers of fine jewellery. By the late 1950s the commercial climate was changing again, the once bustling East End was on the wane and the time had come for Joseph to transplant his family business into the richer soil of London's Knightsbridge. Joseph had inexhaustible energy and charismatic charm. His customers liked and trusted him, his employees admired and respected him, and his family loved and revered him. Roger and Paul Kutchinsky both joined the family business as soon as they had completed their education and training. The business went from strength to strength, specialising in pieces of the highest quality designed to appeal to London's booming export market. Kutchinsky jewellery found its way into the homes of the rich and famous all over the world, particularly in the newly prosperous Middle East. Kutchinsky’s wife Lily was the true love of his life and he was devastated when she was taken seriously ill in 1989. He devoted the next three years to caring for her and to looking after her as tenderly as he could. Despite all this efforts and the very best medical attention she passed away some three years later. Caring for Lily meant that Joseph had to take a less active part in the jewellery business and much of the day to day management of the shop was entrusted to his sons Roger and Paul. Unfortunately the invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War proved a disaster for the family firm, which had taken on some ambitious and capital intensive projects and was poorly equipped to combat the sudden fall in turnover. The business was eventually sold in 1991 to Moussaieff Jewellers Ltd. Joseph Kutchinsky retired as soon as the take-over was completed. The final few years of Joseph’s life were possibly his least happy. Without his wife, and deprived of his business interests he often found time hanging heavily on his hands. His sons and other members of his family paid regular visits to his home in Brondesbury Park and did what they could to provide him with comfort and cheer. Tragedy struck in March 2000 when his younger son Paul was killed in a road accident in Spain just days after celebrating his 50th Birthday. This disaster could only have speeded the onset of Joseph's own final illness. He passed away peacefully on 26th October 2000 aged 86. Despite the take over by Moussaieff, there is still a Kutchinsky boutique in Knightsbridge, on the Old Brompton Road.\"[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Post Office Directories: Tzvi Rabinowicz, 'A World Apart: The Story of Chasidim in Britain', 1997, p. 72</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: http://www.hancocks-london.com/content/kutchinsky</p>\n",
"created": "2016-08-18",
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"title": "Mahera Ruby's childhood memories of how the East London Mosque started",
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"body": "<p>Mahera Ruby, an academic and community activist, grew up in Whitechapel. Here she recalls the East London Mosque when it was a temporary building on Fieldgate Street in the late 1970s, and the opening of the new mosque in 1985.</p>\n\n<p>'My dad [Maulana Abdul Awal] was an academic when he was back in Bangladesh, he was a lecturer at one of the private college universities in Comilla, and then he moved to Dhaka University. When he came here, he came as a Minister of Religion. Now that’s what I remember on the applications, whenever we had to write applications. I assume that’s an Imam’s role.</p>\n\n<p>When we came to join him [around 1975/6], he [was in] east London. He was Chair of East London Mosque… he was Chair for a very long time. At that time, it was a Portakabin, so there was just this grey Portakabin on Fieldgate Street. And we used to come along with him because we were just children and we used to play in the little yard that was in front of the Portakabin.</p>\n\n<p>I remember the feelings around the place. It was very warm, this is where we came [with my dad] for meetings at the mosque. But a lot of the meetings used to happen in our houses, so there’d be a few houses where the core meetings would take place. But because of the [larger] space here it was [used] more for prayer, [and] he would come to meet other uncles. So it was a lot of the older generation.</p>\n\n<p>Although children were around, we weren’t very welcome [laughs] – we made a lot of noise and we would play. And I don’t remember seeing many girls but my dad particularly used to bring us. We didn’t come to the mosque for the madrasah (Islamic teaching) side, we were taught at home. We used to come for the social aspect, I guess, and it was a very formative part of my life actually because I used to see them [the older generation] in meetings, I used to be quite observant about the way they used to conduct meetings, and all the uncles around. So it was the social etiquettes, I think, I learned through that period.</p>\n\n<p>I was about 8 or 9. And there was all the uncles greeting us because I was the Chairman’s daughter. It was just different. Some of those uncles I got to know then are still my mentors to this day, I still go to them for advice and they’re very much interested in what I do and how I move forward and progress. So they are anchors in my life, and similarly with my siblings as well. It’s a very close-knit community. We still work together in the community, we do a lot of stuff in the community. But it was my dad’s generation who built the foundation.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Racism</strong></p>\n\n<p>We used to have people come over from South Asia, particularly Bangladesh, who used to give large sermons. It wouldn’t fit in the Portakabin, so they used to set it up outside, so they used to lay down the mats and people used to sit there, or there’d be chairs. I was a bit tomboy-ish, I guess, so I would sit at the front with them and listen to the sermon.</p>\n\n<p>There was a lot of racism around at the time, where we lived there was a lot, so there were dogs, there were skinheads, there was a lot of – my brothers were beaten up a few times. Doing nothing, just going up a lift to where we lived. In Stepney.</p>\n\n<p>There’d always be young lads downstairs or they’d urinate on the stairs just outside our house knowing that we were Asian. There was a lot of that pressure, and I think we used to be brought here by my dad as relief, kind of a feeling [of] home and seeing familiar faces..… And they used to say well done, you’re doing really great, carry on what you’re doing. So we used to get our spiritual upliftment, I guess, from coming to the mosque here.</p>\n\n<p>Our generation were very very few in number. So it was my brother’s generation who are 10/15 years older than me, we used to look up them because they were our guardians. We had two generations of people, I guess, that were kind of moulding us and advising us…before ’85.</p>\n\n<p>And then we heard the wonderful news about the [planning permission for the new] mosque…Everybody was quite apprehensive that the project was so large, [did] we have the people who would use the mosque, and it’s going to cost so much, can we afford to do it? And it was one brave uncle who said “no, no, of course we can do it, our people will help us”. And then they turned to the community, obviously everybody was like “yes, of course”, were all behind it.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Families</strong></p>\n\n<p>But I think by that time the community might have grown a bit, and families were beginning to join because I remember at the time evening Arabic classes were happening in homes, so one used to happen in our house, my mum used to teach the children in our house.</p>\n\n<p>[Our mum] was very involved in the community, one of the ways to get to the parents was through the children. The parents were quite resistant to anything organised, they were quite anxious about who and where and why, but when it came to children learning the Qur’an, it was okay. And through that medium, she got to know the parents. And I think that’s when, kind of, the community work started among families, and religious instruction. Mum would hold circles for women, and to be honest I think that’s when maybe the women’s groups kind of started as well. So gatherings of women to talk about Qur’an. It used to happen in houses, and I remember… I think Bromley-by-Bow Mosque might have been there but it was in a flat, a converted flat.</p>\n\n<p>She used to walk us from Stepney all the way to Bromley-by-Bow, and there, me, my sister… three or five of us behind her, and when we used to get to the mosque she used to speak to the women and she used to give us ‘Islam: Basic Beliefs and Teachings’, [by] Gulam Sarwar. She used to give us that book and she used to say to me and my sister “you’re the teachers, this is your class”. She didn’t speak a word of English or read… “so you’re going to do that chapter by chapter, answer the questions, and then you’ll mark them because you two are the teachers”. So we used to do that and they used to get on with the women’s circles kind of things.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Concern about the future of the new mosque</strong></p>\n\n<p>And then the mosque was built. I can’t remember how long it took. But we remember coming and going. I remember the launch of it. I remember very long meetings taking place and there was a lot of anxiety, a lot of worry, who would carry this forward, they were quite elderly. They were quite worried if the next generation would carry on the dream. I remember there being lots and lots of late night meetings [in our houses] and we were constantly making tea.</p>\n\n<p>[They were worried about] finances, but also they were quite worried about divisions within the community as well, so they didn’t want it to be a one community mosque. Their dream was that this would be a community mosque, there won’t be any factions, even though it may be run by one particular group of people, it’s open to all.</p>\n\n<p>I remember my dad being very very conscious of that, and saying that we don’t want to be labelled as another Bangladeshi mosque, we are serving the community and we want this to be a unifying factor for the community to come. And the other thing they were thinking about was travellers. So people travelling through would have somewhere to stop and pray, so that welcoming factor as well.</p>\n\n<p>I remember some of those discussions, you know, listening to them discussing those things [was] really interesting because it shaped our outlook. So rather than being navel-gazing and looking at our own community, whatever we did we actually thought about the wider community in the work that we did.</p>\n\n<p>So that was really interesting because they also mentored my brother’s generation because they used to sit in on the meetings. And there was, [after the mosque was built] a situation where there was division in the Committee. And then the Committee that was here, they kind of put it out to the young people, it’s up to you guys, what do you think? Because I think it did become quite culturally divided depending on which village you came from in Bangladesh. And as far as I can remember about my dad, he wasn’t interested in that, that was the last thing that they wanted. So they put it out to the young people who were majority from that faction of people, and the young people said “no, we don’t want that, we came with a wider vision and we want this mosque”. So there was the splintering off [of] a smaller group [and] the majority stayed here, but I think there was a bit of tussle.</p>\n\n<p>So it survived, and we continued. Then I have this gap in memory, so I don’t quite remember, and then I just remember LMC [London Muslim Centre] being built</p>\n\n<p><strong>The opening of the East London Mosque</strong></p>\n\n<p>[When the East London Mosque was built in 1985] I just remember a lot of excitement. I remember the first opening prayer. It was huge. There were lots and lots and lots of people, there was a lot of excitement, lot of, I think, pride. There was a lot of pride, they’d achieved this as a community and they didn’t have to turn to government money for this so it’s kind of [an] independent voice. And I remember Central Mosque being really supportive – you know, Regent’s Park Mosque - although that one’s big, there was more warmth and use here, as a community, the community spirit. We used to go there quite a lot, Central Mosque, because that was the only other big mosque to go to.</p>\n\n<p>I just remember it [the ELM] looking really big. I must have been quite small! [laughs] And I just remember a lot of the uncles, you know they go around, just sort of tapping, feeling, is it for real? I don’t know, there was just a lot of – they were holding each other. It was quite emotional, I think, for them as well.</p>\n\n<p><strong>The mosque caretaker</strong></p>\n\n<p>We used to have a caretaker here … we used to call him Rahman chacha [uncle], that’s what we knew him as, he was the mosque. I mean, if we wanted anything, you had to be in his good books. He was quite a short stout man but he had the key – what I remember about him was his keys, so it’s this big batch of keys he used to carry. He knew the mosque inside out, the basement. To us, it was exploration. He would take us for these little tours because when the kids used to mess around, he used to take them on these little tours, and he became our favourite uncle because he used to entertain us. And if we wanted water, if we wanted anything, it was Khan chacha, that’s what we used to call him. He used to live in the mosque apartment. When my mum used to run out of insulin, we’d come to him because he had the insulin!</p>\n\n<p>The mosque was a source of so much – health, wealth, everything for us as a community. And it was such a tight-knit community. They overcame so many differences. And I truly don’t know how they did that, something must have really held them together, the vision, the dream of what they wanted to see was so much greater than the little differences that they had.</p>\n\n<p><strong>Women’s prayer space in the 1985 East London Mosque</strong></p>\n\n<p>[The women’s gallery was] open [overlooking the men's prayer hall] and we made too much noise, I think, with the kids. So we used to come for tarawih [extra Ramadan prayers] and I remember the children used to try to look over [the gallery] and it wasn’t safe, then they put the glass windows in as well. And it used to be packed when we used to come for tarawih. It helped to break down so many traditional walls that we’d built in our community about women [not] coming to the mosque. And I remember the resistance from the mosque community – wider community about women coming to the mosque.</p>\n\n<p>We used to be chased by certain uncles with their sticks. And then Khan chacha used to save us. So he used to – “go, go behind there” and then show us another route. So it wasn’t liked.</p>\n\n<p>But the Committee were very strong [in providing space for women]. They sang from the hymn sheet. And the imams. They were very positive. And we started our circle in the library, so the heart of the mosque was given over to the girls. We used to hold our Saturday circles, we still run at the mosque, it still continues. And we used to have it at the mosque library.</p>\n\n<p>I think at the time, the Committee were very open-minded, but their religious education [was mixed]. Somebody like my dad who was educated through the madrasah (Islamic schooling) but also through mainstream [school], he held a Master’s in Arabic and Islamic studies, he had the understanding of what the future could look like for us. And also this amazing uncle who was very pragmatic and very forward thinking as well. He knew that there isn’t anywhere that says that women can’t come to the mosque. Also if they needed the children to access the mosque, they needed the parents to come. And usually it’s the women that used to bring the children to the madrasah. It [the women’s prayer space] was a small space comparatively, compared to the main hall and also it overlooked the men’s hall, which probably the public didn’t expect. “Women overlooking men? They should be behind a wall”. So it was quite forward-thinking, I think, and quite brave.</p>\n\n<p>And it [the women’s space] wasn’t done as a tick-box list, sort of exercise, which is different. It was actually with the intention of being used and active. And we felt that at least by the Committee, we are wanted.'</p>\n\n<p>Mahera Ruby was in conversation with Nishat Alam and Shahed Saleem on the 19th January 2018 at the East London Mosque. The interview has been edited for print.</p>\n",
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"title": "The German Roman Catholic Church of St Boniface, Adler Street",
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"body": "<p>London’s German Catholic Mission acquired Lady Huntingdon’s Sion Chapel in 1861. This congregation had its origins at the Virginia Street Chapel, just south of Whitechapel in Wapping, in 1808 when there were thousands of German Catholics in the area, largely employed in sugar refining. A year later the mission moved to premises in the City that were dedicated to SS Peter and Boniface, the last (born Wynfrid) appropriate as having been an English missionary in Germany. </p>\n\n<p>In 1862 there was a thorough refit of the former circus building in a Romanesque style, overseen by Frederick Sang, a German-born architect and decorator based in London. It included an 18ft-wide Caen stone altar. A section of the building east of the amphitheatre was maintained or adapted for the mission’s school. At the opening the Rev. Dr Henry Edward Manning preached and Cardinal Wiseman blessed the new church. But in May 1873 it suffered a spectacular collapse of its domical ceiling and had to be cleared. Manning helped Father Victor Fick to raise funds for a replacement building. A German Gothic scheme by E. W. Pugin (who had prepared plans for a building for the Mission in 1859–60) was superseded by a design from John Young for a loosely Romanesque building, a style preferred by Manning who attended the opening in 1875. A basilican brick structure, its square west tower incorporated a mosaic of 1887 showing St Boniface preaching. Set well back from the street, the church gradually came to be enclosed by later structures. Young oversaw the addition of a presbytery to the south-east in 1877, a school in 1879, and, through Father Henry Volk with justification on grounds of a growing immigrant congregation, eastwards extension of the church with an apse and enhanced interior decoration in 1882. Stained-glass windows and wooden Stations of the Cross were of German origin.[^1] There were further works in 1885, when bells made in Whitechapel were added to the tower. In 1897 Father Joseph Verres gained approval for the formation of a covered playground below a schoolroom and sanitary block to the north-east. More improvements and an extension of this block followed in 1907–8 and 1912–13.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Dispersal and expulsion of members of the congregation aside, the German church suffered heavily the consequences of wars with Germany. It was slightly damaged in a Zeppelin raid in 1917. Having been confiscated as enemy property, ownership passed in 1919 to the Catholic Archdiocese of Westminster. Consecration followed in 1925 when Father Joseph Simml was installed as priest. Then the church was entirely destroyed in September 1940 by a high-explosive bomb. Simml, an opponent of Fascism, stayed through the war, sometimes preaching in the open air. The congregation retreated to the easterly school buildings which with the presbytery were all that survived.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>Rebuilding was pursued despite the loss of much of the congregation to more salubrious parts of London. Some remained willing to travel to Whitechapel, and from 1949 there were also new immigrants, predominantly women, many from East Germany drawn to work in factories, hospitals and homes, for education or through marriage, sometimes to British soldiers of the post-war occupation. Some prisoners of war also stayed on. War-damage assessment was handled for the Archdiocese by Plaskett Marshall & Son, architects, who prepared a first conservatively historicist scheme for a new church in 1947. Without funding this was premature, but on archdiocesan advice the firm was kept on. Upon the death of the senior partner, his son, Donald Plaskett Marshall, took control through Plaskett Marshall & Partners.</p>\n\n<p>From 1952 the rebuilding was pursued by Father Felix Leushacke (1913–97), thinking big in anticipation of future growth and working with Simml, who was said to have brought a liking for Bavarian Baroque to the project. Alongside war-damage compensation there was to be financial help from the West German government. The first plans for the new building disappointed Leushacke so in 1954 he involved a German architect and friend, Toni Hermanns of Cleves (Leushacke’s birthplace). Hermanns visited the site, prepared numerous possibilities in sketches and then presented worked-up plans and a model that were photographed and published. The model and preliminary sketches survive at the church. Hermanns, a powerfully imaginative architect best known for the Liebfrauenkirche in Duisburg of 1958–60, proposed a cuboid block, to be lit by numerous small round windows in a radiating pattern on its long west (liturgical south) elevation. The Archdiocese vetoed the scheme – Leushacke quoted its response as ‘Never!’, upon which Plaskett Marshall said (an assertion that he was to remain in control in Leushacke’s view), ‘And now you leave the dirty work to me!’[^4] Plaskett Marshall worked up revised plans in close if fraught consultation with Leushacke in 1955–6, encountering many more objections from Bishop George Craven at Westminster. The scheme was settled with approval from the newly installed Archbishop William Godfrey in 1957 after debate over the cubic or auditory nature of the main space, progressively non-processional for a Catholic congregation at this date. Higgs & Hill Ltd undertook construction beginning in November 1959 and the new Church of St Boniface opened in November 1960, Cardinal Godfrey being present at both the start of work and the opening. A building of some architectural panache, the Church of St Boniface is unlike other work by Plaskett Marshall and does seem in significant measure to reflect Hermann’s approach and aesthetic, though Hermanns was not involved after 1954. Wynfrid House, adjoining and also by Plaskett Marshall, supplies telling comparative evidence.</p>\n\n<p>The presbytery to the rear on Adler Street was ready by 1962. There were seatings for 200 in the nave and 60 in the gallery, within a concrete-cased steel portal-frame structure. The main walls are of hand-made dark-brown bricks rising to a clerestorey above which concrete eaves cast (unusually) on plastic-lined shuttering for a coffered effect underlie a copper roof supplied by the Ruberoid Co. Ltd. A <em>Westwerk</em> houses a timber-lined narthex and has small coloured-glass cross windows in square patterning to its upper-storey façade. The south-west tower rises 130ft with concrete slabs faced with grey-scale patterning in ceramic mosaics. At its top an open belfry houses salvaged Victorian bells. This slender and prominent tower was chosen in preference to central heating, toilets and a vestry room, prestige trumping comfort. The building as a whole is remarkable for the richness, originality and elegance of its decoration. The plain three-storey presbytery to the south facing Adler Street contrasts with ochre two-inch bricks.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/06/st-boniface-plan-latest-1.jpg\"><em>Plan of the Church of St Boniface as in 2017 (drawing by Helen Jones)</em></p>\n\n<p>The church interior is spacious and light, generally white in its surfaces setting off fittings and stained glass of distinction. The high altar, Lady Altar, tabernacle plinth, and a quasi-triangular font are all of a dark green marble, with a chancel floor of white Sicilian marble, enlarged after Vatican II. On the south (liturgical east) wall there is a large sgrafitto mural of Christ in Glory above St Boniface preaching to the faithful, made by Heribert Reul of Kevelaer, near Cleves. Figurative and decorative wrought iron is by Reginald Lloyd of Bideford, Devon – four panels (altar rails resited as a kind of reredos) and a gallery front depicting the Crucifixion with the Nativity and the Resurrection. An ambo or pulpit front depicting the parable of the sower has been removed since 2003. There is a lectern of 1980, made by Lloyd to mark the 13th centenary of St Boniface’s birth in Devon. The font has a bronze cover commemorating Simml (d.1976), also by Reul. To the north (liturgical west) the gallery front has the Stations of the Cross, relief carvings from Oberammergau (by Georg Lang selig Erben), eleven of fourteen dating from 1912 and reused from the old church. The organ of 1965 was made by Romanus Seifert & Sohn. A spectacular stained-glass window by Lloyd above the gallery depicts Pentecost.[^5] The congregation began to disperse and dwindle and since the 1970s the church has been shared with a Maltese community.</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>The Builder</em>, 4 Oct 1862, p.713; 10 May 1873, p.371; 24 March 1877, p.306; 5 April 1879, p.388; 1 April 1882, p. 408: Felix Leushacke, ‘Memorandum über Damalige Umstände beim Wiederaufbau des Anwesens der deutschen katholischen Mission in den Jahren 1958/60 für St Bonifatius-Kirche und Pfarrhaus und 1968/70 für das Gemeindezentrum Wynfrid-Haus in London Whitechapel’, 1993, t/s, p.1: Alexander Rottmann, <em>London Catholic Churches: A Historical & Artistic Record</em>, 1926, pp.182–6.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>The Builder</em>, 21 Feb 1885, p.289: London County Council Minutes, 30 Nov 1897, p.1310; 5 Feb and 7 May 1907, pp.208,995; 29 Oct 1907, p.880; 28–29 July 1908, p.343; 12 March and 18 June 1912, pp.616,1461; 3 June 1913, p.1238.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Leushacke, pp.1–2: Pfarrarchiv St Bonifatius, London, folder 190: Ordnance Survey maps.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Leushacke, p.3: Pfarrarchiv St Bonifatius, London, folders 156, 189, 191–2: www.monumente-online.de/de/ausgaben/2011/6/liebfrauen-mit-neuem-kleid.php#.V7MdePkrK70.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Leushacke, pp.1–5: Denis Evinson, <em>Catholic Churches of London</em>, 1998, p.230: <em>East End News</em>, 15 Jan 1960: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 19 Nov 1976: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 40032: Johanna Roethe, The Architectural History Practice, report for Historic England and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, see <a href=\"http://taking-stock.org.uk/Home/Dioceses/Archdiocese-of-Westminster/German-Church-St-Boniface\">http://taking-stock.org.uk/Home/Dioceses/Archdiocese-of-Westminster/German-Church-St-Boniface</a>.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>The Whitechapel Gallery has since 2009 consisted of two buildings, the original gallery, opened in 1901, on the site of 80A, 81 and 82 High Street, and the former Passmore Edwards Library, built in 1891–2 on the site of Nos 77–80.</p>\n\n<p>To the east, the former library occupies the site of four 12ft-frontage timber-framed shophouses, there by 1638 when Eleanor Ireland, a Westminster widow, took them on a lease from the Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral. The houses and their ‘little garden plots’ were then in the occupations of a weaver, a translator (a cobbler), a collarmaker and a scrivener. By 1818 they were in single ownership and all had been refronted in brick by 1884. Nineteenth-century use was typical of the High Street. No. 77 housed a gingerbread maker then a ‘commercial coffee house’ from around 1855. No. 78 was a gentleman’s outfitters in 1825 when it sported an ‘excellent bow-fronted shop’; later occupants included a haberdasher, a staymaker and, from around 1855, Godwin Rattler Simpson, patent window-blind maker. No. 79 was a draper’s, latterly Robert Rycroft who moved to No. 75 upon demolition in 1890. No. 80 was a jeweller’s and watchmaker’s for twenty years prior to demolition.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>A substantial brick storehouse to the rear was part of the Swan brewery, as was most of the site of the original Whitechapel Gallery. The large inn, the Swan with Two Necks (later the White Swan), already described as divided into two in 1616 and possibly already present in the early fifteenth century, later became 81 and 82 Whitechapel High Street. These gable-fronted, timber-framed buildings survived in large part until 1897 when they were demolished to make way for the gallery. They appear to have been erected by Richard Loton in the 1650s, when farthing trade tokens marked with a swan and ‘RL’ were issued. Samuel Cranmer’s son, Caesar (later Sir Caesar, 1634–1707), and his second wife’s second husband, Henry Chester, sold the Swan property in 1656 for £2,360 to Loton. He was a clothworker turned brewer, locally eminent as an Independent, lay preacher and Parliamentarian, and a member of the Tower Hamlets Committee of Militia.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>The larger eastern half (No. 81) was substantial, with eleven hearths in 1666 when Abraham Anselme (or Ansell), who also then held a lease of the brewery, was in occupation. Anselme (d. 1678) had grown wealthy as a Hearth Tax commissioner and, like Loton, with whom he was associated, was a well-connected Parliamentarian. Loton died in 1692 and his son, Edward Loton, sold the inn and associated property in 1695, when the occupying brewers were Edmund Paris and Thomas Sparrow. The purchaser was John Pettit, a citizen Merchant Taylor. George Crane took occupancy, then in 1701 Pettit gave a 31-year lease of the inn (No. 81) to Thomas Edwards, a brewer. Tenancy of the ‘victual house or taphouse’ (No. 82) went to John Heard, a victualler.[^3] </p>\n\n<p>Only a degree smaller, No. 82 was similar to No. 81, but had or came to have a canted oriel to its first and second floors. From the 1820s it was mostly occupied by clock and watchmakers, with interludes as a hat dealer’s and a tobacconist.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>Samuel Pedley, of a family of Whitechapel cordwainers, acquired the freehold of both properties by 1847. No. 81 saw varied later usage, mainly by auctioneers from the 1830s to the 1860s. In 1849 a petition was raised against an application from a tenant, Thomas Harwood, who sought a music and dancing licence for his ‘Hall of Science’, which he claimed had been ‘long used for Literary and Scientific Purposes which tended greatly to the mental improvement of the Working Classes’, but which the petitioners alleged was ‘a great nuisance to the respectable tradesmen living in the neighbourhood’, and that Harwood had ‘for a long time carried or permitted music and dancing and other entertainments … and has allowed prostitutes and persons of the worst character to assemble therein’.[^5] The building’s extensive upper parts were used briefly in the mid-1850s by the East London Ragged School Shoeblack Society as a refuge for twenty-one homeless boys, who were housed, clothed, fed and taught skills such as tailoring and shoe-blacking. For the last thirty years or so of its existence, No. 81 housed a photographer’s studio, where William Hobbs (1837–93) was succeeded in 1887 by William Wright. Upper rooms were otherwise variously occupied by households that included tailors and a music publisher.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>By the mid-nineteenth century the alley from the High Street to what had been the brewery in Swan Yard had become Queen’s Place, which swiftly became a foul court. Entry, about 3ft wide, was through No. 81. In 1860 Queen’s Place attracted the unfavourable attention of the Whitechapel District Board of Works, and thence the Metropolitan Board of Works, for two recently erected three-storey west-side tenements, each about 15ft by 20ft, lit only by a narrow gap between them and the infants’ school in Angel Alley, and the 6ft-wide court itself. They had been put up on the site of a warehouse, as, according to the Whitechapel Board’s indefatigable Medical Officer of Health, John Liddle, a recent slew of warehouse building on Commercial Street on the site of poor housing had shifted local needs to housing. By 1881 there were forty-eight people living in the court’s four small houses.[^7] </p>\n\n<p>No 80A was demolished along with Nos 77–80 in 1891. A single-storey shop was erected on the site in 1893 for R. W. Dermott, the watchmaker dispossessed from No. 80, only for it to be sold with Nos 81–82 for the gallery in 1896. </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Post Office Directories (POD): Census: Historic England Archives, Survey of London notes, Box FA054: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 20 May 1818, p.4: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 11 Aug 1825, p.4; 14 Feb 1856, p.8: <em>Journal of the Society of Arts</em>, 15 Jan 1858, p.136: <em>Watchmaker, Jeweller and Silversmith’s Trade Journal</em>, 5 May 1877, p.276</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: British Museum (BM), T.3963: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), LMA/4453/F/01/001; DL/C/0422/001/13: <em>Public Intelligencer</em>, 11–18 June 1659, p.588: George C. Williamson and William Boyne, <em>Trade Tokens Issued in the Seventeenth Century in England, Wales and Ireland by Corporations, Merchants, Tradesmen</em>, vols 1–2, 1889, p.792: Bernard Capp, ‘Republican reformation: Family, community and the State in Interregnum Middlesex, 1649–60’, in Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (eds), <em>The Family in Early Modern England</em>, 2007, pp.43,48: Keith Lindley, ‘Whitechapel Independents and the English Revolution’, <em>The Historical Journal</em>, vol.41/1, March 1998, pp.283–91: G. Lyon Turner, <em>Early Nonconformity under Persecution and Indulgence</em>, 1911, pp.237,254,440: Charles Ray Palmer, ‘Revd William Hooke, 1601–1678’, <em>Papers of the New Haven Colony Historical Society</em>, vol. 8, 1914, pp.56–81 (76–7)</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/356/212; C7235/50; C10/436/24: Hearth Tax Returns, 1666: LMA, LMA/4453/F/01/001; DL/C/0422/001/21–2: 4s£: William A. Shaw (ed.), <em>Calendar of Treasury Books, 1669–78</em>, vol.3/2, 1908, pp.874,970,1034,1198: <em>Biblioteca Lindesiana: Handlist of a Collection of Broadside Proclamations</em>, 1886, p.73: Goad insurance plans, 1890</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Census: POD: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 4 Sept 1823, p.1: <em>Clerkenwell News</em>, 21 March 1864, p.4: <em>Daily Telegraph & Courier</em>, 28 April 1869, p.2</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, MR/L/MD/285/02: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P/SLC/2/16/35/1; L/SMB/C/1/2</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 18 Oct 1856, p.2: POD: Ancestry: LMA, SC/PZ/ST/01/81</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: BM, T.3963: <em>The Builder</em>, 28 Dec 1861, p.892: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, , 6 Jan 1860, p.4; 10 Feb 1860, pp.116–17: Census</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Harun Quadi settled in the East End in the early 1980s, having originated in Comilla, Bangladesh.</p>\n\n<p>\"I came in this country in 1973 [from Chittagong], I was a junior engineer for United Steamship Company, and that company sent me for further education in South Shields and in London.</p>\n\n<p>My home country is Comilla but I studied at Chittagong. I studied at Marine Academy in Chittagong, from there I finished my basic marine training then I was employed by Cunard Steamship Company in London.</p>\n\n<p>I finished my training as marine engineer. Two years training in Marine Academy Chittagong, and after the training then I had the apprenticeship for two years in a workshop, marine workshop. Then I was employed as a junior engineer in Cunard Steamship Company, London. Then Cunard Steamship Company, I worked four years with that company they sent me for a higher education as a marine engineer. I did my Marine engineer class one-two-three-four and chief engineer, in South Shields and in London. 1978 to '84 I completed my education.</p>\n\n<p>I lived in North London first, I was there for two years and after that I bought a house in auction in 23 Casson Street, London, E1 [in 1982]. That was a derelict house, I bought that house because I thought I'm an engineer, I could repair the house and make it for my own living and business.</p>\n\n<p>I bought it for £55,400 and it is a five storied building, it was derelict and about ten rooms was there, only one toilet at that time. It was cold and it was just only birds living there. As an engineer I got confidence and I employed one or two builders and I worked with them as well, I made that whole house habitable. That was my first venture, that was ten rooms and five floors. I lived in one of the floors and rented out all the four flats, four rooms for flats. They're not self-contained flats but it was like flats.</p>\n\n<p>Harun Quadi was interviewed by Shahed Saleem on the 17th January 2018 at No.12 Brick Lane</p>\n",
"created": "2018-05-04",
"last_edited": "2018-05-04"
},
{
"id": 142,
"title": "Somali community centre",
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"body": "<p>In the early 2000s this shop was a Somali community centre.</p>\n",
"created": "2016-09-17",
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"title": "coffins discovered under Faircloughs",
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"body": "<p>Memories of Eric Shorter, b. 1936</p>\n\n<p>At one time, parts of Fairclough offices suffered wall subsidence, and builders were called in to investigate and correct. I did not see, but my father told me that the cause was that underneath the wall concerned there were three lead-lined coffins, one of them being child-sized. He said that one was opened to reveal a skeleton still covered with dried skin. But a little knock caused the dry skin to disintegrate and fall away. I have since asked the Museum of London if they might know what happened to the coffins, but no one seems to know.</p>\n",
"created": "2016-11-01",
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"title": "Sundays at Toynbee Hall, 1896",
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"body": "<p>A selection from: Henry Walker, <em>East London. I : Whitechapel, Sketches of Christian work and workers</em>. Published by the Religious Tract Society, 1896</p>\n\n<p>\"The Universities Settlement, known as Toynbee Hall, may naturally be expected to figure in a description of a Whitechapel Sunday. In what form, it might be asked, does it contribute to the religious activity of the day? Toynbee Hall is situated in almost the centre of the Jewish quarter, and is entered from Commercial Street, the great thoroughfare which unites Spitalfields with Whitechapel High Street. By its side stands St. Jude's Church, of which one of the leaders of the Universities Settlement project, Canon Barnett, was for many years the vicar. Opposite to St. Jude's is one of the most notable chapels of a former generation, the Baptist Chapel of which the late Charles Stovell was for many years the famous minister, and to which he drew by the solemnity and force of his preaching a large and influential congregation.</p>\n\n<p>The visitor will be disappointed if he expects to find Toynbee Hall a directly religious agency established for evangelistic purposes, and undertaking or assisting in church work on Sundays. It should at once be said that the word 'mission' does not occur in its programme, although the intense glow of the inner personal life of Edward Denison, the leader of the movement, is still felt in the settlement. It was in 1867 that Denison, an Oxford student who had been profoundly impressed with the gulf existing between the rich and the poor in London, took lodgings near the London Hospital, and tried to share his life with the poor of the district. His example was contagious, and by the year 1874 it had become the custom for a few Oxford graduates to spend part of their vacation in the neighbourhood of St. Jude's, Whitechapel, and to join in some of the work of the parish. Among them was Arnold Toynbee. The intensity which Denison and Toynbee threw into their teaching and example made a great impression on public opinion, and the settlement at Toynbee Hall took an organised and permanent form in the year 1884. From that date up to the present time its scope and aims have been ethical, social, and educational, and within the limitations thus adopted its character and achievements have become well known. Toynbee Hall is a lay settlement, and, in the words of its programme, its object is to 'provide education and the means of recreation and enjoyment for the people of the poorer districts of London.' Toynbee Hall 'has become a name under which a society holds together, formed of members of all classes, creeds, and opinions, with the aim of trying to press into East London the best gifts of the age.' \"[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]:http://www.mernick.org.uk/thhol/easlon02.html</p>\n",
"created": "2016-07-17",
"last_edited": "2021-05-04"
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{
"id": 703,
"title": "76 Whitechapel High Street",
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"body": "<p>The present building here dates from 1845, put up by James Little & Sons, builders of America Square, Minories, and Size Yard, Whitechapel Road, during the occupation of Diggory Northey, a linen draper then also occupying Nos 75, and 78, and with premises in Soho.[^1] The common ownership of Nos 75 and 76 may help explain the overlaps between the two buildings to the rear where part of No. 76 runs over the passage between the two houses, once the access to Bull Court. No 76. includes a three-storey building to the rear through which the passageway to Bull Court once also ran; in 1840 a building on the site was a warehouse for John Phillips, the linen draper then in No. 76.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The sites of Nos 75 and 76 have alternated over 350 years between being a single building and two. By the early seventeenth century the main house and grounds on the site of one or both were in the tenure of Francis Mountfort, succeeded by William Blume by 1638, when the house was in the occupation of the gunmaker John Silke (d. 1660) later a member of the Gunmakers’ Company and a supplier of guns to the Office of Ordnance since 1627.[^3] Silke was succeeded by William Camell or Cammell who witnessed his will in 1659. By 1693 the house was occupied by a victualler, James Lord (d. 1695), whose trustees were Joseph (d. 1711) and Richard Bowler, his neighbours at what was later No 75, in which use it continued into the mid-eighteenth century when it was known ‘by the sign of Crown and Scepter’.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>Use throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was almost exclusively by the clothing trade – lace and baby linens from the 1840s to the 1880s, with Cappers tea dealers in residence in the 1880s, then ladies’ outfitters and one of several Whitechapel branches of Abraham Goldenfeld, hosiers.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/08/07/76-high-street.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p>The shop at KVJ Fairdeal Ltd in July 2018 with staff members, from left, Mr Baber Khan, Mr Khairul Sojib and Mr Jessen Mootoosamy</p>\n\n<p>Since the 1970s it has been run by Kamal Vijaya Jain, who established KVJ Fairdeal Ltd in 1967, wholesalers of photographic supplies, electrical equipment and later blank audio media, with much business now conducted <a href=\"https://www.totalblankmedia.com\">online</a>.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: DSR: POD: Goad insurance maps: LMA, MSCLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/569/1311022</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, Survey of London notes on Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s records: TNA, PROB 11/299/681: ‘The Office of Ordnance and the Parliamentarian land forces, 1642-1648, PhD thesis, University of Loughborough 1976 p. 105, accessed at <a href=\"https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/handle/2134/19437\">https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/dspace-jspui/handle/2134/19437</a> </p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THLHLA, P/HLC/1/14/1: Ancestry</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, Land Tax returns (LT): POD: Census: <em>Clerkenwell News</em>, 15 April 1864, p. 3: <em>East London Observer</em>, 1 Jan 1887, p. 7: LMA, MS 11936/569/1311022: Companies House, no. 00922802 - <a href=\"https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00922802\">https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00922802</a>: <em>The Times</em>, 22 July 1976, p. II</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-10",
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{
"id": 852,
"title": "40 Dock Street",
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"body": "<p>Around 1830 Thomas Hodgson & Son took over a sugarhouse with premises to its north on the west side of Dock Street, just north of the parish boundary (later 40 Dock Street). Thomas Hodgson was locally eminent, including as an Auditor for the Sailors’ Home in 1835. Another Thomas Hodgson, related to Dr Henry Loades who had a substantial estate in the vicinity from 1655, had been present hereabouts in the 1690s. The sugarhouse had been built around 1800, possibly by Daniel Austin, and an engine house and back warehouse were recent additions. John Hodgson may have rebuilt in the 1840s, but that remains unclear. By this date at any rate the sugarhouse was nine storeys tall. Around 1856 the premises were taken over by John Harrison who had to rebuild the sugarhouse following destruction of all but ‘the bare walls’ by fire in August 1861. At this point, Harrison, two clerks, a German foreman, forty-two German labourers, a cook and a housemaid all lived on the site. The replacement, complete by July 1863, maintained the grand scale, with nine storeys of extremely plain stock-brick elevations, and five by six bays of iron-framed windows. Inside, hollow-circle section cast-iron columns supported timber floors. North of a narrow yard there was a double-fronted three-storey house and office, perhaps of the 1840s. The refinery was converted in 1874–5 for Butcher, Jones & Co. (soon after Jones & Pooler), tea warehousemen, to be the Monastery Bonded Warehouses. With tea above, wines and spirits were stored in vaults and a former engine house. After another fire in 1879 the two upper storeys had to be reconstructed and proprietorship passed to the Monastery Bonded Tea Warehouse Co. Ltd. In 1927 there were 15,462 tea chests here. Other commodities, sugar, biscuits and baled surplus clothing, were introduced in the 1940s and the top floor was again rebuilt in 1956. Tea warehousing ceased in 1970 following closure of the nearby docks. Demolition work in 1973 accounted for the house, but was halted by the listing of the former sugarhouse, wherein a fire promptly gutted the upper storeys, leaving the rest of the building open to decay. It too came down in 1980–1 after a successful planning appeal by the Leopold Joseph Property Co. Ltd. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>At 24–28 Dock Street a plain three-storey group of shophouses of 1891 stood with a smaller-scale building at No. 30 into the 1980s. The Hearts of Oak public house at 36 Dock Street, rebuilt with No. 38 in 1893–4, remained through the 1990s, interrupting the frontage of a site at 24–34 and 40–42 Dock Street that had come into unified ownership.[^2] Development plans were approved at the end of 1982 (possibly for Town and City Properties) and five red-brick clad two-storey industrial units initially known as the Turret Business Centre were erected around 1985, their sub-Georgian street elevations incorporating relieving arches. The site was conveniently close to the City, and around the time of the deregulatory Big Bang of 1986 the complex became a telecommunications service, distribution or data centre for Mercury Communications, a company formed in 1981 as a subsidiary of Cable & Wireless to compete with British Telecommunications. Cable & Wireless acquired and replaced Nos 36–38 around 2000, putting up an absurdly neo-Georgian three-storey ‘house’, of brown brick with finicky pedimented openings. Those responsible for this design remain unknown, which is perhaps for the best. Windows elsewhere along the frontage were replaced with louvres. The an-aesthetic not to say insulting approach to streetscape was not accidental for a data centre, a facility where security and anonymity would have been growing priorities. The nature and proprietorship of the site were further concealed after what had become Cable & Wireless Worldwide was bought by Vodafone in 2012.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/MMD/1/1-2: National Maritime Museum, SAH/60/2: Horwood's maps, 1799 and 1813: London Metropolitan Archives, THCS/P/006/7; CLC/B/017/MS15627/038; CLC/B/017/MS14943/005, pp. 128, 137; /012, p. 21; CLC/B/017/MS14944/024, p. 350; /042, p. 153; /047, p. 148; /053, pp. 162, 175; Collage 281184, 281225, 281236; District Surveyors Returns (DSR): <em>John Bull</em>, 31 Aug. 1861: Census: The National Archives, WORK6/143/4; IR58/84824/4125: Historic England Archives, London Region Historians Files TH277: Post Office Directories (POD): information kindly supplied by Bryan Mawer</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: DSR: POD: THLHLA, P02646–8: Ordnance Survey maps</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2019-03-05",
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{
"id": 684,
"title": "Fieldgate Mansions",
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"body": "<p>Fieldgate Mansions is a substantial complex of tenement dwellings of 1903–7.</p>\n\n<p>In the 1790s Thomas Barnes had created a 10ft-wide alley between New Road and York (Myrdle) Street on this part of the London Hospital estate. Lined with small one- and two-storey houses as Essex Street and renamed Romford Street in 1882, this was not a place that reflected well on the hospital and its closure was contemplated. In 1897 Rowland Plumbe, the hospital’s surveyor, produced a plan for the widening of Romford Street, intending to redevelop both sides all the way down to Commercial Road with terraced houses, standard save for the inclusion of top-floor workshops, an arrangement the propriety of which the hospital’s estate sub-committee questioned. In any case, the Ministry of Health thought the scheme left too little space at the backs and the LCC refused permission for the road widening. Plumbe made revisions and, exasperated by hold-ups, in January 1899 went to see Thomas Blashill, the London County Council’s Superintending Architect, with Arthur Crow, Whitechapel’s District Surveyor. LCC approval was immediately secured, provided the new houses did not exceed 24ft in height. </p>\n\n<p>Davis Brothers (Israel and Hyman Davis) were lined up as the developers, but Plumbe now faced another unco-operative interlocutor in the person of Henry Legg, Mile End Old Town’s District Surveyor. After further delay, the southern part of the project was abandoned, land there having been compulsorily purchased by the School Board for London (Myrdle Street School opened in 1905). The northern part was recast to extend to Myrdle Street and in 1903 Israel Davis (Hyman had died in 1902) projected tenements, gaining the London Hospital’s approval for 80-year leases and for designs to be prepared by Rowland Plumbe & Harvey. Work began in late 1903. Disagreement as to whether the 24ft restriction applied to the eaves or overall height caused further difficulty – Plumbe prevailed with the former interpretation. By the end of 1905 the west side of Romford Street had been largely built-up. The eastern and western rows and a final pair of blocks (Nos 33 and 34) on Fieldgate Street west of Myrdle Street followed by 1907. </p>\n\n<p>There were originally thirty-four blocks or sets of dwellings in all. Each had eight one-bedroom flats, so was deemed suitable for thirty-two people, all the flats having sculleries and WCs. Of red brick, variegated with stock-brick bands in the upper storeys, the elevations are broken and significantly enhanced by arched gablets over open staircases of fire-resistant (concrete) construction. The first occupants were largely Jewish immigrants.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Leases were sold on, repairs were neglected by shady companies and their agents (slum landlords), a war-time bomb took out Blocks 20 to 22 at the south end of Romford Street, and by the 1950s overcrowding was recognised as a problem. In 1961 Edith Ramsay organised a conference to consider the growth of prostitution in the area. Better lighting was urged to deter casual sex in the playgrounds between and behind the mansions, yards that were regularly bridged by laundry. St Mary’s Ward, of which this area formed the western part, elected three Communist councillors in 1964 and 1968. From 1972 the mansions and nearby streets, particularly Myrdle Street and Parfett Street where many properties had been left deliberately empty, attracted squatters, including to all but the eastern row of Fieldgate Mansions. This occupation was inspired by the London Squatters Campaign, formed in 1968 to rehouse families from hostels or slums. With numerous local spin-offs this led to licensed squatting. Terry Fitzpatrick, in particular, worked with homeless Bengalis as the Bengali Family Housing Association to establish squatted tenure here and elsewhere in East London. The Bengali Housing Action Group ('bhag'<em> </em>means tiger in Bengali) was formed in 1976.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>At the request of Tower Hamlets Council, the Greater London Council took action to outflank the squatters and to improve local living conditions. In 1979 David Levitt of Levitt Bernstein Associates (architects), Frances Bradshaw and Geoffrey Morris prepared a feasibility study for the rehabilitation and conversion of the remaining 256 flats in Fieldgate Mansions for the Samuel Lewis Housing Trust. The Parfett Street Housing Action Area was declared in 1983 through the GLC’s Area Improvement & Modernisation office. Enabled by the Housing Act of 1974, this attracted improvement grants and aimed to encourage existing residents to stay. The designation included all of Fieldgate Mansions. Plans for conversions involved knocking through to create some maisonettes to reduce crowding and to provide for some of the larger families in what was referred to in a GLC Press Release as ‘a close knit Bengali population’. Otherwise conservative in its treatment of the buildings, the overhaul involved the introduction of balconettes and the demolition of one block on the west side side of Romford Street for a tenants’ meeting room. The work was carried out to designs by Levitt Bernstein Associates. Fordham Bros Ltd of Dagenham were the builders in the first two phases of 1983–5, Thomas Bates & Son Ltd in the three later phases of 1986–91 that included the communal building and a playground.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), GLC/AR/BR/22/BA/011831; District Surveyor's Returns: Royal London Hospital Archive, LH/A/9/41, pp. 85, 95, 200; LH/D/3/24, p. 70; LH/S/1/4: London County Council Minutes, 5 Oct 1897, p. 982; 6 Oct and 3 Nov 1903, pp. 1455, 1736; 4 Oct 1904, p. 1956; 30 Jan. 1906, p. 160: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), Building Control file 40670: Census returns: Isobel Watson, ‘Rebuilding London: Abraham Davis and his Brothers, 1881–1924’, <em>London Journal</em>, vol. 29/1, 2004, p. 68</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: THLHLA, L/THL/D/2/14/16; P/RAM/1/2/6; Building Control file 40663: interview with David Hoffman, August 2017 https://surveyoflondon.org/blog/2018/david-hoffmans-photographs-and-recollections-squat/; Alex Vasudevan, <em>The Autonomous City: a history of urban squatting</em>, 2017, pp. 47–56</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: THLHLA, LC7797; Building Control files 40662–3: LMA, GLC/DG/PRB/35/040/222; GLC/DG/PRB/35/041/342</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-02",
"last_edited": "2019-03-19"
},
{
"id": 113,
"title": "Wynfrid House",
"author": {
"id": 2,
"username": "surveyoflondon"
},
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"body": "<p>This guest house was built in 1968-70 to the east of and as an adjunct to the German Roman Catholic Church of St Boniface. It was conceived by Father Felix Leushacke as a hostel open to short-term residence by any and all, but particularly young visitors and tourists from Germany sympathetic to the Catholic mission. He acknowledged that there was not at the time anything like a ‘deutsche Kolonie’ in London. It was financed by the German Bishops’ Conference and the West German Foreign Office in Bonn through its London embassy. Plaskett Marshall & Partners were responsible for design, Ashby & Horner Ltd were the builders. First thoughts in 1956 envisaged accommodation for 400 above common spaces. To provide an open courtyard next to the church and away from the street an L plan was adopted. This was seen as suited to girls’ and boys’ wings. Deferred until the church was finished, the project was revived in 1964, but it had to pass muster in two countries and there were more revisions. Gender separation was abandoned after an attempt to impose separate staircases and lifts, what had been projected as a licensed club room became simply a hall, and capacity was reduced to 100. Plans were settled in 1967 and seen through under Leushacke, who remained in charge up to 1986. Originally four storeys and a basement, the building’s concrete floors are starkly expressed between brick-panel facing and small windows to the outer elevations, the inner or courtyard sides have far more fenestration. An abstract patterned stained-glass window in the front elevation lights a staircase. The front range was raised a storey around 1998.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Felix Leushacke, ‘Memorandum über Damalige Umstände beim Wiederaufbau des Anwesens der deutschen katholischen Mission in den Jahren 1958/60 für St Bonifatius-Kirche und Pfarrhaus und 1968/70 für das Gemeindezentrum Wynfrid-Haus in London Whitechapel’, 1993, t/s, pp.4–5: London Metropolitan Archives, GLC/AR/BR/07/5188: Pfarrarchiv St Bonifatius, London, folder 172: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 40032: Tower Hamlets planning applications. </p>\n",
"created": "2016-08-26",
"last_edited": "2017-01-30"
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}