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"id": 863,
"title": "The first premises of the Co-operative Wholesale Society at Hooper Square (mostly demolished)",
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"b_name": "Flats 1 to 45 Christopher Court, 97 Leman Street",
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"body": "<p>In 1878 the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) began negotiations for the freehold of a former sugar refinery and associated property, which occupied the corner site between the east side of Leman Street, Hooper Square (now Street) and the west side of Rupert Street (later Goodman Street). Three of the earliest Co-operative Wholesale Society premises in Whitechapel were housed in former sugar refineries. Following the decline of the sugar industry locally, large refineries came on the market, and advertisements stressed their suitability for other purposes, as businesses went bust or moved out. Two other former sugar houses were occupied by the CWS at different times – the coffee & cocoa works and bacon stoves at 116 and 118 Leman Street and a short-lived furniture warehouse on the south side of Chamber Street. </p>\n\n<p>Emanuel Goodhart, Son and Co., sugar refiners, had been insured for a site at ‘Hooper Square, bottom of Rupert Street, Goodmans Fields’, since at least 1841.[^1] By 1846 the business was known as Messrs E. Goodhart, Son & Patricks, Hooper Square.[^2] The partnership between W. and W. B. Patrick and Charles Emanuel Goodhart, sugar refiners and merchants of Limehouse and Hooper Square, was dissolved in 1855, when the business continued as Messrs Goodhart, and a furnace chimney shaft was approved in 1862.[^3] C. E. Goodhart became a director of the Lebong Tea Company Limited in that year and may have been branching out into other provisions.[^4] In 1865 he was among many London merchants and sugar refiners petitioning the directors of railway companies for equalizing the mileage rates for the conveyance of sugars, and gave his address as 97 and 98 Leman Street, where he was listed until at least 1868.[^5] These houses (renumbered 101 and 99 in 1879) were the southernmost in a terrace of nine, on the Leman Street front of the refinery site. In 1814, when they were advertised for sale, the three plots on this corner site, which correspond broadly with the land later acquired by the CWS, formed part of William Strode’s Leman Street estate.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>In June 1876, C. E. Goodhart leased a sugar refinery on the west side of Rupert Street (that had previously been a pair), together with the house at 98 Leman Street to Quintin Hogg for fourteen years.[^7] Almost exactly two years later, in June 1878, the CWS began considering the purchase of the same site, measuring 1,700 square feet, from an unknown party, and the Society’s offer of £18,000 was accepted in November.[^8] If Hogg played a role in the CWS’s acquisition of the premises this has not come to light. He had begun in the tea trade at Mincing Lane before becoming a sugar merchant and would probably have been aware of the Co-operative movement through his philanthropic work in funding ragged schools and the Regent Street Polytechnic.[^9] Joseph Woodin, of the Co-operative Central Agency (CCA) and the CWS tea buyer from 1869 to around 1881, is another possible link. In 1852, the catalogue of the CCA had praised the quality of Goodhart’s sugar and the refineries at Hooper Square and Limehouse, and Woodin, who contributed to the volume, may have known of the premises.[^10] A notice of February 1879 for the auction of the ‘capital building materials of a large sugar refinery and other buildings at Hooper Square and Leman Street’ probably relates to this site.[^11]</p>\n\n<p>The foundation stone of the new CWS warehouse was laid on 19 July 1879, by Thomas Hughes, author of <em>Tom Brown’s Schooldays</em> and advocate of Co-operation, and the building opened formally on 12 January 1881.[^12] Abutting on the south side of the sugar refinery, the warehouse initially rose six storeys from a roughly square plan, with a canted corner angled so as to face Hooper Square, and an entrance in the stair tower, which survives, projecting to the south. It was described in 1886 as measuring about 90ft by 50ft[^13] and externally resembled the first CWS warehouse at Balloon Street in Manchester.[^14] The pair of shields above the door, now misleadingly painted black and white, appear to represent the crests of the City of London and the City of Manchester. Works evidently continued on site, for the ‘refinery warehouse’ was concreted and asphalted in September 1882.[^15] This was presumably the ‘roomy and extensive tea warehouse’ converted under the supervision of architect and CWS London Branch committee member, J. F. Goodey, for the ‘new tea and coffee department’, which commenced production on 1 November.[^16] It was reported a little later that the department’s first home was in a converted warehouse that had been used as a sugar refinery, or perhaps a warehouse associated with it.[^17] The tea department, and the boot and shoe department, which also opened in 1882, joined the existing grocery and provisions department.[^18] Ben Jones, a former CWS buyer who had been sent from the Manchester headquarters to take charge at the Minories warehouse in 1874, was retained as the manager of the London Branch in Whitechapel.[^19]</p>\n\n<p>By late 1882, the CWS had acquired the Brunswick Arms in Rupert Street and sought to let it as a German Beerhouse.[^20] The following year, negotiations were underway to rent a warehouse adjoining on the north side of the CWS’s existing premises in Rupert Street from B. H. Heather and by mid-December Goodey had made ninety-one attendances while superintending the alterations at the existing and new warehouses.[^21] Within a few years these premises proved too small for the expanding business and so the ‘dilapidated old houses, whose leases were expiring’ which, together with the Brunswick Arms, occupied the remainder of the site, were cleared to make way for a more substantial warehouse and London Branch headquarters.[^22] Such incremental additions of large and small plots were characteristic of CWS property acquisition in and around Leman Street in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as land was purchased with a view to immediate or future expansion. Surplus capital was invested in land adjoining CWS premises, and from 1884 to the late 1930s warehouse extensions were ‘almost continually in progress’ in London and elsewhere.[^23]</p>\n\n<p>In March 1885 Goodey was asked to prepare detailed plans and specifications for the new buildings to be erected ‘on our land’ in Leman Street.[^24] The plans were ready by May, at which time the Leman Street site, which presumably also included the land fronting Hooper Square and Rupert Street, was ‘being cleared for the erection of suitable additional warehouses’.[^25] Goodey (1834–1910) was born in Halstead, Essex, and was first secretary and later president of the Colchester Co-operative Society, and secretary of the Colchester Mutual Permanent Building Society. Elected to the CWS branch committee in 1878, he resigned from the position during 1885–1889 in order to take up his appointment as architect for the new London Branch.[^26]</p>\n\n<p>A new storey to the original warehouse at Hooper Square was authorised in May 1885 but it is not clear if this was executed before or after a fire that broke out on the night of 30 December 1885.[^27] This gutted the tea warehouse and destroyed its roof; the smaller warehouse, in use as stores and offices, survived with damage to stock by heat, smoke and water.[^28] Overall, the damage to buildings and stock amounted to £35,000, of which about £18,000 was the value of the tea stored on site.[^29] Its neighbour to the north, Tudor, Nash & Co.’s white lead factory, and the tenements opposite were evacuated but escaped the blaze.[^30] The business of the tea warehouse was transferred immediately to premises leased temporarily at 116 Leman Street, on the other side of the road, and by May 1886 the warehouses on Hooper Square and Rupert Street were being rebuilt.[^31] Board meetings were shifted to the new Toynbee Hall, with whom the CWS maintained a long association, until the works were completed in 1887.[^32]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/574/1363270, 7 September 1841.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>German Hospital Dalston</em>, 1846, p. 82.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Perry’s Bankrupt Gazette</em>, 7 April 1855, p.273; <em>East London Observer</em>, 18 June 1859, p.2; <em>Minutes of Proceedings of the Metropolitan Board of Works</em>, 17 October 1862, p. 774.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Money Market Review</em>, 13 December 1862, p. 517.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Royal Commission on Railways, Appendices to evidence taken before the commissioners, Vol. 1, London HMSO, 1865, p. 250; London PO Directory, 1868.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: Plan of part of the Leman Estate, the property of the late Wm. Strode, 1814, LMA, SC/GL/PR/S3/WHI/p7491610.</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), P/GLM/1/5/1.</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: National Co-operative Archive (NCA), CWS Minutes, 29 June, 31 July, and 1 November 1878.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Ethel M. Hogg, <em>Quintin Hogg: A Biography</em>, second edn, 1904.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: Central Co-operative Agency, <em>Catalogue of teas, coffees, colonial & Italian produce, and wines, &c</em>., [1852], pp. 101–8.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: ‘Sales by Auction’, <em>The Times</em>, 14 February 1879, p. 16.</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, 1913, pp. 90–1.</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: <em>Morning Post</em>, 1 January 1886, p.5.</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: Lynn Pearson, <em>Architecture of the Co-operative Movement</em>, draft Chapter 2, p. 4.</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: NCA, CWS minutes, 15 September 1882.</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, pp. 9, 26: NCA, CWS Minutes, 2 December 1882, 7 September and 14 December 1883.</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p. 9: ‘Opening of New Co-operative premises in Whitechapel’, <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 5 November 1887, p. 7.</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 2 December 1882, p.104; CWS,<em>21st Anniversary of the Opening of the London Branch Programme</em>, 1895, pp. 13–14. </p>\n\n<p>[^19]: <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, 1913, p. 88.</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 15 September 1882 and 15 December 1882.</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 14 December 1883.</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p. 9.</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: Percy Redfern, <em>The New History of the C.W.S</em>., 1938, p. 50.</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 20 March 1885. </p>\n\n<p>[^25]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 15 May 1885.</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: <em>Story of the C.W.S.</em>, pp. 379–80.</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 15 May 1885.</p>\n\n<p>[^28]: <em>Morning Post</em>, 31 December 1885, p. 5 and 1 January 1886, p. 5; NCA, CWS Minutes, 5 March 1886.</p>\n\n<p>[^29]: <em>Opening of the New Premises and Cocoa Works</em>, 1887, p.28.</p>\n\n<p>[^30]: <em>Morning Post</em>, 31 December 1885, p.5.</p>\n\n<p>[^31]: NCA, CWS Minutes, 28 May 1886.</p>\n\n<p>[^32]: See NCA, CWS Minutes, 5 March 1886–21 January 1887 and 28 January 1887–18 November 1887.</p>\n",
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"id": 477,
"title": "Previously Charlotte Street",
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"body": "<p>Part of Fieldgate Street used to be called Charlotte Street. This was 22 Charlotte Street in the 1891 census (the Queens Head pub and distillery)</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Rosemary Lane was renamed Royal Mint Street in 1850. Its north side had been transformed a decade earlier by the viaduct of the London and Blackwall Railway, which swept away courts of late eighteenth-century houses and the timber yard. Part of what was left of the timber-yard site was taken for St Mark’s School, established in 1841 opposite Blue Anchor Yard. Set back from the road, the red-brick neo-Tudor school comprised three buildings, a small two-storey classroom block for girls above boys to centre front, a single-storey boys’ schoolroom set back to the east, and a two-storey block for the girls’ schoolroom over an infants school set back to the west. Two railway arches at the back served as playgrounds. The schoolmaster had a house on the south side of Chamber Street (No. 19), alongside which an access passage ran through a third arch. There was rebuilding of the boys’ school in 1862–3 and another infants’ classroom and a WCblock were added to the west. Inadequate play space, constant noise from trains and very poor under-nourished children notwithstanding, the school was described as pleasant in 1939 when it closed. In the 1950s the premises were adapted as St Mark’s House, ships’ stores for J. Freimuller Ltd, then demolished around 1985 to make way for the Docklands Light Railway.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The west side of White Lion Street and its corner with Rosemary Lane were cleared to accompany the widening of Dock Street in 1845–6. The Great Eastern Railway Company’s East Smithfield Depot, formed in 1864 on what had been Glasshouse Yard to the south by the London Docks, required a rail bridge to be carried across Royal Mint Street. This arced over Blue Anchor Yard until around 1976. The Midland Railway Company Depot followed on the north side of Royal Mint Street around 1870 causing ‘very old’ wooden houses to come down. Rosemary Lane’s northern frontage from Leman Street to St Mark’s School had been cleared by Whitechapel District Board of Works in 1867–8 for road widening, which had extended further west up to the Great Northern Railway Company’s Depot at the parish boundary by 1875. In the Tower Bridge improvements of 1907 Mansell Street was extended southwards as a wide thoroughfare, obliterating Little Prescot Street and what old fabric had been left standing between the railway depots. Samuel Blow, a builder who had premises in one of the last old timber houses on the south side of Royal Mint Street near Tower Hill up to their removal in the Tower Bridge improvements, occupied four of the London and Blackwall Railway’s arches as stables from 1881.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>Following the widening of Royal Mint Street, what became the Trafalgar Temperance Coffee House (130 Leman Street) curved round the northeast corner, going up in 1874–6 alongside four comparably tall four-storey shophouses at 69–72 Royal Mint Street. This group was demolished around 1985 for construction of the Docklands Light Railway.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>On the south side of Royal Mint Street, Nos 32–37, east of the Cartwright Street corner and not in Whitechapel, were mid nineteenth-century three-storey shophouses that incorporated Stepney Children’s Library at No. 33 in the 1930s. The corner was a short-lived playground until the whole site was redeveloped in 1978–82. Linking Nos 41 and 47, Cohen’s Buildings was a small four-storey development, built in 1856 as tenements over shops and demolished by 1960. Ruinous houses at 53–54 Royal Mint Street were rebuilt in 1890–1 as a four-storey warehouse that was used as a Salvation Army Food and Shelter Depot. The site has been clear since the 1950s. Nos 55–56 was an early nineteenth-century pair of shophouses that came to house the Model Inn, and No. 65 a three-storey eighteenth-century building that survived into the 1990s.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>Prior to state-sponsored housing interventions, industry accompanied the railways into the southern residential area. By 1850 there was a factory on the west side of Glasshouse Street, just north of New Martin Street. This was rebuilt in 1874–5 as coffee roasting and grinding mills for Peek Brothers & Co., tea and spice importers. Ernest George, who had been Sir Henry W. Peek MP’s architect on his Rousdon estate in Devon, was also employed here. In 1912–14 William Verry, the building contractor, built joinery workshops and stores immediately south of this factory on New Martan Street, employing Leo Sylvester Sullivan as architect through the City of London Real Property Co. Ltd. Peek’s factory was by this time devoted to cocoa, and tea-handling followed. These buildings stood until the late 1970s.[^5] In 1934 it was said that ‘in Royal Mint Street and its tributaries through which such traffic daily trickles, the horse retains its ancient sway because of the advantage it has in drawing loads for short distances between the docks, wharves and railway goods depots’.[^6] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), P93/MRK/009,028–9; LCC/EO/PS/13/223; Y/SP/93/10/A–C: <em>The Builder</em>, 5 July 1862, p. 488: Goad insurance maps, 1887 and 1960: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/THL/D/2/30/129: Post Office Directories (POD)</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes (MBW Mins), 5 April and 7 June 1867, pp. 427,698; 24 Jan 1868, p. 151; 5 Feb. 1869, p. 143; 1 Nov. 1872, p. 489; 13 Feb 1874, p. 209; 18 Oct 1878, p. 469: THLHLA, L/WBW/13/18: <em>The Builder</em>, 3 April 1875, pp. 295–6; 6 May 1876, p. 447; 7 Aug 1880, p. 191: LMA, M/93/159/1; District Surveyors Returns (DSR): The National Archives (TNA), RAIL783/221: Ordnance Survey maps </p>\n\n<p>[^3]: THLHLA, P/MIS/157; P05779, P05782: TNA, IR58/84834/5139–40: DSR: Goad 1887</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: LMA, GLC/RA/D2G/12/129; DSR: TNA, IR58/84834/5117–26: THLHLA, P05774–7; I/MIS/6/1/2: Peabody Archives, WHC.19–20: Goad: POD: information kindly supplied by Danny McLaughlin</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: DSR: MBW Mins, 24 March 1876, p. 455: TNA, IR58/84824/4146: Goad: THLHLA, P30946: Peabody Archives, WHC.24: POD: information kindly supplied by Danny McLaughlin https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1733/detail/#</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Copartnership Herald</em>, March 1934, p. 11</p>\n",
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"title": "Naylor Building East, 15 Adler Street",
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"body": "<p>This block was part of a residential and retail development for Ballymore Properties built to plans prepared by Michael Squire and Partners, architects, in July 2000. There is grey facing with projecting half-dormers, a colourless echo of Ralph Erskine’s higher-profile and contemporary Millennium Village on the Greenwich Peninsula. In six storeys balconies face north to Altab Ali Park. The south and entrance elevation is flatter than that of its sibling. [^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, TH/9360/C/THL/G/2</p>\n",
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"id": 82,
"title": "117–119 New Road",
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"body": "<p>Nos 117–123 (odd) New Road were a block of four commercial buildings put up in 1894 as an early project of N. & R. Davis, the youngest of the seven builder brothers Davis.[^1] They also built similar premises elsewhere, for example on the north side of Fashion Street, and (closer to Whitechapel) 18–28 Cambridge (Heath) Road.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, Middlesex Deeds Register (MDR) 1894/19/36, 661, 663 </p>\n\n<p>[^2]: MDR 1904/10/936-937.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>In the 1930s this was the location of the office of Lloyd Rakusen & Sons Ltd. Biscuit manufacturers, famous for their matzos. Jacob Wolfson worked out of this office as a representative. </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>The site of 191-193 Whitechapel Road has been an empty frontage for more than half a century, but it and the land behind occupy a place of importance in London’s theatre history. The Pavilion Theatre, in business here for little more than a century (1827 to 1934), was one of Whitechapel’s landmarks. Its arrival was part of the general development of what had been garden ground behind 181–193 Whitechapel Road in the mid 1820s.</p>\n\n<p>The first theatre, a small playhouse, was built by John Farrell, said to have been an actor, and William Hyatt (known as Wyatt) in 1826. It was open by February 1827 and within the year was billed as the new Royal Pavilion Theatre. Promoted as being on Whitechapel Road, it was in fact well back from the road, immediately south of Caroline Place and behind houses on Baker’s Row, the only point of access at first; it stood about where 15–25 Vallance Road are now. At first unlicensed, and therefore liable to be closed down, the future of the establishment was secured in 1828 thanks to the collapse of the Royal Brunswick Theatre. That led to the transfer of both a license and performers. A new lease was agreed and improvements were immediately planned, including a long ‘avenue’ to the main road for patrons of the boxes. The Baker’s Row entrance was kept for the gallery, with houses there used for dressing rooms. George Chambers, known as an artist of ships and seascapes, gained employment as a scenery painter here in late 1829. Nautical melodrama was widely popular, and perhaps particularly emphasised here to establish the succession from the Well Street theatres. Even so, respectability was sought, suspected prostitutes being banned entrance. Farrell alone acquired leases of the site of 193 Whitechapel Road and land behind in 1830. Buildings that included the covered passage or ‘avenue’ were up by 1836. The street front was a three-bay stuccoed classical edifice, of some grandeur in the local context with a double order of paired Ionic columns, black on the ground floor and fluted to a piano nobile. The lease was sold in 1839 and a series of sub-tenancies followed.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>Fire destroyed the empty theatre on 13 February 1856. The roof collapsed, leaving the auditorium and stage a shell; the distant main-road frontage was not affected. The lease had passed to Charles Conaughton, an Irish gas fitter (according to the Census of 1851). He died in 1853 leaving his property to his Whitechapel-born 21-year old daughter Elizabeth M. A. Munro, she having married Donald Munro, a Scottish linen-draper on the Mile End Road. The theatre, its machinery and wardrobe had been insured. That permitted Elizabeth Munro to undertake rebuilding on a significantly larger scale in 1858, agreeing a new head lease with the Bacon estate and subletting to John Douglass, proprietor of the Great National Standard Theatre, Shoreditch, who became the Pavilion’s manager and paid for the fitting up of the premises. They opened as the ‘New Royal Pavilion Theatre’, claiming also to be ‘The Great Nautical Theatre of the Metropolis’. First designs had been by Arthur Taylor, architect, but his place was nominally taken by G. H. Simmonds; the <em>Builder</em> reported that architectural duties were in several (un-named) hands. The capacious auditorium could seat 1,750 to 2,000, and the gallery had room for 1,200 to 1,400. However estimated, capacity was greater than at Covent Garden’s new theatre. There was improved circulation and egress, though inadequacies were sharply noted. From Whitechapel Road the ‘superb Parisian avenue’ (10ft6in. wide and 172ft long) was an arcade of Portland stone and corrugated iron off of which there was a refreshment saloon. The 70ft-wide stage to the north had a great Corinthian proscenium arch. In the auditorium slender columns and ring beams of cast iron supported the balconies. Internal décor was of white and gold with crimson velvet for the box fronts and curtains. The painted domical ceiling, seemingly unsupported, had a central glass chandelier by Defries and Son.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>An attempt in 1859–60 to attract more respectable audiences that included the construction of private boxes and stalls and a renaming as the East London Opera House appears to have met little success and in straitened times the theatre failed in 1869. Munro tenure of the theatre property and its environs was consolidated in 1861–2, extending to all the Baker’s Row properties immediately to the east and nearly all those to the south on Whitechapel Road. The widening of Baker’s Row in the early 1870s gave the Munros an opportunity to acquire the southerly part of that frontage, which permitted minor additions to the theatre in 1873, overseen by Jethro T. Robinson, architect, and redevelopment along the street in 1873–6. Donald Munro became Whitechapel’s representative on the MBW.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>From 1871 the Pavilion’s proprietor had been Morris Abrahams under whom the theatre cemented a reputation as a leading popular venue: ‘It is perhaps the most cosmopolitan pit in the metropolis. Here may be seen the bluff British tar; the swarthy foreign sailor fully arrayed in a picturesque sash, a red mob-cap and a pair of ear-rings; the Semitic swell in glossy broadcloth and the rorty coster, a perfect blaze of pearly buttons artistically arranged in an elegant suit of corduroy with a natty bird’s-eye neckerchief tied in an imperceptible knot; the sallow, callow youth in the shortest of jackets and the largest of stand-up collars; the sallow youth’s sweetheart; the respectable tradesman accompanied by his wife, five children and a large bag of provisions and a bottle of enormous dimensions, a trio of artless maidens who giggle and weep torrents.’[^4] Extensive alterations were made in 1884 with John Hudson as architect, including to the street frontage and the proscenium wall, to meet MBW stipulations arising from a general review of theatres prompted by the destruction of the Ring Theatre in Vienna in 1881.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>Further minor alterations to circulation and refreshment facilities on the Baker’s Row side in 1889–90 were handled by S. Walker and Rüntz, surveyors. Ernest Augustus Rüntz was the Munros’ son-in-law, having married Mary Ann Munro in 1883. He was to establish a reputation as a theatre architect. With Abrahams given a new lease under Mrs Munro, Rüntz was responsible for more extensive reconstruction in 1894 under the eye and influence of C. J. Phipps. This included an entirely new Doulton’s terracotta façade to Whitechapel Road, widened to the east to permit separate entrances to the pit and stalls or boxes. Rüntz gave the upper storeys increased presence with a double-height recessed arch above a balcony. Around a large oculus, for advertising, there was relief sculpture depicting Tragedy and Comedy, modelled by William J. Neatby. The auditorium was raised, ceiled with figurative painted decoration by Nepperschmidt & Hermann, and reseated with electric blue upholstering. There were also lateral extensions of the stage with a taller fly tower in a huge mansard spanning 64ft. Between the flies to the back was a scene-painting workshop, and there were new dressing rooms and bars, in particular a roomier refreshment saloon at circle level. Rüntz oversaw further reseating in 1906–8 to give a capacity of 1,832 of which 516 were standing and 500 in the gallery. Now managed by Isaac Cohen, this vast home to melodrama and pantomime was ‘the Drury Lane of the East’.[^6]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/08/pavilion-theatre-plan-1894.jpg\"><em>The Pavilion Theatre, ground-level plan as in 1894 (drawing by Helen Jones)</em></p>\n\n<p>After 1900 the Pavilion came to be known for the staging of Jewish plays, to some extent through the short managerial stints of Max Merton and Laurence Cowen, whose first play, <em>The World, the Flesh and the Devil</em>, premiered here in 1909. In that year a meeting in support of the establishment of a Jewish theatre in east London drew more than 2,000 to the Pavilion – ‘it was an auditorium where everybody knew everybody else, and was not ashamed to say so, in strident tones to be heard from gallery to stalls. The noise never stopped.’[^7] Management passed to Jacob Woolf Rosenthal, Polish-born, who responded to financial problems in 1911 by proposing cinema use. The Whitechapel Foundation, freeholder and neighbour, agreed to this, but resisted proposals for opening on Sundays, the Jewish clientele notwithstanding. Rosenthal moved away but came back in 1922 to stay until the end. Minor works of alteration in 1922–3, with Herbert O. Ellis & W. Lee Clarke as architects, were completed with a projecting illuminated sign at first-floor level advertising ‘VILNA TROOP’, the international Modernist Yiddish theatre company whose production here of Sholem Asch’s <em>The God of Vengeance</em>, set in a brothel and with a favourable portrayal of a lesbian relationship, was shut down by the censor. Rosenthal, always precarious, planned to sell up to Savoy Cinemas Ltd, but this fell through in 1927 so he kept the Yiddish theatre going. By now the superior lease was held by Sid Hyams, of a family of East End Jewish cinema entrepreneurs. With George Coles as his architect, Hyams proposed redevelopment on a larger scale for a theatre to take more than 5,000. But this failed to gain traction and cinema and occasional boxing use continued alongside Yiddish theatre. The LCC stipulated extensive improvements in 1932 to keep up with regulations. These were not carried out, forcing closure in 1934 with Rosenthal clinging to the possibility of redevelopment. The Hyams’s Gaumont Super Cinemas Ltd held out hope in the late 1930s, but the transformation never came and after indirect bomb damage in 1940 the building fell into dereliction.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>The LCC acquired the property for clearance and housing development and in 1961 the theatre historian John Earl recorded the roofless ruins (see his separate account). Clearance followed and an advertising hoarding occupied the Whitechapel Road frontage from 1962 to 2012. Back land fell to use as a lorry and car park and eventually into the ownership of Lidl. In 1988 Tim Reynolds’s Academy Drama School unsuccessfully attempted unauthorised building work on the site to form a theatre and classrooms. That property passed into the ownership of Lidl and a scheme for a supermarket below flats that extended east to Vallance Road was refused permission in 2013. The site remains empty in 2020.[^9]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; A/DAV/01/018; E/BN/120,123–4,164–5; MR/L/MD/0045: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 28 June 1827; 8 Jan. 1828: <em>Weekly Dispatch</em>, 17 Feb. 1839: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (hereafter THLHLA) cuttings 795.1: East London Theatre Archive: Diana Howard, <em>London’s Theatres and Music Halls, 1850–1950</em>, 1970, pp .171–2: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub</em> Chambers: Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow, <em>Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880</em>, 2001, pp. 55–6</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Illustrated London News</em>, 23 Feb. 1856, pp. 206–7; 6 Nov. and 13 Nov. 1858, pp. 429–30,453: <em>The Builder</em>, 15 May, 26 June, 25 Sept., 2 Oct. and 6 Nov. 1858, pp. 342,446,644-5,654-5,738–9: LMA, E/BN/138: Ancestry: Historic England London Region photographs</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, E/BN/140–3; GLC/AR/BR/19/0439: THLHLA, L/WBW/13/15: Ordnance Survey map 1873: District Surveyors Returns (DSR): Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) Minutes, 8 Oct. 1875, p. 337: Davis and Emeljanow, <em>London Theatregoing</em>, pp. 60–1,68–9</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>The Referee</em>, 1883, as quoted in Albert E. Wilson, <em>East End Entertainment</em>, 1954, p. 89</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/0439; /19/0439: MBW Mins, 13 Oct. and 17 Nov. 1882, pp. 511,741; 10 Aug. 1883, pp. 347–9; 24 April 1885, p. 739: DSR: Howard, <em>loc. cit</em><em>.</em></p>\n\n<p>[^6]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/0439; 19/0439: DSR: London County Council Minutes, 2 Aug. 1889, p. 697; 6 May 1890, p. 374; 13 June 1893, pp. 611–2; 1894 passim; 16 Oct. 1906, p. 851: <em>The Builder</em>, 22 Dec. 1894, p. 460: <em>The Architect</em>, 15 Feb. 1895: A. Stuart Gray, <em>Edwardian Architecture</em>, 1985, pp. 314–15: Post Office Directories: Howard, <em>loc. cit</em><em>.</em></p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Charles Landstone, <em>Jewish Chronicle Supplement</em>, 27 Nov. 1970, p. 42</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: LMA, GLC/AR/BR/07/0439; 07/P/0439; GLC/AR/BR/22/036395; A/DAV/02/002, p. 206; LCC/EO/PS/03/170: DSR: Post Office Directories: <em>East London Advertiser</em>, 20 Nov. 1909; 7 Jan. 1911: <em>New York Times</em>, 28 Oct. 1923, p. x2: DSR: Anthony L. Ellis, ‘The East-End Jew at his Playhouse’, <em>Pall Mall Gazette</em>, vol. 41, 1908, pp. 173–9: Emanuel Litvinoff, <em>Journey Through a Small Planet</em>, 1972 (edn 1993), pp. 76–87: Howard, <em>loc. cit</em><em>.s</em></p>\n\n<p>[^9]: LMA, SC/PHL/02/1007HEA, MD96/04715–30: Colin Sorenson, ‘“How I began theatre hunting” some discursive recollections’, in Joanna Bird, Hugh Chapman and John Clark (eds), <em>Collectanea Londiniensia: Studies in London archaeology and history presented to Ralph Merrifield</em>, 1978, pp. 463–72: <em>The Express</em>, 18 Aug. 1961, p. 3: Historic England Archives, Aerofilms A147200: THLHLA, Building Control file 15497: information supplied by Ann Robey: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2017-08-25",
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{
"id": 325,
"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",
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"title": "12-20 Osborn Street",
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"address": "12-20 Osborn Street (Arbor City Hotel)",
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"body": "<p>What had previously been the narrow southern end of Brick Lane took its present form and the name Osborn Street (after local landowners) following legislation in 1778 that provided for the widening and paving of ‘Dirty Lane’. Commissioners were granted compulsory purchase powers over Thomas Berney Bramston’s property on the street’s east side for clearance, including of the Bell after which Bell Yard was named. Other paving improvements, including to Old Montague Street, were enabled by the same Act. The roadworks were carried out in the 1780s.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>The new frontage was not yet fully built up when a tall sugarhouse was built on the site of Nos 12–18 in 1794–5 by Robert Dewes and George Ansell, sugar refiners previously in Goodmans Fields (see Bryan Mawer's account). Bramston granted them a 70-year lease of a site with an 85ft6in. frontage and a depth of 96ft8in., curtailed to the south-east where it abutted the yard of the Nag’s Head Inn. There were two houses, a sugarhouse and a warehouse. By 1806 Dewes and Ansell had acquired the freehold. George Bankes took over in 1832 and saw the sugarhouse destroyed by fire in 1834. After his death in 1843 Charles Richard Dames and John Frederick Bowman ran what was now described as a steam sugar house, ownership of the property and business passing to Dames & Son (Richard Dames) in 1850 up to 1877. By the time of the refinery’s closure in 1875, it had grown to have a frontage of 135ft. The sugarhouse had nine floors, there was internal iron construction and a 150ft chimney.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>From 1878 the Victoria Wine Company had the former sugarhouse buildings at Nos 14–18, adapted to be its head office, warehouses and vaults. This firm, started in 1865 by William Winch Hughes in Mark Lane in the City, is said to have been the first wine multiple in Britain. Making the most of reduced duties on French wines, Hughes’s operations expanded quickly and there were 63 shops by 1879. The Osborn Street site’s substantial buildings were used for the storage and bottling of all kinds of alcoholic drink, and tea was also handled. The ground floor housed offices and retailing. Replacement was piecemeal. A four-storey warehouse was built (at Nos 16-18) in 1892, and there were further extensive rebuildings at Nos 12–18 to a height of seven storeys between 1916 and 1926. An air-raid shelter was installed in the basement in 1939. The depot was a casualty of bombing in May 1941 when five members of staff were killed.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The whole site (12–20 Osborn Street) was redeveloped in 1957–61 as a clothing factory, a warehouse and workshops, with offices above and shops below. Within a year or so a day nursery for the children of the factory’s employees was built to the rear, behind the Nag’s Head public house. This was converted to storage use in the late 1970s and demolished not long after. It has been succeeded by a building of comparable scale at the south end of a car park entered off Old Montague Street. </p>\n\n<p>The factory was converted to be a hotel in 2000–1 for M. Gill of Transomas Properties, and raised <em>c.</em>2004 to plans by GA Architects. Further alteration of what had been City Hotel in 2015–16 gave the ground floor its ‘graffiti-proof’ granite facing, for a bar that has since become a franchise restaurant under what was renamed Arbor City Hotel. Remodelling with substantial extension to the rear on the former car park up to Old Montague Street began in 2021. This aims to provide 153 further guest rooms in blocks rising to six storeys designed by Dexter Moren Associates, architects.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA) pamphlet LC8691: Act GIII 18, c.lxxx: Land Tax</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: London Metropolitan Archives, O/038/006–019: Post Office Directories (POD): <em>The Times</em>, 8 November 1873, p. 16; 10 November 1875, p. 14: see Bryan Mawer's account: THLHLA, cuttings 022</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Goad insurance maps: Historic England Archive, aerial photographs EPW005770, EPW055309: District Surveyors Returns: POD: Asa Briggs, <em>Wine for Sale: Victoria Wine and the Liquor Trade, 1860–1984</em>, 1985, pp. 9, 50, 126</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: THLHLA, Building Control file 17750: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>My grandfather, who I never knew, was forced to flee Poland by himself as a teenager in 1902. He went to live with someone, who may have been his cousin, at 44 Settles St. The rowhouse still exists and I was fortunate enough to step inside last summer during a visit from the US. It was surreal. I understand that a <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/735/detail/#history\">public house</a> involved in one of Jack the Ripper’s murders was down the block on Settles St.</p>\n",
"created": "2018-10-31",
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"title": "George Yard Mission and Ragged School",
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"body": "<p>The George Yard Mission and Ragged School was one of the earliest sustained endeavours in Whitechapel to address the travails of the poor. Ragged schools to provide free education for destitute children grew out of isolated charitable initiatives, most famously that of John Pounds, a Portsmouth cobbler. Impetus for expansion came through the foundation in 1844 of the Ragged School Union in London, under the patronage of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, and with support from Charles Dickens, to provide education for the poorest of the poor, often homeless, such that refuges were an integral part of the endeavour. By 1851 there were more than 100 ragged schools educating 10,000 children.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In 1852 Robert Hanbury, senior and junior, of Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Co., brewers, began fundraising for a ragged school in Whitechapel, under the auspices of the Rev. Hugh Allen of St Jude’s church. But they decided instead to use their site off the east side of Commercial Street for a Boys’ Refuge and Industrial School. The George Yard school was founded in 1854 by George Holland (1824–1900), a grocer in the Minories who devoted the rest of his working life to what became the George Yard Mission and Ragged School. Holland converted a former distillery building of 1836 on the east side of George Yard at the back of 88 Whitechapel High Street. The teaching, at first of just ‘some thirty rough boys’, was conducted initially with pupil-teachers assisting Holland in a single lofty room. It had a markedly more personal and pious tone than that which characterised later efforts led by the Rev. Samuel Barnett from St Jude’s, not just in being avowedly evangelising, but also in a less astringent attitude to charity, which was dispensed with less judgement as to the ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ character of the recipients, most of whom were acutely poor. Holland’s devotion to his task attracted the attention of Shaftesbury, which opened up a world of affluent connections that sustained the Mission into the twentieth century. By 1857 it was said 700 children were under instruction. There was a day school, Sunday school, evening schools, a George Yard Temperance Society, and a marching band. Teaching continued to follow the pupil-teacher method and the Mission provided meals, sometimes accommodation, and trips to the ‘country’, destinations such as Hampstead, Enfield and Addiscombe. In 1861 a ‘shelter for outcast boys’ opened at the top end of George Yard on Wentworth Street. By the 1870s a Lodging House Gospel Mission was visiting nine or ten lodging houses a week.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>With the establishment of Board Schools after 1870, the number of ragged schools diminished from a peak of around 150 to around thirty within a few years, a matter of regret for Shaftesbury who observed that the Board Schools ‘would not feed, clothe and educate in the fear and love of God, the destitute children for whom the Ragged Schools were intended’.[^3] The George Yard Ragged School and Mission came to concentrate on infant and evening education, and general welfare and evangelical work. The original building was used as the Flowers of the Forest day nursery from 1875 to 1887. Aristocratic patrons paid for three cottages, or ‘Homes for the Weary and the Drooping’, to give short holidays to ‘respectable married women and their infants’ in leafy areas on the edge of London, and the Nonington training school for young women was established in Addiscombe.[^4] </p>\n\n<p>Expansion ensued in the late 1880s with two new buildings in Angel Alley for an infants’ school and a shelter and library, and the adaptation of two others, 87 Whitechapel High Street, which connected at the rear to the old school, now a mission hall, and an adapted building in Angel Alley (84B Whitechapel High Street), the whole group ‘almost puzzling in its labyrinthine variety’.[^5] By the time of Holland’s death in 1900, the school and mission were said to have seen 60,000 children pass through.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>The George Yard Mission continued for a time under the superintendence of a Col. Hayne, but the LCC found the converted distillery unsuitable for continuing school use in 1905. Closure followed, the children transferring to the new Commercial Street School on the other side of George Yard.[^7] The building continued as a mission hall, with a floor inserted to create sheltered accommodation in four rooms. As the area’s population grew increasingly Jewish, the location came to seem less than ideal for an overtly Christian organisation. Frederic Alford Snell (1859–1954), Secretary at the mission from 1885 to 1923 noted, ‘it had been overwhelmed with the alien tide and the commercial tide too. They were being nearly smoked out by the Dust Destructor’.[^8] In 1923 the George Yard Mission merged with the King Edward Institution, another former ragged school, north of Old Montague Street in Spitalfields, and both in turn merged in 1934 with the Good Shepherd Mission in Bethnal Green. All the Whitechapel buildings were sold.[^9] The distillery–school building was subsequently used as an auction room by D. Stanton & Sons Ltd. Two further floors were inserted in 1934 when 88 Whitechapel High Street, to which the building once again formed an adjunct, was adapted for the <em>Jewish Post</em>, and the ground floor strengthened to take printing presses. It was destroyed in the Second World War and the site cleared and left empty.[^10] </p>\n\n<p><strong>Nagpal House (1 Gunthorpe Street) </strong>is a four-storey block of flats with ground-floor offices, built in 2006–7 on the long vacant site of the distillery that was used from 1854 to 1923 as the George Yard Mission and Ragged School. It was built for the owners, S. and B. Nagpal, by Zencroft Developments to designs by Richard Bonshor, architect. The upper storeys project with irregular triangle-plan oriels creating a zig-zag pattern, with windows on the shorter south-facing sides to prevent overlooking of 4 Gunthorpe Street. The ground-floor units are used by solicitors and as a health and beauty clinic.[^11] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: John Shirley, ‘Ragged and Industrial Schools in England’, <em>Charity Organisation Review</em>, ns vol.9/49, Jan 1901, pp.9–16</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 23 June 1852, p.1; 16 Feb 1853, p.4; 15 July 1857, p.1; 9 Nov 1865, p.5: <em>Illustrated London News</em>, 17 Sept 1853, p.239:<em>Illustrated Times</em>, 1 Jan 1859, pp.3–6: <em>East London Observer (ELO)</em>, 2 July 1859, p.2; 30 April 1887, p.7: <em>Morning Post</em>, 23 Jan 1861, p.3; 20 March 1874, p.5: <em>Penny Illustrated Paper</em>, 3 Sept 1864, p.146: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 9 Dec 1869, p.5: ed. Richard Mudie-Smith, <em>The Religious Life of London</em>, 1904, pp.33,52</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Norwood News</em>, 5 July 1875, p.3</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Croydon Advertiser and Surrey County Reporter</em>, 22 May 1886, p.2: <em>Bedfordshire Mercury</em>, 23 Jan 1875, p.6: <em>ELO</em>, 28 April 1877, p.6; 15 June 1901, p.6</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>ELO</em>, 30 April 1887, p.7: <em>Tower Hamlets Independent and East End Advertiser</em>, 30 April 1887, p.6: ed. C. S. Loch, <em>The Charities Register and Digest</em>, 1890, pp.483–4: Goad</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>ELO</em>, 25 Aug 1900, p.5: Census: Ancestry:Thomas Paul, ‘Among the Little Waifs of London’, in ed. Arthur T. Pierson,<em>The Miracle of Missions: Modern Marvels in the History of Missionary Enterprise</em>, 1899, pp.148–68</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: London County Council Minutes, 30 May 1905, p.2082; 13 February 1906, p.247; 27 March 1906, p.823</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>ELO</em>, 19 May 1923, p.3</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), W/GSM/1/5/3: ed. F. H. W. Sheppard, <em>Survey of London: </em>vol.27,<em>Spitalfields and Mile End New Town</em>, 1957, pp.265–88: <a href=\"https://www.goodshepherdmission.org.uk/\">www.goodshepherdmission.org.uk/</a></p>\n\n<p>[^10]: Post Office Directories: London Metropolitan Archives, District Surveyors' Returns: The National Archives, IR58/83839/5696: <em>ELO</em>, 26 May 1923, p.2; 4 Dec 1926, p.5</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: THLHLA, Building Control files 80545, 15859: Tower Hamlets planning applications online</p>\n",
"created": "2019-09-12",
"last_edited": "2019-09-12"
},
{
"id": 549,
"title": "Essex Wharf",
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"body": "<p>The site between the East London Line railway cutting and Swanlea School is called Essex Wharf. This is on account of connections with Essex via a Great Eastern Railway siding that was laid down around 1877 to serve the newly built depot of James Brown (London) Ltd, brick makers who also dealt in terracotta and later became suppliers of Frazzi fireproof hollow tiles. They had taken what had been surplus East London Railway property to build an array of workshops and stores. Offices on Buck’s Row were decorated with terracotta panels and with ‘ESSEX WHARF’ in large letters. After the Second World War these premises became S. Rosenberger, Coates & Co.’s tie factory (43 Durward Street) which stood until the early 1990s.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives, ACC/0224/11 and 13; District Surveyors Returns: Greater London Industrial Arachaeology Society Newsletter, Dec 1984: William J. Fishman, <em>The Streets of East London</em>, 1979, p.103: Post Office Directories</p>\n",
"created": "2018-01-03",
"last_edited": "2018-01-03"
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{
"id": 816,
"title": "Nos 3 to 21 Commercial Street",
"author": {
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"username": "surveyoflondon"
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"body": "<p>The first development on the west side of Commercial Street was the corner block (considered as part of 110 Whitechapel High Street), built in 1849 for John Aldington Perry, an ironmonger previously at the demolished 109 High Street. Most of the four-storey building, featuring heavily rusticated stuccoed ground floor and pedimented first-floor windows, was taken up with the bank and living quarters, only the last bay being an individual shop-house, numbered No. 2 until 1877, then No. 3.[^1] </p>\n\n<p>Adjoining it to the north was a block of nine three-storey shop-houses built in 1851 by H.W. Cooper, builder, of Regent Square.[^2] They were occupied by typical Whitechapel businesses many in the clothing trade, the upper floors increasingly changing from residential to small offices in the twentieth century. One of the two buildings to survive the war relatively unscathed, No. 5, had one of the longest-surviving businesses, Harry Semel, gown and blouse manufacturer there from c.1920. The other survivor, Nos 19-21, included an entry through it to a double-width yard with four stables and smith’s workshops built by Samuel Grimsdell, builder of Bell Lane, Spitalfields, in 1852 for the new occupier of the house and yard, the veterinary practice of William Farrow (d. 1878) which was continued by his son Arthur Hastings Farrow until his death in 1916.[^3] Following Farrow jr’s death, the site was taken over by J. Levine, shopfitters, for whom the back premises were rebuilt in 1923 by Fram Ltd.[^4] No. 5 was finally demolished c.1968 for road widening and the building of the new Seven Stars pub in the late 1960s. The ruined remains of the other buildings and Nos 19-21 went in the early 1970s for the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1454/detail/#denning-point-and-the-new-holland-estate\">New Holland estate</a> and the creation of Pomell Way.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Post Office Directories (POD): The National Archives (TNA), IR58/84809/2661</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: District Surveyor's Returns (DSR): POD: TNA, IR58/84809/2662-2670</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: information Jane Roberson: POD: DSR: TNA, IR58/84809/2670: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 21 May 1852, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: Goad insurance plans: POD: DSR: Tower hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control files 12438 and 12442</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-12-20",
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{
"id": 169,
"title": "The pigeon slaughterer of Gower's Walk",
"author": {
"id": 72,
"username": "eric"
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"body": "<p>Memories of Eric Shorter, b. 1936</p>\n\n<p>Many times I saw a man with bulging pockets in Aldgate. One pocket bulged with permits from many councils. He was entitled to shoot pigeons, for food, they were sold to Sainsburys after the war. He came into Gower's Walk, where birds would sit on the edge of The Tilbury roof, so high up. I saw him stand with his back to the Tilbury warehouse wall, take aim upwards, and bring down a pigeon. His other pockets bulged with pigeons.</p>\n\n<p>I also saw a gas-lighter man come to light/extinguish old gas lamps. He had a pole with a hook on its end. The hook would engage with little chains from the gas taps, one chain for off and the other for on.</p>\n",
"created": "2016-11-01",
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"id": 526,
"title": "Whitechapel Library, Newark Street (formerly the Church of St Augustine with St Philip)",
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"street": "Stepney Way",
"address": "St Philip's Church Library and the Royal London Museum",
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"body": "<p>The red-brick church that lies behind the former Royal London Hospital was built in 1888–92 to the designs of Arthur Cawston. It is on the site of a chapel raised in 1818–21 and subsequently dedicated to St Philip. Almost islanded by Stepney Way, Turner Street, and Newark Street, Cawston’s church is a commanding landmark despite the abrupt base of its unbuilt tower. The quality of his work culminates in the rich interior spaces of St Philip’s, deemed to be an ‘architectural masterpiece’ by the Gothic revivalist Stephen Dykes Bower.[^1] St Philip’s was merged with nearby St Augustine’s, Stepney, after the Second World War and declared redundant in 1979. The church was converted into a medical and dental library for the London Hospital Medical College in 1985–8.</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/01/sol-whitechapel100043.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Whitechapel Library (formerly the Church of St Philip with St Augustine), view from the east behind the new Royal London Hospital. Photographed by Derek Kendall in 2016 for the Survey of London. </em></p>\n\n<h2><em>Stepney New Church, 1818–21</em></h2>\n\n<p>The chapel which preceded the present church was at first known variously as Stepney Chapel and Stepney New Church. It was probably dedicated to St Philip the Apostle in 1836, when it was assigned a district from the parish of Stepney. Plans to build a chapel of ease in the neighbourhood of the London Hospital originated in nine Trustees, namely Thomas Barneby (Rector of Stepney), Harry Charrington, Nicholas Charrington senior and junior, William Cotton, William Davis, Charles Hampden Turner, James Peppercorne, and Christopher Richardson junior. Each of the Trustees was prominent in local affairs, business and philanthropy, and nearly all were governors of the London Hospital. Cotton was also an energetic promoter of Anglican church attendance, as a founder of the Church Building Society and a supporter of the Churches Act of 1818. The Trustees determined that, of all the hamlets in Stepney, Mile End Old Town most urgently required a new church. A vacant piece of ground south of the London Hospital and straddling the parish boundary with Whitechapel was deemed to be convenient, being at the heart of a growing neighbourhood in the throes of development. The Trustees set about raising subscriptions towards a new church for 2,000 worshippers that would offer free sittings for two-thirds of the congregation and derive its income from pew-rents.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>For its design the Trustees turned to John Walters, an architect and engineer who, as the surveyor to the London Hospital from 1806, was probably familiar to many of the Trustees. This attribution has been confused by a letter written to John Soane, who had enquired about the size and expense of the church following the Act of 1818. Francis Goodwin, then employed as a clerk in Walters’s office, wrote in October that ‘although Mr Walters was the appointed architect to the Stepney New Church – I had the honour to make the design, and to superintend the building’. This claim may need to be treated with caution, given Goodwin’s later opportunistic pursuit of church commissions.[^3]</p>\n\n<p>The progress of the church was marred by financial complications and its intended size diminished accordingly. Despite commencing building on a ‘limited scale’ in June 1818, when the first stone was laid by the Duke of York, funds were depleted by the end of the next year.[^4] An application for a grant from the newly formed Church Building Commission secured £3,500 with the condition that the sum would only be paid after the finished church was surrendered to the Commissioners. The promise of an influx of cash failed to distract the Trustees from entering into a legal dispute with their builder, Francis Read of Islington. In May 1816 Read had agreed to build the chapel and install the pews for £6,200 within three years, yet his work was not finished until Spring 1821. During this interlude a number of additional contracts were agreed to cover the cost of the pulpit and interior fittings, raising the contract price to £6,815. Read’s final account of £12,400 surprised the Trustees, who determined that his calculations were ‘in a very incorrect and imperfect state’.[^5] This startling discrepancy was explained as ‘extras’, and a protracted legal case followed, which concluded in a payment of £2,000 to Read.[^6]</p>\n\n<p>Due to this setback, the finished church stood unconsecrated, dormant, and neglected for nearly two years. Writing in <em>The Gentleman’s Magazine</em>, Edward John Carlos deplored that ‘its windows were broken by idle boys, and its walls made the repository of inflammatory inscriptions’.[^7] Its site was finally conveyed to the Commissioners in 1822, and the consecration followed in January 1823. Stepney Chapel stood behind iron railings at the centre of an island site bounded by newly formed streets on the London Hospital Estate. This Perpendicular Gothic church was in contrast to the sober neoclassicism of nearby St Paul’s Church in Shadwell (1817–21), built simultaneously to designs by Walters, who had died exhausted in October 1821 at the age of thirty-nine. Stepney Chapel was a brick-built rectangular structure coated with Hamelin’s Mastic, a stucco favoured for ornamented surfaces. The public front in Turner Street was adorned by a large west window above a central entrance flanked by octangular buttresses with pointed spires. Plainer side entrances stood below decorative niches and pierced quatrefoil parapets. This neat tripartite arrangement was replicated at the east front, which contained two vestry doors. The decoration bestowed on the entrance fronts was diluted in the treatment of the side elevations, each composed of six evenly proportioned bays defined by buttresses with crocketted pinnacles. The Gothic window frames were modelled in artificial stone by J. G. Bubb.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>The west front of the church opened into a passage with north and south porches fitted with stairs to the galleries. Beyond the five-bay nave and aisles, the east end terminated in a large traceried chancel window behind a carved pulpit and desks for the reader and the clerk. The recessed chancel was flanked by vestries and the nave arcades were supported by cast-iron columns faced with mastic. The nave was overlooked on three sides by galleries, bestowed at the west end with an organ in a finely carved case. Deal pews decorated with Gothic panels secured 408 sittings, supplemented by 754 free seats. This number was significantly less than the 2,000 sittings first contemplated, and still fewer than the 1,500 sittings calculated erroneously on the working drawings. Judging from J. H. Good’s calculation of sittings in 1840, a proposal to install flaps in the side aisles to raise the capacity to 1,338 was executed.[^9]</p>\n\n<h3><em>Later history and alterations</em></h3>\n\n<p>The smooth mastic coating of Stepney Chapel was not destined for longevity, as in its ill-fated application at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. In a visitation return of 1841, the Rev. Joseph Heathcote Brooks complained that the mastic was ‘all coming off’.[^10] The condition of the church had worsened considerably by 1858, when the Rev. James Bonwell claimed that it was ‘falling down’.[^11] Bonwell shocked the neighbourhood as the rakish culprit of the ‘Stepney scandal’ wildly reported in the press. Efforts towards the restoration of the church were deferred until after Bonwell’s dismissal in 1860, when his temporary successor the Rev. J. G. H. Hill arranged repairs and improvements. The arrival of a perpetual curate in July 1862 brought stability and a renewed attempt at restoration. As the son of Charles James Blomfield, the former Bishop of London, the Rev. Alfred Blomfield was a prestigious appointment to a district parish shaken by Bonwell’s misdemeanours. Blomfield established a public appeal for funds to build a parsonage and rectify the failing mastic. The exterior repairs were overseen by James Knight and completed in 1863.[^12]</p>\n\n<p>Blomfield’s promotion in 1865 led to the appointment of the Rev. John Richard Green, who was to gain renown and influence through writing <em>A Short History of the English People </em>(1874). Green arrived at St Philip’s with experience of impoverished east London parishes, namely Holy Trinity, Hoxton, and St Peter’s, Cephas Street. In a letter of 1869 to William Boyd Dawkins, Green described his situation at St Philip’s, and its connection with nearby St Augustine’s in Settles Street:</p>\n\n<blockquote>\n<p>In plain English, I am incumbent of St Philip’s, Stepney, which the work of Blomfield here has made the ‘crack’ parish of this end of Town. There is a good church, a fine choir, a capital parsonage, and good schools – 16,000 people, of whom 6,000 are cut off to form a mission district. Two curates work with me at the church, two more are in charge of the Mission.[^13]</p>\n</blockquote>\n\n<p>Green resigned his living due to ailing health in 1869 and devoted the rest of his life to writing. He was succeeded by the Rev. Alexander Johnstone Ross, who heartily started to raise money for a complete restoration of the church. Ross enlisted the advice of E. W. Godwin and contemplated rebuilding, until it became apparent that funds were too scarce. A faculty issued in 1871 authorized restoration works to designs by Godwin. The organ was transferred to the north side of the chancel, effected by removing part of the north gallery, a new pulpit was raised, and choir stalls were installed with distinctive carved ends hollowed into upturned crescents. In 1875 a memorial window was completed to designs by William De Morgan for the social reformer Edward Denison, who had lived briefly in Philpot Street to intensify his work with the poorer classes of east London.[^14]</p>\n\n<p>The restoration of St Philip’s collapsed due to a shortage of funds. The earlier works had been funded by a private loan taken out by Ross, who was increasingly burdened by interest payments. Ross intensified his fundraising efforts, concerned that many of his congregation had ‘been drawn into the handsome dissenting chapel’ in Philpot Street ‘by the dismal condition of the parish church’.[^15] A catalogue of desirable alterations and repairs in 1876 included the reseating of the nave, aisles and gallery, new windows, and a drainage course to salvage the exterior walls from damp. It is not certain that these works were completed, aside from external repairs and the insertion of a ceiling in the crypt.[^16]</p>\n\n<h2><em>Rebuilding, 1888–92</em></h2>\n\n<p>A rebuilding scheme for St Philip’s Church was precipitated by the Rev. John Sidney Adolphus Vatcher, who found it in a ‘disastrous and disgraceful state’ after his arrival as vicar in 1883.[^17] Vatcher began to raise funds towards a new church, yet reputedly a substantial contribution was derived from his private wealth, which probably stemmed from his family in Jersey. The foundation stone was laid in July 1888 and construction by A. Bush & Sons was executed in two phases. The east side of the earlier church was preserved temporarily for worship, accessed by an iron entrance porch installed to the south. The west side of the church, including the nave, the aisles, the transept piers and the baptistery, was completed in 1889 and used for worship from the next January. The east end followed in 1890–2, and the finished church was consecrated on 27 October 1892. At this time, it was described by William Sinclair, Archdeacon of London, as a ‘magnificent gift to the Church’ that had ‘cost £40,000 out of Mr Vatcher’s own pocket’.[^18]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/01/sol-whitechapel100150.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>St Philip's Church, photographed by Derek Kendall from Newark Street in 2016.</em></p>\n\n<p>The building is a rare example of the work of Arthur Cawston, a lesser-known architect whose early death in 1894 aged thirty-seven severed a nascent career. Cawston was articled to Habershon & Brock and worked in the office of Edward I’Anson before designing a handful of residential, civic and institutional buildings. Prior to St Philip’s, Cawston had taken only tentative steps in ecclesiastical architecture with the Ascension in Balham Hill (1883) and St Luke’s in Bromley Common (1886). Both red-brick churches bear the plain Early English style adopted at Cawston’s final church, yet lack its imposing scale and grandeur. The ambition of Cawston’s design testifies to the generous brief set by Vatcher, who wished to raise ‘a building worthy of the great purpose to which it is put; an interesting place for the parishioners to rest and hide themselves for a time from their neighbours, and a permanent protest in this practical age against the everlasting question, “Will it pay?”’.[^19]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/01/sol-whitechapel100045.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>The east end of former St Philip's Church, photographed by Derek Kendall in 2016 after the demolition of the Royal London Hospital's Fielden House and Pathology Block. </em></p>\n\n<p>The irregular footprint of the church sprawls over more of the site than had been neatly occupied by Walters’s chapel, leaving open spaces for repose. The west end is flanked by small gardens graced by a fig tree and a tall lime tree at the south, and a leafy walled cloister extends along the south side of the church, screened from Newark Street by a tall stock-brick wall. The asymmetrical plan and stark red-brick walls with Ancaster-stone dressings are consistent with Cawston’s earlier ecclesiastical work, yet also recall the manner of the east London churches of James Brooks. Unlike in his earlier commissions, Cawston was presented with the rare challenge of designing an urban church visible from every angle. A plain Early English style was adopted in deference to the austerity of its neighbourhood. The narrow nave is expressed externally by a four-bay clerestory, its other faces concealed by a lively cluster of buildings. The west end is dominated by the unfinished tower, of which only the lower stages were built. A surviving model of the proposed tower by C. N. Thwaite indicates that an octagonal turret was once envisaged, yet Cawston also produced drawings for a sturdy square tower. The exposed corners of the tower are supported by angle buttresses, with a corbelled staircase suspended at the north-west. Its north face is encroached by a gabled porch, intended as the ceremonial entrance to the church yet rarely used. A stock-brick passage in Stepney Way had been added by 1916, yet this route to the hospital is now blocked. The usual entrance to the church has probably always been the stock-brick south porch, originally approached through the cloistered garden. The north and south aisles comprise four bays articulated by brick buttresses and windows, each embellished with dissimilar tracery. The east and west transepts rise to brick gables with vacant stone niches, placed above three lancet windows and a perforated stone parapet. The east end of the church was intended to overlook a public garden, sacrificed in 1899 for hospital expansion by the construction of Fielden House. Its recent demolition has exposed the angular projection of the morning chapel, its plain battlemented walls converging at a central gable with a triple lancet window. A steep flèche marks the crossing of nave and transepts, rising above Welsh slate roofs. The vestry which abuts onto Newark Street seems to have been built by December 1892, despite its omission from early plans. Its plain stock-brick walls climb to high windows and a tiled hipped roof. The east and west elevations bear Gothic entrances, yet it is plausible that the discreet blocked doorway opposite the former vicarage served as the usual entrance.[^20]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/01/04/sol-whitechapel-101659.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>View of the nave from the former baptistery in December 2017. Photographed by Derek Kendall. </em></p>\n\n<p>The heavy blocky exterior of St Philip’s cloaks the grandeur and grace of the interior. Vatcher’s aspiration for the church to provide an ‘artistic resting-place’ for his parishioners is manifest in bold vistas generated by stately proportions and stock-brick vaulting dressed with Bath-stone ribs, reminiscent of the work of John Loughborough Pearson.[^21] The west end is occupied by a baptistery, where the font from the early church was installed, and a barrel-vaulted gallery. The narrow four-bay nave lies between double aisles and rises through a triforium and clerestory to an imposing height. The nave advances to the crossing of the north and south transepts, originally fitted with choir stalls, and culminates in a five-bay arcaded apsidal chancel encircled by a vaulted ambulatory. The chancel arcade affords fragmentary views of the intricate vaulting of the morning chapel, in plan a compact octagon similar to the Lady Chapel at Wells Cathedral. A ground plan of 1887 suggests that the east end was initially to be closer to that of St Luke’s in Bromley, with a long arcaded chancel terminating in a semicircular apse and a rectangular morning chapel adjoining the north transept.[^22]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/01/04/sol-whitechapel-101668.jpg\"><em>View of the stock-brick vaulting over the nave and the chancel. Photographed by Derek Kendall in 2017.</em></p>\n\n<p>The nave was furnished with free seats and contained a marble pulpit with three carved relief panels, including a bust of Dorcas thought to be a likeness of Marion Vatcher, the vicar’s wife. Accessed by an oak spiral staircase, the organ gallery over the north transept was fitted with an instrument built by the Ginns Brothers of Merton, restored by Noel Mander in 1961. In the interval between the completion of St Philip’s and its conversion into a medical library, its interior witnessed few alterations. Stephen Dykes Bower supervised works to the sanctuary in 1949, including repaving with Portland stone and Westmorland slate. This scheme was intended to commemorate the former vicars of St Augustine’s, which had been irreparably damaged by incendiary bombs. The reredos from St Augustine’s, designed by G. F. Bodley, was later transferred to the morning chapel.[^23]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/01/04/sol-whitechapel-101678.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>View from the west gallery, looking east towards the nave. Photographed by Derek Kendall in December 2017. </em></p>\n\n<h2><em>Conversion into a medical library</em></h2>\n\n<p>St Augustine with St Philip’s Church was converted into a library for the London Hospital Medical College in 1985–8 to plans by Fenner & Sibley. Following the assimilation of the college into Queen Mary University of London in 1995, the building continues in use as a medical and dental library.</p>\n\n<p>The formal redundancy of the church in 1979 coincided with concern that the library in the adjacent medical college was overcrowded and inadequate. The disused church fortuitously presented an extensive space at the heart of the London Hospital campus. A feasibility study and plans for its adaptation were prepared in 1982 by William Sibley of Fenner & Sibley, a practice formed by partners in the office of H. Reginald Ross after his retirement. The college’s fundraising appeal won support from a number of benefactors and received grants from the GLC Historic Buildings Division and English Heritage (from 1984) towards the restoration and repair of the church. After the redundancy scheme received official sanction in July 1985, the work was executed in two stages by the highly regarded local builders R. W. Bowman. The first phase covered the restoration of the exterior, including the removal of an extension to the north porch. The next stage of the works witnessed the repair of the interior and its conversion into a library. As a precaution against the weight of books, the ground floor was reinforced with brick piers and structural steel.[^24]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/01/04/sol-whitechapel-101672.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>View of the crossing of the nave and the transepts, looking south-east, showing the lift designed by Surface Architects. Photographed by Derek Kendall in December 2017. </em></p>\n\n<p>The library entrance was transferred to the south-west courtyard, bypassing the walled garden that had originally formed the public approach to the church from Newark Street. The south passage leads to a library issue desk installed in the former baptistery, adjacent to a computer room in the north porch. The west gallery is devoted to historical and rare books. The vestry was converted into staff offices by the insertion of a mezzanine level and light partitions. Early drawings suggest that it was intended from the outset to transform the nave, choir and sanctuary into a dignified reading space, bounded by book shelving in the aisles and the morning chapel. The crossing of the nave and transepts was initially furnished with reading desks, yet has acquired an unusual focal point with the installation of a lift designed by Surface Architects in 2003. The adaptation of the crypt occurred after the opening of the library in September 1988. Comprising only the eastern side of the church from the third bay of the nave, the well-lit crypt has been divided into storage, teaching and computer rooms for the library west, and the Royal London Hospital Museum east. The passageway to the museum, which encircles the former vestry, is lined with Portland stone plaques inherited from hospital wards. Its north side is bordered by a fragment of railings with castellated finials, which probably survive from the earlier church.[^25]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2017/12/01/railings-outside-museum_CRhxVgX.JPG\"></p>\n\n<p><em>Railings outside the Royal London Hospital Museum in the crypt of former St Philip's Church, which probably survive from the church of 1818–21.</em></p>\n\n<p>The fittings and furnishings of the church were removed after the approval of the redundancy scheme, with the exception of monuments. The north aisle contains a neoclassical marble tablet to Eva C. E. Luckes, matron of the London Hospital from 1880 to her death in 1919. Other monuments include a slate tablet commemorating the restoration of the sanctuary in 1949, and several memorial plaques. Two tablets in the south aisle commemorate windows installed at the earlier church in 1873.[^26]</p>\n\n<p>An important addition to the library is the distinctive stained glass installed in the north and south aisles in 1999–2002 to designs by the German artist Johannes Schreiter, whose aborted scheme for the Heiliggeistkirche in Heidelberg attracted the interest of stained-glass artist Caroline Swash in 1989. The idea to commission stained glass on medical and scientific themes for the library was derived from her husband Michael Swash, Professor of Neurology at the London Hospital Medical College. The collaboration which unfolded between Schreiter, Swash and medical minds at the Royal London Hospital and St Bartholomew’s resulted in eight stained-glass windows crafted at the studio of Wilhelm Derix in Taunusstein. As described fully in Caroline Swash’s book, <em>Medical Science and Stained Glass</em>, the themes of the north windows are <em>The London Hospital</em>, <em>Gastroenterology</em>, <em>AIDS/HIV</em>, and <em>Ethics</em>, while the south windows comprise <em>Medical Diagnosis</em>, <em>Influenza Pandemic</em>, <em>Molecular Biology</em>, and <em>The Elephant Man</em>.[^27]</p>\n\n<p><img alt=\"\" src=\"/media/uploads/2018/01/04/sol-whitechapel-101692.jpg\"></p>\n\n<p><em>The Molecular Biology Window in the south aisle. Photographed by Derek Kendall in December 2017.</em></p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), DL/A/C/02/095/087.</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: Church of England Record Centre (CERC), ECE/7/1/20850/1; LMA, DL/A/C/MS/19224/614; <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 14 June and 28 July 1817; LMA/4441/01/3143; VCH; ODNB; Pevsner, <em>The Buildings of England, London 5: East </em>(2005), p. 392.</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Soane Museum (SM), Correspondence 2, X.E.3., cited by Michael Port, ‘Francis Goodwin (1784–1835): An Architect of the 1820’s. A Study of His Relationship with the Church Building Commissioners and His Quarrel with C. A. Busby’, <em>Architectural History</em>, Vol. 1 (1958), pp. 61–72; Colvin; Royal London Hospital Archives (RLHA), RLHLH/A/5/14, p. 243; RLHLH/A/5/17, pp. 95–9.</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: CERC, ECE/7/1/20850/1.</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: CERC, BARNES 3/4/10, BARNES 3/2/3/14.</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: RLHA, RLHINV/883; Gordon Barnes, <em>Stepney Churches: An Historical Account</em> (London: The Faith Press for the Ecclesiological Society, 1967), pp. 70–4; LMA, DL/A/C/MS/19224/614; CERC, ECE/7/1/20850/1.</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: ‘Account of the New Chapel at Stepney’, <em>The Gentleman’s Magazine</em> (January 1823), pp. 4–7.</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: John Summerson, <em>Architecture in Britain 1530–1830 </em>(1993), p. 439; Colvin; Thomas H. Shepherd, <em>Metropolitan Improvements</em> (1827); <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 3 June 1820; RLHA, RLHLH/A/5/17, pp. 95–99; CERC, ECE/7/1/20850/1; LMA, DL/A/C/MS/19224/614; OS 1873; <em>The Gentleman’s Magazine</em>, Vol. 99, Part 2, Vol. 146 (1829), pp. 578–9; ‘Account of the New Chapel at Stepney, <em>The Gentleman’s Magazine</em> (January 1823), pp. 4–7.</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: CERC, CBC/7/1/5, p. 87; SM, Nos 5543, 6799; Thomas Allen, <em>Histories and Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southward and Parts Adjacent</em>, Vol. 5, Part 3 (1828), pp. 483–4.</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: Lambeth Palace Library (LPL), FP Blomfield 72/140.</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: LPL, TAIT 440/366.</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: <em>East London Observer</em>, 2 November 1861, 20 August 1862, 24 January 1863, 2 May 1863; 2 January 1864; <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 28 October 1865; LMA, DL/C/A/020/MS11725.</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: <em>Letters of John Richard Green</em>, edited by Leslie Stephen (London: Macmillan, 1901), pp. 159–60.</p>\n\n<p>[^14]: ODNB; <em>The Architect</em>, 23 December 1871; LMA, DL/A/K/09/10/458, Letter by A. J. Ross, 26 October 1876; LMA, DL/A/C/02/v17/014; <em>East London Observer</em>, 22 July 1871, 22 March 1873, 10 April 1875; LPL, No. 7419.</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: LMA, DL/A/K/09/10/458, Letter by A. J. Ross, 28 January 1875.</p>\n\n<p>[^16]: LPL, Jackson 50, f. 103; LMA, DL/A/C/MS/19224/614.</p>\n\n<p>[^17]: LMA, DL/A/C/02/034/026; LPL, FP Jackson 2/553.</p>\n\n<p>[^18]: LMA, DL/A/C/MS19224/614; LMA/4441/01/3143, DL/A/C/02/034/026; The Builder, 11 October 1890; 1861 Census; LPL, FP Jackson 2/553; <em>Building News</em>, 28 October 1892, 2 December 1892, 9 December 1892, 23 December 1892; CERC, ECE/7/1/20850/2.</p>\n\n<p>[^19]: <em>The Builder</em>, 17 January 1891, p. 50; 16 June 1894, 11 October 1890.</p>\n\n<p>[^20]: <em>The Builder</em>, 11 October 1890; RLHA, RLHINV/884; <em>Building News</em>, 2 December 1892, 9 December 1892; LMA, DL/A/C/02/045/029; OS 1916; RLHA, RLHINV/143.</p>\n\n<p>[^21]: <em>The Builder</em>, 7 March 1891, p. 193; Historic England Photographic Library, B940812–3, A910644–6, 64/5757–67; 66/3729–30.</p>\n\n<p>[^22]: <em>The Builder</em>, 11 October 1890, 7 March 1891; LMA, DL/A/C/02/039/017.</p>\n\n<p>[^23]: LMA, DL/A/C/02/095/087; Michael Hall, <em>George Frederick Bodley and the architecture of the later Gothic Revival in Britain and America </em>(New Haven and London, 2014), p. 450; Historic England Historians’ file TH40, PM 851, January 1979; Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, P09989, P09992–7, P09995, P10005–6, P10012–3.</p>\n\n<p>[^24]: RLHA, RLHLH/MC/X/38; RLHLH/MC/A/24/127; ‘Book Case’, <em>Building Design Supplement </em>(August 1989), p. 48.</p>\n\n<p>[^25]: RLHA, RLHLH/TH/A/13/8; RLHA, RLHLH/MC/S/4/12; RLHLH/TH/A/13/8; LMA, DL/A/C/MS/19224/614; Information from Richard Meunier, Archivist at the Royal London Hospital Archives & Museum; ‘Ambiguous Object’, PA/03/01267; ‘Surface feels uplifted’, <em>Building Design </em>(27 August 2004).</p>\n\n<p>[^26]: RHLA, RLHLH/MC/X/38; RLHLH/MC/A/24/127; LMA, DL/A/C/02/095/087; LMA, DL/A/C/02/056/027.</p>\n\n<p>[^27]: Caroline Swash, <em>Medical Science and Stained Glass: The Johannes Schreiter Windows at the Medical Library, the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel</em> (Malvern Arts Press, 2002); Caroline Swash, <em>The 100 Best Stained Glass Sites in London</em> (Malvern Arts Press, 2016).</p>\n",
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"id": 705,
"title": "Early history of the site of the former Passmore Edwards Library",
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"b_name": "Whitechapel Gallery, former Whitechapel Library",
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"body": "<p>Whitechapel Gallery has since 2009 consisted of two buildings – the <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/388/detail/\">original gallery</a>, opened in 1901 and to its east the former Passmore Edwards Library, built ten years earlier. The library, then known as the Free Library, opened in 1892, another initiative of Samuel Barnett, the vicar of St Jude's church and founder of Toynbee Hall, both in Commercial Street.</p>\n\n<p>The library building occupies the site of several buildings which by 1818 were in single ownership.[^1] These included the former 77 to 80 High Street, four small timber-framed houses (all refronted in brick by 1884), there by 1638 when Eleanor Ireland, widow of Westminster, took a lease of them from the Dean and Chapter of St Paul, which had held land in Stepney since the thirteenth century, much depleted by the sventeenth.[^2] The houses were described as with 12ft frontages and ‘little garden plots’, and were then in the occupations of a weaver, a translator (a cobbler), a collarmaker and a scrivener. Subsequent use was typical of the High Street. At 77 were a gingerbread maker (1841-2), and a ‘commercial coffee house’ from c. 1855 till it was demolished. No. 78, in 1825 when it was a gentleman’s outfitters, sported an ‘excellent bow-fronted shop’; later occupants included a haberdasher, who went bankrupt in 1841, followed by a staymaker and from around 1855 till it was demolished, Godwin Rattler Simpson, patent window-blind maker. No. 79 was a draper’s, latterly Robert Rycroft who moved to No 75 on the demolition of No 79 in 1890.[^3] No 80 was a jeweller’s, J. Horton & Son, Frederick Horton (d. 1877) in charge for the twenty years before its demolition.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The library site also included to the rear a substantial brick storehouse, part of the former Swan brewery, discussed in connection with 17 to 25 Osborn Street, and the west side of what had been an alley leading to the brewery. By the mid nineteenth century the alley had become <strong>Queen’s Place</strong>, which swiftly degenerated into a foul court. The entry to this, about 3ft wide, was through a timber-framed building (No. 81) formerly the Swan with Two Necks (later the White Swan), perhaps rebuilt by the brewer Richard Loton in the 1650s, and from which trade tokens marked with a swan and R.L. were issued in 1650.[^5] In 1860 Queen’s Place attracted the unfavourable attention of the Whitechapel Board of Works, and thence the Metropolitan Board of Works, for two recently erected three-storey tenements, each about 15ft by 20ft deep, lit only by a narrow gap between them and the infants school in Angel Alley, and the 6ft wide court itself. They were put up on the site of a warehouse on the court’s west side, as, according to the Whitechapel Board’s indefatigable medical officer, John Liddle, the recent slew of warehouses in the new Commercial Street on the site of poor housing had shifted the need from warehouses to housing in other parts of Whitechapel.[^6] By 1881 there were 48 people living in the four small houses.[^7]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>Morning Chronicle</em>, 20 May 1818, p. 4</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: 'Stepney: Manors and Estates', in A History of the County of Middlesex: Volume 11, Stepney, Bethnal Green, ed. T. F. T. Baker (London, 1998), pp. 19-52: London Metropolitan Archives, Survey of London notes on Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s records</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: Post Office Directories (POD): Census: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 11 Aug 1825, p. 4: <em>Morning Advertiser</em>, 14 Feb 1856, p. 8: <em>Journal of the Society of Arts</em>, 15 Jan 1858, p. 136</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: POD: <em>The Watchmaker, Jeweller and Silversmith’s Trade Journal</em>, 5 May 1877, p. 276</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: British Museum, T.3963</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Builder</em>, 28 Dec 1861, p. 892: Metropolitan Board of Works Minutes, 6 Jan 1860, p. 4; 10 Feb 1860, pp. 116-17</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Census</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2018-07-10",
"last_edited": "2020-10-05"
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{
"id": 706,
"title": "Former Whitechapel Free Library, later Passmore Edwards Library",
"author": {
"id": 2,
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"body": "<p>Between 1892 and 2005, what is now the eastern half of Whitechapel Gallery was the Whitechapel Library. The library originated, like the gallery, with Henrietta and Samuel Barnett and their colleagues at Toynbee Hall. The Barnetts had established a small lending library within the parish school at St Jude’s almost as soon as they arrived in Whitechapel in 1873. This expanded, becoming a lending library to the George Yard Mission, and to other educational establishments around London, and was eventually housed in Toynbee Hall, first in the dining room and from 1889 in a purpose-built addition. Barnett saw the need for a borough library but, despite the efforts of a committee on which he served, chaired by Whitechapel’s rector, J.F. Kitto, the first vote among the parishioners in 1878 rejected the idea of adopting the Public Libraries Act (which allowed local authorities to levy a rate to pay for free libraries). Reservations were expressed among those generally in support that the Act’s limit of 1d in the pound would not yield sufficient to pay for the library, despite offers in kind and cash of £1,000, and from those in opposition that ‘an already overtaxed community’ should not be called on ‘to fund a Public Library wherein idle people may enjoy themselves’ . [^1] </p>\n\n<p>Barnett expressed his regret on that occasion that so many ratepayers should ‘pit their stomachs against their brains’. [^2] By 1889 Barnett was able to harness the resources of Toynbee Hall, with 100 volunteers campaigning door to door in Whitechapel in support of adoption of the Act (‘the effects of systematic and vigorous canvass were never better illustrated in the entire history of the movement than in Whitechapel’), which was passed on a high turnout of ratepayers by a majority of four to one.[^3] Fundraising had yielded nearly £5,000 when Barnett had the perspicacity to show the Cornish philanthropist John Passmore Edwards around in 1891, a visit that secured from him a cheque for £6,454, the full cost of the building, the first of many public library buildings in London for which he was to pay.[^4]</p>\n\n<p>The newsrooms were openened to the public on 9 May 1892, with a formal opening of the building by Lord Rosebery, Chairman of the LCC and Foreign Secretary, on 25 October 1892. The builder was Walter Gladding of Baker’s Row, the architects Potts, Son, and Hennings (Edward Potts and William Edward Potts, father and son, of Oldham, and Arthur William Hennings, recently fledged pupil of Sir John Sulman), who had attracted the Commissioners’ attention, perhaps, with their design for Wimbledon Library. The style is similarly non-partisan, a salmagundi of Renaissance and Tudorbethan snippets, with asymmetrical shaped gables, an oriel window, moulded terracotta friezes, ‘gambolling cherubs’ by R. Caldwell Spruce of Burmantofts in the spandrels of the entrance, and a square central tourelle.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>The building occupied a relatively narrow site, only 48ft wide and 130ft deep. A central door led to a small lobby leading to a passage flanked to the left by the closed-access lending library, with narrow borrowers’ area by the door, and to the right small separate boys’ and girls’ reading rooms. Beyond the children’s rooms the passage opened out into a staircase hall. The full width of the ground floor beyond was taken up with the main newsroom and reading room, top lit, though only partially, as on the first floor above, with arch-braced queen-post roof, was a room devoted to the natural history collections of the Rev. Dan Greatorex, vicar of <a href=\"https://surveyoflondon.org/map/feature/1371/detail/\">St Paul, Dock Street</a>. [^6] Across the front of the first floor was the reference library, and above it librarian’s offices and a caretaker’s flat. To counteract the dimness of the reading room, electric lights were installed, unusually early and before the board had built its generating plant in Osborn Street, which meant the library had its own generator.</p>\n\n<p>Passmore Edwards’ vanity was almost equal to his generosity, and Barnett arranged for the library to be renamed the Passmore Edwards Library in 1897, to forestall Edwards’ wish to have the Whitechapel Gallery, for whose building he also paid, being named after him.</p>\n\n<p>With its association with Toynbee Hall, the library established its outreach mission from the start, the library and museum open seven days a week till 10pm, with monthly lectures, and loans available to schools from the museum collection. By the end of 1903 the museum, its collection augmented by ‘Egyptian antiquities, of dried plants and of fossils (from the Geologists’ Association in 1896), and many native weapons from the Fiji Islands and elsewhere’, was attracting 70,000 visitors a year. [^7] Since 1895 its curator had been Kate Marion Hall (1861-1919), a protégée of Henrietta Barnett at Toynbee Hall where she had been teaching nature studies since 1891. Her appointment made her the first professional woman curator in the country.[^8]</p>\n\n<p>After 1900, and absorption of Whitechapel into the new London Borough of Stepney, the policy of Stepney was to centralise the reference work by concentrating the more important and costly books at the Borough Reference Library in Bancroft Road. But Whitechapel Library retained an unrivalled reference collection, strong in Judaica, and its first-floor reference library established a role as the ‘university of the ghetto’. [<em>^9</em>] In 1905 the district Librarian, William Weare, in response to a patronising reference to East End libraries, could claim that the library had ‘helped many private students to obtain University, Commercial and other scholarship, and the Japanese Minister of Education, German, American and other Foreign Professors have expressed their surprise and pleasure when, on visiting the library, they have seen the Reference Library full of earnest students’. [^10]</p>\n\n<p>In 1922 minor alterations were made when the library converted to open-access. [^11] In 1930 a children’s library was established in the basement, and alterations were made to the reference and lending rooms by Stepney Borough Council’s works department. [^12] More substantial was the insertion in 1938 of a new entrance at the east end of Aldgate East underground, replacing the lefthand window in the frontage with a curved perron stair clad in cream tiles, typical of the New Works Programme of the newly established London Transport. [^13]</p>\n\n<p>Bombing in 1940 damaged the roof, and repairs truncated the righthand gable. By 1948, though the late-night opening had ceased, the Greatorex collection still formed the nucleus of the museum, augmented by local antiquities, ‘miscellaneous objects’ and ‘a permanent exhibition of live tropical fish’ [^14]</p>\n\n<p>In 1963 the lobby was enriched by the addition of a fanciful painted tile panel of ‘Whitechapel Hay Market, 1788’, by Charles Evans & Co., west London art-tile and glass makers, made in 1889 for the Horns public house, at 16 Whitechapel High Street, demolished c. 1961. [^15]</p>\n\n<p>In 1987 an English Heritage Blue Plaque to the poet Isaac Rosenberg, one of the many ‘Whitechapel Boys’, painters and poets who included Mark Gertler, David Bomberg and the sculptor Osip Zadkine, and often met in the library, was added to the frontage.[^16] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: <em>East London Observer (ELO)</em>, 11 May 1878, p. 6; 25 May 1878, p. 6; 7 Dec 1878, p. 7: <em>Pall Mall Gazette</em>, 11 Dec 1878, p. 6</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>ELO</em>, 14 Dec 1878, p. 6</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>Globe</em>, 28 July 1891, p. 6: Thomas Greenwood, <em>Public Libraries : A History of the Movement and a Manual for the Organization and Management of Rate-supported Libraries</em>, London 1891, pp. 338-9</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>London Evening Standard</em>, 5 Dec 1889, p. 3: Henrietta Barnett, <em>Canon Barnett: His Life, Work and Friends</em>, 2 vols London 1918, vol. 2, pp. 4-8: E. Harcourt Burrage, <em>John Passmore Edwards, Philanthropist</em>, London 1902, pp. 51-3: <em>St James’s Gazette</em>, 27 Feb 1892, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Nikolaus Pevsner, Bridget Cherry and Charles O'Brien, <em>Pevsner Architecural Guides, London 5: East</em>, London 2005, pp. 72, 78, 399-400</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>London Daily News</em>, 26 Oct 1892, p. 3: <em>ELO</em>, 29 Oct 1892, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: <em>A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to London</em>, London 1901, p. 310: <em>The Museums Directory</em>, London 1904, p. 142: <em>Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association</em>, xv, London, 1899, p. 58</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: Leanne Newman, 'Kate Hall \"A Fellow of the Linnean Society and creator of a beautiful and famous municipal garden\"', <em>The London Gardener</em>, 21, 2017, pp.11-25</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Reginald Arthur Rye, <em>The Libraries of London: A Guide for Students</em>, London 1908, p. 22: Elaine R. Smith, 'Class, ethnicity and politics in the Jewish East End, 1918-1939, <em>Jewish Historical Studies</em>, 32 (1990-1992), pp. 355-369: Sarah MacDougal, '\"Something is happening there\": early British modernism, the Great War and the Whitechapel Boys', in <em>London, Modernism and 1914</em>, ed. Michael J.K. Walsh, Cambridge 2010, pp. 122-47</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: <em>The Library World</em>, vii/83 May 1905, p. 312: <em>B’nai B’rith News</em>, ix/8, April 1917, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/SMB/E/1/15: LMA, District Surveyor's Returns (DSR)</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: THLHLA, L/SMB/E/1/17: DSR</p>\n\n<p>[^13]: THLHLA, L/SMB/G/1/38/1 and 2: John P. McCrickard, ‘LPTB New Works Programme 80th Anniversary: A Tribute to a Major Expansion of the Underground Network', accessed at <a href=\"http://www.lurs.org.uk/\">lurs.org.uk</a></p>\n\n<p>[^14]: S.F. Markham, <em>Directory of Museums and Art Galleries in the British Isles</em>, London, 1948, p. 232</p>\n\n<p>[^15]: <a href=\"http://www.tilesoc.org.uk/tile-gazetteer/tower-hamlets.html\">http://www.tilesoc.org.uk/tile-gazetteer/tower-hamlets.html</a></p>\n\n<p>[^16]: THLHLA, L/THL/H/1/4/15: English Heritage Blue Plaques file notes, courtesy of Howard Spencer: MacDougall, op. cit.: information on Zadkine's presence in Whitechapel kindly supplied by Cathy Corbett</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Holloway Street became a westwards extension of Coke Street in the 1960s, its margins largely empty. By the 1990s land here was wholly clear and used for car parking. In 2000 Ballymore Properties developed sites north and south as Aldgate Triangle, initially two large residential blocks incorporating shops, offices, car parking and a gymnasium. The Dryden Building (south) and Cornell Building (north) were designed by CZWG Architects, with Rex Wilkinson as designer and Sanjiv M. Gohil as job architect. Housing 233 flats they have plain monolithic elevations of yellow brick above rusticated ground floors of polished concrete blockwork punctuated with pyramidal precast concrete studs. The Dryden Building has a similarly treated Postmodern frieze around its upper (ninth) storey, and a central seven-storey recess topped by a precast arch breaks up its Commercial Road façade. The decorative frieze now seen only on the ninth storey originally also spanned around the building on the ground floor. The details were however removed after completion to appease tenants of the retail units. Drawing on motifs from Louis Sullivan's North American warehouses, the architect planned an accentuated cornice to top the Dryden Building but this was scaled back during the design process. A circus reminiscent of the same firm’s more spectacular Circle on Shad Thames of ten years earlier was formed across the west end of Coke Street. Beyond there is a small raised garden between the blocks of the Cornell Building. Across Plumbers Row, Ballymore completed the project in association with the Spitalfields Housing Association with the Colefax Building in 2001–2, containing fifty-five more flats. This block, architecturally similar if more subdued, was designed by Llewelyn-Davies.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Historic England Archives, aerial photographs: Tower Hamlets planning applications: <em>The Independent</em>, 14 Jan 2000: Sanjiv Gohil and Rex Wilkinson (CZWG Architects) in private conversation with Sarah Milne, 1 Nov 2016.</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Until 1912 Gunthorpe Street was known as George Yard, named after the George public house, which appears to have stood on the route’s west side, towards the north or Wentworth Street end, on part of the site now occupied by Broadway House. The George was present before 1560, having been leased by John Feellde (Field) to John Biges. It survived as a pub until 1823.[^1]</p>\n\n<p>In 1580 John Brayne, a former Bucklersbury grocer who had financed the Red Lion playhouse at Whitechapel’s eastern margin in 1567, and who owned a stake in James Burbage’s The Theatre in Shoreditch, took a twenty-four-year lease of the George. He intended to establish a theatre in its yard, but failed to see the plan through and was deep in debt at the time of his death in 1586. Litigation between Brayne’s widow, Margaret, and his business partner, Robert Miles, a goldsmith she accused of murdering her husband, reveals something of the use of buildings surrounding the George, and that the lease passed to Miles.John Hibbeyhad a cooperage in the stable yard, and a mill was used for soap-making, by James Norman in the 1580s, and Miles’s son Raphe in the 1590s. Christopher Ocland, writer of historical verse, lodged at the George in 1589.[^2] </p>\n\n<p>The Black Horse was a long-lived presence further south on the west side of George Yard, a disreputable inn with a large stable yard, about 60ft deep and 45ft wide. Adjoining to the south was a narrower stable yard, evident by the 1670s and labelled Black Horse Yard on Rocque’s map of 1746, a mistake perhaps occasioned by the fact that the inn separated the two yards. The first clear mention of the Black Horse inn comes from 1732 when Jonathan Ellwood was running it as an unlicensed ale-house. By 1736 he had died, holding a lease of the inn and stable-yard from Joseph Tantum, a Quaker joiner and cabinet-maker once of Houndsditch, then of Stratford.[^3] That year a George Yard coachman was apprehended for carrying smuggled tea, and in 1750 a highwayman was apprehended in Black Horse Yard, ‘well mounted … a bold and daring fellow … pitted with the Small-Pox’.[^4] In 1786 the landlady Elizabeth Jones and her brother-in-law, James Jones, a coachman who kept his coach in the inn’s yard, were committed for perjury having given false alibis in a capital trial for burglary. The Black Horse, ‘the cadger’s hotel’, had a transformative afterlife from 1875, when it reopened as a ‘home for houseless girls’ with an evening Sunday School, part of the George Yard Mission and Ragged School. The narrow and lesser stable yard to the south was known as Batt’s Yard in the 1840s and ’50s, after Philemon Batt, a farrier, Jacob’s Yard in the 1870s, and Hall’s Yard from the 1890s.[^5]</p>\n\n<p>George Yard, generally inhabited by poor labourers, continued to feature in lurid descriptions of crime and poverty; it was ‘a place of dangerous appearance’.[^6] The House of Commons Committee on Mendicity and Vagrancy in 1815–16 singled out George Yard as ‘forty houses, in which lived two thousand persons in a … state of wretchedness’.[^7] It was described in 1822, in an account of a theft committed by two residents of a brothel there, as ‘that receptacle of all that is vile – George Yard’.[^8] Henry Mayhew presented a more nuanced picture in 1861. He found George Yard a ‘narrow, dirty and overcrowded street’ and described lodging houses, typically charging 3d. a night, one having a large kitchen 35ft long with a framed over-mantel picture of the 'Great Eastern' steamship, tables and benches around the walls for the residents – beggars and dock labourers, bonepickers, crossing sweepers, and shoeblacks. In some lodging houses he saw ‘a large number of low thieves’, in others ‘plainly but decently dressed’ women, and a ‘respectable mechanic out of work’.[^9] John Hollingshead, visiting around the same time, noted George Yard as an ‘English Colony’, in contrast to the Jews who predominated in Tewkesbury Buildings and the Irish in Inkhorn Court and elsewhere.[^10]</p>\n\n<p>George Yard survived the road widenings of the 1880s, but slum clearance saw most of its buildings replaced between the 1870s and the 1900s. The north-west side was replaced first, with George Yard Buildings in 1875 and St George’s House in 1883. The east side had several squalid lodging houses, including one run by George Wildermuth at Nos 31–34, near the north end, which shortly before demolition in 1891 housed sixty-four single men, mostly labourers and porters, nearly half of whom were unemployed. The most notorious premises were misleadingly named Garden Court, which survived until 1899. Charles Booth’s researcher George Duckworth was blunt, classing its residents as ‘vicious, semi-criminal’, his police guide saying it ‘“doubles” as a brothel’.[^11] Old houses south of Hall’s Yard were demolished in the 1880s for Sir George’s Residences (No. 4), the Whitechapel District Board of Works took over the north-east side of George Yard in the 1890s, and Black Horse Yard was eradicated by the building of Commercial Street (Canon Barnett) School in 1900–1. The renaming of the street in 1912 commemorates John Gunthorpe (d. 1498), a priest, courtier and diplomat who was Whitechapel’s rector in 1471–2. Hall’s Yard persisted, consisting of stables with lofts, a two-room house and a smithy that became a cart shed, its south side including the former smithy in use as garaging until around 1975.[^12] Residential and commercial gentrification has crept into Gunthorpe Street since 2000, but the Dellow Centre, Providence Row’s homeless shelter, on a site at the north end of the east side that had been a council works depot, might be thought to be sustaining the spirit of George Yard’s most famous historic presence, the Mission and Ragged School founded by George Holland.</p>\n\n<p>[^1]: London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) London wills (via Ancestry); Land Tax returns (LT); MR/LV/05/026]</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: David Mateer, ‘New Light on the Early History of the Theatre in Shoreditch’<em>, English Literary Renaissance</em>, vol.36/3, Autumn 2006, pp.335–75: Herbert Berry, ‘Shylock, Robert Miles, and Events at The Theatre’, <em>Shakespeare Quarterly</em>, vol.44/2, Summer 1993, pp.188,192–5,198–201: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub </em>Brayne and Ocland</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: LMA, MR/LV/05/026: The National Archives (TNA), PROB11/679/372: Ancestry: LT</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>Derby Mercury</em>, 10 Feb 1736, p.3: <em>Penny London Post</em>, 27–30 July 1750</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: Old Bailey Online, t17860426-12: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 6 Aug 1827, p.1: Census: LMA, LT; MBW/1838/5: <em>Illustrated London News</em>, 17 July 1875, p.11: <em>East London Observer</em>, 20 April 1878, p.6</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>Evening Mail</em>, 15 Sept 1802, p.1</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: Charles Creighton, <em>A History of Epidemics in Britain, II: From the Extinction of Plague to the Present Time</em>, 1894, p.170</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>Public Ledger and Daily Advertiser</em>, 9 Jan 1822, p.3</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: Henry Mayhew, <em>London Labour and the London Poor IV; Those That Will Not Work</em>, 1861, pp.311–16</p>\n\n<p>[^10]: John Hollingshead, <em>Ragged London in 1861</em>, 1861, p.45</p>\n\n<p>[^11]: British Library of Political and Economic Science, BOOTH/B/351, p.131</p>\n\n<p>[^12]: TNA, IR58/83795/2015; IR58/84815/3211: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, WG/2/59/2: <em>Oxford Dictionary of National Biography sub </em>Gunthorpe</p>\n",
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"body": "<p>Between 1871 and 1876, a pair of houses on the site cleared in the 1880s for Wentworth Dwellings, was briefly used as the Jewish Workhouse, an attempt to provide welfare to Jews unable to work, who were denied the opportunity for religious observance in Christian workhouses. Its founder and first President was Solomon Abraham ‘Sholey’ Green (1830-99), a fishmonger and sometime landlord of the Freemasons’ Arms on Goulston Street, from an extensive family much involved from the 1820s in Jewish relief work in Whitechapel and its surroundings, including his uncle Levi Ephraim Green (1784-1858) and his father Abraham (1793-1852).[^1] Donations enabled Green and his supporters to take over the lease of a pair of unpretending houses, one door away from the west corner of Old Castle Street, and the workhouse opened on 4 April 1871 with fourteen inmates. It was established in the face of opposition from both the Whitechapel Union and Jewish establishments. A whiff of anti-Semitism is evident in suggestions from the former about it attracting ‘foreigners’ to come to enjoy an easy life in England – though usually it was couched more pragmatically by representatives of the Poor Law Board, in terms of the cost of maintaining paupers from ‘elsewhere’, or by the Jewish Board of Guardians about it impeding efforts to get mainstream workhouses to accommodate Jewish dietary and other requirements – and from both about the class of people involved in its running: most donations in its founding year were under £1, many collected by Green himself, soliciting coppers from traders in Petticoat Lane.[^2]</p>\n\n<p>The name workhouse was misleading (‘no stones to break, no sickening concoction of oatmeal to gulp down’), as it aimed only to provide succour to the aged and infirm, whom Green brought from workhouses in London and beyond.[^3] One of Green’s more excitable critics referred to ‘certain loud-mouthed, impulsive orators’, and the workhouse as ‘a five-roomed house with a large “kennel” in the back yard for the inmates to sleep in… of which house the President of the workhouse was landlord… (I understand the… “kennel” has …. [just been] done away with).’[^4] The improvements referred to were the demolition of the party wall between the two houses to make a single large dwelling to accommodate more than twenty inmates, and the creation of a garden from the back yards. A glowing account in the <em>Jewish World</em>, quoted in the <em>East London Observer</em> (and perhaps partial, as Green’s cousin was on the staff of the <em>Jewish World</em>), described it as a ‘specimen of cleanliness, order and even salubrity’, among the ‘filthy dwellings, squalor… and misery’ of Wentworth Street.[^5] The street door opened in to ‘a spacious hall, well sanded, containing two very long tables covered with snow-white cloths… Round the fire were seated a few of the inmates, male and female, talking and chattering as if they knew no worldly care’. On the first floor was a room fitted up as a synagogue, the Ark containing two scrolls ‘covered with pretty damask mantles’.[^6] Daily morning services were conducted free of charge, as was the medical superintendence, by Albert Kisch (1845-1929).[^7]</p>\n\n<p>Green and the Board of Guardians settled their differences in 1875 and the Workhouse was renamed the Jewish Home, with the experienced organiser and philanthropist Frederick David Mocatta (1828-1905) as its new President. It moved to more commodious premises at 37-39 Stepney Green in 1876.[^8] Following merger with two other small institutions founded in the 1840s by Green’s father and uncle (the Hand-in-Hand Asylum for Decayed Tradesmen and the Widows’ Home, both in what became Ensign Street) it became part of the new Home for Aged Jews in 1894; this survives following numerous moves and amalgamations as the Nightingale in Wandsworth.[^9] </p>\n\n<p>[^1]: Alex Jacob, ‘No ordinary tradesmen: The Green family in 19th-century Whitechapel’, <em>Jewish Historical Studies</em>, 33 (1992-4), pp. 163-73</p>\n\n<p>[^2]: <em>Jewish Chronicle</em> (<em>JC</em>), 24 Feb 1871, p. 10; 5 May 1871, p. 9; 15 Sept 1871, p. 11; 1 Dec 1871, pp. 7-9; 15 March 1872, p. 7; 22 March 1872, pp. 4-5</p>\n\n<p>[^3]: <em>East London Observer</em> (<em>ELO</em>), 4 Oct 1873, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^4]: <em>JC</em>, 6 Sept 1872, p. 311</p>\n\n<p>[^5]: <em>JC</em>, 6 Dec 1872, p. 496: <em>ELO</em>, 4 Oct 1873, p. 7: Jacob, op. cit., p. 165</p>\n\n<p>[^6]: <em>ELO</em>, 4 Oct 1873, p. 7</p>\n\n<p>[^7]: ibid: <em>JC</em>, 19 Dec 1873, p. 644</p>\n\n<p>[^8]: <em>JC</em>, 16 June 1876, p. 166: C. Adler and I. Singer, eds, <em>The Jewish Encyclopedia</em>, vol. 8 New York and London, 1894, p. 637</p>\n\n<p>[^9]: London Metropolitan Archives, LMA/4456</p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n\n<p> </p>\n",
"created": "2019-05-28",
"last_edited": "2021-05-04"
}
]
}