1-7 Prescot Street

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CWS Coffee Roasters & Cocoa Works and London Bacon Stoves, 116-118 Leman Street (demolished)
Contributed by Rebecca Preston on March 29, 2019

Early in 1886, following a fire at the end of 1885, the Co-operative Wholesale Society's Tea Department was moved into a former sugar refinery at 116 Leman Street, diagonally opposite the London Branch headquarters. Prior to its use by the English &Scottish CWS, the building was occupied in 1875 by confectioner, Henry Overall, and in 1880 by Augustus William Gadesden, a sugar refiner.¹ A seven-year lease was negotiated and approved by the tea committee in August 1886.² This appears to have been arranged by John Charles Hudson, of Wigg, Oliver & Hudson, architects and surveyors of 80 Leman Street, who also acted for other landowners locally, including Henry Friedlander who owned adjoining property on Chamber Street and in Prescot Street. This was intended to be a temporary arrangement, and in 1887 the tea business returned to the rebuilt warehouses in Rupert Street. However, in August 1886 the committee announced that it proposed shortly to commence manufacturing cocoa, chocolates and essence of coffee at 116 Leman Street and in the next month to spend £2,000 on machinery.³ Strong objections were made to these proposals by some members, including Edward Owen Greening, who had been helping to promote a separate society for the manufacture of cocoa.⁴ The committee’s proposal was however carried and Mr Cheverall’s tender for the erection of a new chimney was accepted in June 1887 and the following month the committee resolved to buy the remainder of the 99-year lease from an unidentified party.⁵ By the end of 1887, the Tea, Coffee and Cocoa Department had supplied £312 worth of cocoa (compared with £398,275 worth of tea and £41,143 of coffee in the same year).⁶ The building had eight storeys and was six bays wide and, together with No. 118, which the CWS would shortly acquire for its bacon stoves, formed a substantial block that incorporated 93 and 94 Chamber Street, where it also had a substantial frontage. As co-operator George Holyoake observed of the Co-operative Wholesale Society’s ‘colossal premises’ in London and Manchester in 1891, at Leman Street was ‘a notable pile of buildings with a considerable cocoa manufactory on the opposite side of the street’.⁷

The lease of the ‘large warehouse or manufacturing premises’ at 118 Leman Street was advertised in the summer of 1884, when it appears to have been already associated with the neighbouring premises at 93 Chamber Street;⁸ during the late 1880s and early 1890s the building was occupied by E. H. Hill & Co., wholesale and export confectioners.⁹ It was converted for bacon stoves by the CWS in c.1896, by which time the two properties were shown as one on the Ordnance Survey.¹⁰ In about 1910 both 116 and 118 Leman Street, and 93–94 Chamber Street, were owned by the Duke of Marlborough, from whose agent the property was held by the CWS on 99-year leases from 1885.¹¹ With the exception of a small garage on Chamber Street, this appears to have been the only site within the growing CWS and E&SCWS stronghold locally where the CWS departed from its usual practice of acquiring the freehold.

Following the expansion into 116 Leman Street, the CWS began to look for freeholds to buy on the west side of Leman Street and in December 1886 sought possession of No. 92 for a tailoring workshop and advertised for a competent man as a cutter.¹² This house was purchased as part of the block which also included its neighbour, 94 Leman Street, from which the CWS was threatening to evict the tenants in February 1887.¹³ Although such purchases were intended for immediate or longer-term expansion into purpose-built warehouses and showrooms, a series of successful claims against the CWS for compensation for loss of light and air were costing time and money and the acquisition of property adjacent to the Society’s taller buildings may also have been intended to reduce this burden.¹⁴ Some of the purchases, for example from Mrs Cohen of 98 Leman Street, were made on the understanding that previous compensation settlements were to be refunded.¹⁵ The houses were then let to tenants until the site was needed for expansion. Thus 94 Leman Street was let to Mr Bannerman for a tailor’s shop in 1888.¹⁶ Alternatively, as at 88 and 90 Leman Street, the CWS took leases on strategically placed buildings with the right of ultimate purchase if a property came on the market.[17]

Early in 1886 members of the E&SCWS Tea Committee visited some of the largest chocolate factories in Paris, including that of Percheron & Co., to investigate the equipment required for a cocoa works. During the year, 116 Leman Street was fitted with ‘the most approved machinery’ for the purpose, necessitating ‘extensive alterations’ to the building, which opened for business in 1887;¹⁸ the top room was converted for coffee roasting and grinding.¹⁹ The cocoa processing machinery was supplied by Percheron (which had premises near City Road, Clerkenwell, as well as in Paris)²⁰ at a cost of more than £900 with a further £549 for installation.²¹ Unlike coffee roasting, which had previously taken place in the tea department on Rupert Street, cocoa processing was a new departure for the E&SCWS and CWS. As noted above, it proved controversial with some CWS members and, in addition, the story of the cocoa business in Leman Street was ‘mainly one of an uphill fight against the combined advertising and competitive powers of the English and Continental cocoa makers’.²² As a report of a Booth interview with the CWS chocolate department noted in 1895, English chocolate had a tendency to be gritty: ‘There can be little doubt that the foremost French chocolate–cocoa makers are far ahead of us in this branch of confectionery’.²³ Discussions about moving the chocolate works out of central London began in 1898 and, after considering several options nationally including Silvertown, new Cocoa Works were finally opened on the edge of Luton in 1902.²⁴ Coffee grinding and roasting continued on site at 116 Leman Street, but these operations appear to have shifted to an extension at the back. In June 1898, ‘our architect, Mr Harris’, presumably F. E. L Harris, was consulted on the rebuilding of 93 Chamber Street, which formed the rear part of the premises recently converted for bacon stoves at 118 Leman Street.²⁵ Shortly afterwards he was asked to draw up plans for extensions to the cocoa works at No. 116.²⁶ By 1910, the latter was an ‘old brick built warehouse in fair repair’, the rear portion rebuilt with a skylight over, and the whole used for furnishing and leather upholstering.²⁷ Plans for 92–93 (and 94) Chamber Street were certified in 1916, which may represent further adaptations.²⁸

Meanwhile the new CWS bacon stoves were opened at the rebuilt 118 Leman Street in 1895–6, on the corner of Chamber Street.[29]Bacon curing had previously been undertaken on a smaller scale within the 1887 branch headquarters building at 99 Leman Street. By 1900, some 2,000 sides of bacon and hams were smoked each week in the new premises.³⁰ In 1912, when the smoking process for each batch took three days, there was capacity for 4,000 sides per week. Green bacon was imported to Leman Street from CWS suppliers in England, Ireland, Denmark and Canada and the CWS factory in Tralee.³¹ The basement, ground and first two storeys contained the stoves and stores while furnishing and bedding workshops occupied the upper floors.³² At some point in the early 1900s the manufacture of brushes, begun in the early 1890s at the headquarters branch, was moved to 118 Leman Street before the removal of all brushmaking to Leeds in 1904.³³ The CWS was particularly proud of its brushmaking enterprise, since it demonstrated that this industry, notoriously associated with sweating in the East End and elsewhere, could be carried on ‘with a profit under fair conditions’.³⁴ By 1912 CWS brushes from the Leeds factory were stored in the London Bacon Stoves building and there were workshops for French polishing in addition to those for upholstery and bedding manufacture.³⁵ Like its neighbour, this too was described in 1910 as an ‘old brick warehouse in fair repair’ but, unlike 116 Leman Street, the central bay in the Leman Street elevation appears to have been adapted with seven loading bays prior to opening. This work is most probably the seven-storey ‘addition to the Co-operative Stores’ by builder, Charles Blake, which was approved in 1890.³⁶ Blake also applied on behalf of the CWS to build a warehouse in Chamber Street in 1893, presumably at the rear.³⁷ ‘Modern premises built fifteen years ago for coffee grinding &c’ were mentioned in the 1910 assessment for 116 and 118 Leman Street and these appear to have been placed across the backs of both premises, with additional access from Chamber Street.³⁸ No. 118 was ‘partially rebuilt’ in 1924.³⁹

Drainage plans indicate 116–118 to be CWS property by 1923, though perhaps still held on a long lease.⁴⁰ The owner of these two buildings, and their neighbours at Nos 108–14 in the same block between Prescot Street and Chamber Street, was unnamed in the Borough of Stepney Valuation List of 1935, perhaps indicating that the CWS had acquired the freehold as well as being the occupier.⁴¹ Ultimately the whole site would be built over, in two stages in 1933 and 1958, by the new CWS Administrative Offices and Bank designed by L. G. Ekins, which is described below. But for the meantime the bacon stoves and coffee works continued in use until at least 1930.⁴² New CWS bacon stoves were in operation on the east side of Goodman Street by September 1933, suggesting that the old stoves had been abandoned, and perhaps demolished, and the operations transferred prior to the opening of the first phase of the new administrative block, just to their north, in April 1933.⁴³ The old buildings appear to be standing in a CWS illustration recording the adjoining new administrative block at this time but, as noted, these illustrations are not always reliable.⁴⁴ Nos 116 and 118 had certainly gone by 1945 and the site was temporarily walled in during 1953.⁴⁵

Co-operative Wholesale Society Administrative Offices and Bank, 1 Prescot Street
Contributed by Rebecca Preston on March 29, 2019

Leonard Gray Ekins, FRIBA (1877–1948) worked all his adult life for the Co- operative Wholesale Society and served as London Branch Chief Architect from 1916 to 1942.¹ In 1898–1903 he was assistant architect under F. E. L. Harris at Manchester and confirmed as Newcastle’s Branch Architect in 1905.² Like Harris, Ekins employed the Hennebique system of reinforced concrete in his larger projects, including the Dunston-on-Tyne soap works (1907–9, extended 1911–14).³ He was placed in charge of the new branch Architects’ Department, which covered London, the South of England and South Wales, in 1916, and appears to have been based initially at 99 Leman Street.⁴ In his early years in Whitechapel Ekins seems principally to have been involved with planning alterations to the block on the west side of Leman Street (Nos 108–118), which housed the coffee works and bacon stoves, but was doubtless also at work on more ambitious projects. Demolitions had already begun on the north side of this block, in 1912 if not before, with a former restaurant at the corner with Prescot Street. By January 1913 the CWS had erected a temporary single-storey iron building for use as offices in its place and renumbered the plot 1 Prescot Street, presumably with a more impressive building in mind for the future.⁵ The demolition of the neighbouring houses at the corner of Prescot Street took place at around the same time. Ekins made plans in 1923 for a series of temporary covered workshops and garages, which extended south behind the bacon stoves and coffee works at 116–118 Leman Street, with an entry created by the demolition of the house at 90 Chamber Street. But this work seems not to have been executed and no further building appears to have taken place on this site until preparations for the new Administrative Offices and Bank in about 1930.⁶

The impressive building now known as 1 Prescot Street is probably L. G. Ekins’s best-known London work. This steel-framed office block, with dramatic, cliff-like elevations above its artificial granite base, looms over Leman Street and Prescot Street, where it occupies a prime position on the south- west side of the crossroads, nearly opposite the site where the London Branch had begun in 1881. At the opening of the first section of the Administrative Offices in 1933, CWS publicity explained how, on the east side of Leman Street, No. 99 was in a line of buildings that continued for 514 feet, while on the other side the headquarters of the E&SCWS extended for 331 feet. Street directories capture the spread of the two societies along Leman Street – the CWS at 53 & 55 and 99 on the east side and 82, 116, 118 and 130, and the E&SCWS at 100 Leman Street on the west.⁷ To the CWS at least, this provided further evidence of the almost seamless ‘Co-operative Advance along Leman Street’.⁸ But to some, the range of architectural styles was now bewildering. An article in Building by architect Frederic Towndrow described the impact made by Ekins’s new Administrative Offices in comparison with its older CWS neighbours:

'After wandering through this unpleasant part of London, one comes upon it with a shock of pleasant surprise. Its adjacent buildings, also belonging to the Co-operative Society and designed several years ago, are frankly awful. Here in such low company is one of the most interesting and beautiful buildings erected in England in recent years. In contrast with work of a similar kind, which was being done a few years ago, here is food for optimism and faith in the human race. The building has spirit, it has urge, and a sense of grand advancement.'⁹

In 1930 Ekins had travelled to Germany and Holland with CWS Architects W. A. Johnson, FRIBA (from Manchester) and W. G. T. Gray (Newcastle-upon-Tyne) to study ‘modern architecture’, which CWS historian Percy Redfern took as a sign of how the CWS kept pace with ‘the revolutionary change since the war in the outlook of the [architectural] profession’.¹⁰ Towndrow was unconcerned as to whether the new administrative block was ‘modern, or functionalist, or English, or Dutch or merely original’ but thought it had ‘some life and power in it’.¹¹ It has been heralded since as ‘a riot of German Expressionist and Wrightian motifs’, with ‘rugged Amsterdam-School style Expressionist brickwork’.¹² As Teresa Pinto points out, in openly embracing this new style from the Continent, the CWS was doing more than just following fashion: ‘it was also celebrating its role within the international co-operative movement, in which it conceptualised itself as the leading player’.¹³ Ekins’s undated elevation drawings for the new block were received by the LCC in July 1929 and show the design as executed, with contrasting textured spandrel panels, spiny antefixae and other detailing, which indicate that, even before his tour of Europe in 1930, he already had such a building in mind.¹⁴

The approved drawings covered the complete development of the six-storey Administrative Offices on the Prescot Street, Leman Street and Chamber Street sites but it was executed in two planned stages; like the tea warehouse, which opened in 1897 and subsequent E&SCWS and CWS buildings, the building was executed in-house by the CWS Building and Engineers’ Departments. The first portion, on the north side of the block between Prescot Street and Chamber Street, was opened formally in April 1933 and contained the CWS Bank on the ground floor. Although Ekins’ drawings of around 1929 indicate that he proposed to add the double-height mansard at a later date, and CWS board minutes of February 1930 discuss the cost of planning for two extra floors, photographs of May 1933 appear to show the first phase of the building, fronting Prescot Street and the corner of Leman Street, completed to full height.¹⁵ Unless it was retrospective, it is therefore not clear what was meant by the ‘addition of fifth and sixth floors with alterations’ itemised in district surveyors’ returns of 1936.¹⁶

When both phases were complete, the building was designed to hold 500 people and it was proposed that the Architects’ Department, and the Engineers’ and Building Departments, would be housed in ‘happy unity’ on the two upper floors.¹⁷ The Architects’ Department designed the retail stores as well as the Wholesales’ premises and in 1933 a total of 800 architectural, engineering and building staff based at branch offices in England and Wales were to be supervised from the new Administrative Offices.¹⁸ The CWS highlighted the symbolism of having frontages in both Leman Street and Prescot Street – Leman Street, with the entrance to the Bank, being a ‘co-operative colony’, while Prescot Street was ‘the thoroughfare that leads to the Tower of London, the Royal Mint, and the great City itself’.¹⁹

The new Bank – ‘the clearing house’ of the Co-operative movement – had three times more floorspace than in its former home at 99 Leman Street, where it had opened in 1920 with ‘only 441 current and deposit accounts’.²⁰ The panel above the Prescot Street entrance, depicting a naked man and woman grasping a wheatsheaf staff beneath a beehive to symbolise co-operation, was designed by J.C. Blair, the brother of a late director of the CWS.²¹ An underground tunnel connected the new building with the London Tea Department on the north side of Prescot Street.²² There were now nearly 2,957 CWS employees in and about Leman Street with a further 978 working for the E&SCWS at Leman Street, the bonded warehouses at Middleton’s Wharf, Wapping, and the chocolate factory at Luton.²³

Although the CWS had claimed in 1930 that, ‘compared with northern grime, Whitechapel was the high street of an old-world country town’,²⁴ the effects of urban pollution on Ekins’s London exteriors may perhaps have influenced CWS practice in Manchester. Similarly dentilated brickwork in contrasting panels was in the late 1930s also employed by the CWS Architects’ Department in Manchester, for example at the new Menswear Department and Drapery Warehouse, which opened at the end of 1939. It was reported that the buff and blue brickwork and reconstructed stone dressings had been chosen ‘with a view to survival from the more murky effects of a drab climate’.²⁵ When the first portion of the London Administrative Offices was opened in 1933, the promotional booklet insisted that while Balloon Street, Manchester, ‘retains its historic position in the CWS; Leman Street affords evidence of the conquering power of co-operation in the Capital City of Empire’.²⁶

The second portion of the administrative block was undertaken in 1957–8, thereby completing Ekins’s suite of Expressionist blocks on the west side of Leman Street; the Leman Street entrance was moved further to the south than originally conceived and the return building line on Chamber Street was also modified.²⁷ Other than the three-bay side return on Chamber Street, where Ekins’s seven-storey wing ended, the elevation flanking Chamber Street (which was rarely photographed) was one-storey high above the plinth.²⁸ This was described in 1957 as ‘partial development’, and thus represented a curtailment of Ekins’s original four-storey design for the south side of the block.²⁹ Plans of around 1929 show a dining room on the ground floor, with a double- height meeting hall and staff gymnasium on the unexecuted storeys above.³⁰ An extension was added in 1960 to the Chamber Street front at second-floor level, near the private link road between Prescot Street and Chamber Street, but otherwise the exterior fronting Chamber Street was not altered significantly until after 1973.³¹ Like other CWS and E&SCWS premises locally, the whole administrative office complex was arranged around an open area which served as light well and yard, entered in this case from the link road. This link road was eventually bridged with a foot passage above second floor on the Prescot Street frontage, in order to connect with Ekins’s furnishing warehouse of 1939. Inside the administrative block, ‘Empire hardwoods’ were used throughout and the completed building contained a double- height boardroom and directors’ dining room, in addition to the banking hall and associated offices.³²

Now known as 1 Prescot Street, the Administrative Office and Bank were generally known as 110 Leman Street and 1 Prescot Street (but were still addressed with their original numbering of 108–118 Leman Street and 1–9 Prescot Street by the GLC in 1973).³³ In 1968 ‘alterations to form offices’ were agreed to the sixth floor ‘Ex Architects’ Department’.³⁴ Changes in the 1970s included a new CWS Travel Bureau on the ground floor with a basement adaptation for a bullion room.³⁵ A total refurbishment was carried out for the CWS in 1985.³⁶ It was presumably at this time that the single-storey elevation along Chamber Street was carried up to the height of the Leman Street front and capped with a projecting attic, since drawings of 1995 showing the present Chamber Street elevation proposed removing the ‘existing windows’ above the first floor with decorative metal grilles to vent car parking areas on the ground, first and second storeys.³⁷ In 1995 IKA Project Design & Management submitted plans for a proposed conversion from offices to residential accommodation with 115 units on behalf of CWS Property, with landscaping and associated works.³⁸ After these were passed in mid-1996, a representative from Rialto Homes Plc attended the meeting between the architects and the District Surveyor to discuss a fire strategy for the accepted scheme. Later the same year, by which time the CWS was not mentioned in building control or planning correspondence, Rialto Homes submitted a revised scheme. Permission was sought and granted for the refurbishment, change of use and conversion from offices and ancillary uses, to create a gym at basement level, 150 residential units on floors one to seven (including four residential units at roof level), and car parking and cycle storage at lower ground, ground and new mezzanine floor levels (i.e., no carparking above the first floor as originally planned).³⁹ Present use, and plans by Rialto’s architects for the conversion, Denton Corker Marshall Ltd, indicate commercial units on the ground-floor Leman Street and Prescot Street fronts.⁴⁰ The building and its railings were listed Grade II in 1990.