9 Prescot Street

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Co-operative Wholesale Society Furnishing and Hardware Warehouse, 9 Prescot Street
Contributed by Rebecca Preston on March 29, 2019

The seven-storey Furnishing and Hardware Warehouse and Showrooms at 9 Prescot Street (and 78 Chamber Street) were designed for the Co-operative Wholesale Society by its architect, L. G. Ekins, at around the same time as the Tea Office and Coffee Works in Prescot Street from 1934. Built in 1937–8, when the furnishing showrooms opened in May 1939, they were billed as evidence of the ‘further stage of peaceful penetration into the Metropolis by the CWS’ and the ‘fourth large contribution of the Wholesale Society in eight years to the changing face of East London’.¹ The staff of the London Architects’ Department now numbered seventy, which together with the building, engineering, shopfitting and allied departments, completed not just the landmark buildings on Leman Street and Prescot Street but the warehouses, discussed above, on both sides of Leman Street.²

The Furniture Warehouse is built in the same distinctive brickwork as the administrative offices above a Cornish (rather than artificial) granite base but without the green-tiled roof of its more striking neighbour. Inside, the building handled products from the six CWS furniture factories, displaying carpets, mattresses and pianos on the ground floor and, above these, toys, cycles and prams, hardware and electrical goods. The fifth-floor radio and television showroom walls were ‘treated in a novel way with corrugated asbestos blended with sycamore veneered fixtures’, and the sixth displayed wallpaper, paint and brushes. 10,000 square yards of Scottish CWS Falkland linoleum covered the three acres of floor space. In the sub-basement an electricity substation was designed to serve all the new premises and a 600ft borehole producing 10,000 gallons of water per hour was intended to feed the second portion of Ekins’s administrative offices, which had yet to be built. Together with a similar tank in the drapery department, the aim was to supply all the water for CWS premises locally.³ In 1949 there were still two functioning CWS wells for drinking water in Leman Street, out of only five still working in the borough, and these were checked regularly for quality by the Metropolitan Water Board.⁴ Assuming one was still within the Furnishing Warehouse, the other was presumably the artesian well sunk beneath the London Tea Department in the 1890s. The present single-storey extension at 74–78 Chamber Street was added to the furnishing warehouse in about 1953, built on a vacant site on the south side of the Princess of Prussia public house (which leased an adjoining portion of the furnishing warehouse’s ground floor⁵) and the former county court.⁶ The furnishing warehouse remained in use by the CWS until around 2011 and was acquired, together with 16 Prescot Street, by Derwent London in 2012 but was let to the Co-op Bank until 2015.⁷ Part of the building is currently used as offices of the Barts Health NHS Trust.

Towards the end of 1939 Ekins drew up plans for a first-aid post and air-raid wardens’ headquarters in the basement beneath the ‘old drapery’ at 99 Leman Street. In September 1941 he also signed the plans for adjustments to the public air-raid shelters created beneath the tea department at 100 Leman Street, which may represent some of his last work on site before his retirement in September 1942.⁸ During the Blitz, these were used by homeless employees, by air-raid personnel and policemen from Leman Street Police Station, whose sleeping quarters were on the top floor of the station.⁹ The CWS fire brigade took care of its own and neighbouring property during raids.¹⁰ During the First World War, when CWS cellars in Leman Street reportedly served as the official shelters for the area, the Tea Department had suffered £820 worth of damage in October 1915 and in 1917 one of the clock faces at 99 Leman Street was cracked by the blast from the accidental munitions-factory explosion at Silvertown, but otherwise its property was relatively unscathed.¹¹ Unlike the CWS Silvertown works which were themselves destroyed in 1940, the Whitechapel premises again survived major devastation during the Second World War; there was some general non- structural blast damage to the Administrative Block at 1 Prescot Street and, to a lesser degree, the coffee works building on Prescot Street, but given its proximity to the railway, the City and the docks the CWS Whitechapel estate suffered remarkably little damage.¹² The many incendiaries which fell on ‘most of the CWS properties’ during 1940 were said to have been extinguished by CWS firemen.¹³

Early buildings on Prescot Street's south side east of Magdalen Passage
Contributed by Survey of London on Aug. 3, 2020

The eastern stretch of Prescot Street’s south side was solidly built up by 1693 with eighteen houses (later Nos 1–18), all but a few of the most easterly built by William Chapman in the late 1680s. A group of five on the sites of Nos 12–16 was then empty and held by Thomas Chambers. The first leases of 1682 ran to 1745. Constructed on broadly regular plots and probably all of three storeys, these houses followed the two-room-plan, rear-staircase house form that was standard along both sides of the street. Internally, accommodation, as described in the early nineteenth century, typically comprised two ground- floor parlours, a drawing room and bedroom on the first floor, and two second- floor bedrooms, with attics above, and basement kitchens and washhouses.¹

Following the expiry of the fist leases, Thomas Quarrill (1706–1763), a colourman based on the south side of Whitechapel High Street, a paving commissioner and a governor of the London Hospital, took thirty-one-year Leman leases of twelve houses on the south side of Prescot Street in 1746–7. By 1749 Quarrill had redeveloped the group as eleven new houses, those later numbered Nos 11–18 and three further east extending beyond where Magdalen Passage was later put through as far as what was then the London Infirmary. From about 1759 Thomas Quarrill himself occupied the easternmost house next to the Magdalen Hospital, and was followed there by his brother William Quarrill (1721–1798), a magistrate and colourman, who stayed into the 1770s prior to the building at the end of the Quarrill lease of Magdalen Row, nine bigger houses west of Magdalen Passage that were later numbered Nos 16–24 (see below).² New sixty-one year leases of other houses in this stretch were granted in the 1760s, and there was perhaps further rebuilding then. A number of Jewish merchants were resident in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Commercial use of at least parts of the houses had become general by the time Whitechapel County Court replaced three houses east of Magdalen Row in the 1850s. Nos 1–14 came down in the early twentieth century, giving way to premises of the Co-operative Wholesale Society.³

At the east end, the first and comparatively wide house at No. 1 may have been cleared by the 1790s for access to a large rear yard. If so, the frontage had been rebuilt by the middle of the nineteenth century. No. 2 was another wider than average house. It was occupied by and possibly rebuilt for the wealthy Dias Fernandes family, Sephardi Jews and merchants, from around 1755 into the 1780s. Judith Mendes da Costa (d. 1815), a widow, held a sixty- one year lease from 1765. John White, a coal merchant, was here in the 1790s. Monahun Levy Bensusan, a wealthy Jewish merchant and his wife, Sarah, who migrated to England from Gibraltar around 1800, appear to have been later residents. Thomas Finchett, an attorney, was present in 1814 when the house had two offices and a kitchen on the ground floor, a drawing room and sitting room on the first, and two bedrooms on the second, with a second basement kitchen. From the 1820s until the 1860s, No. 2 was the premises of William Wall and his son Thomas Tabor Wall, wine and brandy merchants. By 1900, Nos 1 and 2 were used by the Co-operative Wholesale Society, which soon after demolished.⁴

No. 3 was occupied by Moses Gomez Sero in the 1740s. It later came to be connected to a few of Prescot Street’s many jewellers and watchmakers. In the 1770s and 1780s, Thomas and George Prior were in occupation, followed around 1790 by Baron Lyon De Symons. In 1814 Peter Salomans, a merchant, had a garden building here with two rooms, one of them a china closet. Jonas Levy and Judah Azuelas, another merchant, followed in the 1830s and ’40s. For fifty years from about 1870, the house was in use as tailoring workshops. A rear outbuilding of 1878 succeeded the garden building, displaced by the expansion of Wainwright and Gadesden’s sugarhouse.⁵

No. 4 was occupied in the 1840s by John Geickle (Jekyll), a Russia merchant, having previously been home to Richard William Wilcox, a Clothworker, and Gotchal Levien (d. 1825), an Ashkenazi broker who had migrated to London from Jamaica. On the sale of Levien’s freehold in 1825, the house was advertised as having a first-floor ‘handsome drawing room, neatly papered, with marble chimneypiece’, and a ‘cheerful garden’ to the rear.⁶ There was some rebuilding front and back and from the 1890s until around 1920, No. 4 was used as the Eastern Dispensary of the German Hospital at Dalston. The Young Zion Institute, which aimed to unite the East End’s Zionist groups, was briefly based here from 1897.⁷

No. 5 housed Captain Joseph Brooks in the 1690s. In the late eighteenth century it was associated with Joseph Clark, a stationer. Coleman Levy Newton (d.1833), a West India merchant, was here in the 1820s, followed by Thomas Ashton junior (d. 1844), a gunmaker. The house was subsequently used as an Excise Permit Office, then for administrative purposes by Whitechapel’s parish Vestry for which clerks and solicitors, Henry Sadler Mitchell then Thomas Davis Metcalfe, took up residence from the late 1850s to the 1890s.⁸

Joseph Bagnall, the sugar refiner, was at No. 6 in the 1690s. Joseph Rooks (d. 1761), a citizen Cooper, succeeded from the late 1740s. His insurance specified that the house had four panelled rooms. Moses Lindo followed around 1800. By 1880, No. 6 was occupied by Henry Friedlander, a tailor of German extraction, who acquired a number of freehold houses on both sides of Prescot Street, including No. 7, which he united with No. 6 for tailoring, building a five-storey workshop behind No. 7 in 1889. No. 6 was replaced around 1890 with a building that included a ‘well-lighted’ single-storey rear factory, said to be suitable for sixty-five labourers.⁹

No. 7 had been occupied by Scott and Willes, corn factors, around 1770. P. Mugle and Co., Dutch merchants, stored 1,200 bottles of port and a ‘sarcophagus wine cooler’ in the cellar in 1816.¹⁰  In the 1840s the house was the London home of Joseph Whalley junior, a Leeds-based importer of wool from Germany and cotton from the West Indies. He reportedly recalled that he lodged at Prescot Street during winters ‘principally to improve himself … and to do business if any offered’.¹¹ Before Friedlander’s arrival, Thomas James Martin and William Settles, sugar refiners, occupied the house.¹² 

No. 8 followed a similar pattern, turning from mercantile to manufacturing use. Merchant occupants were Cox and Sherren and then Philip Isaac from the 1790s to 1830s. The Rev. Thomas Prescott, a curate at St Mary Matfelon, was resident in the 1850s. Thereafter, the building was used by a commission agent and Morris Harris, a shirt manufacturer. By the 1920s, the CWS had acquired Nos 3–8.¹³  No. 9 housed Capt. Radore Wilson in the 1770s, followed by Leigh and Jeffrey, ship and insurance brokers. Abraham and Ann Abrahams, watchmakers, were based here for much of the nineteenth century. From the 1880s the building was used by rag-trade businesses, and on its purchase by Friedlander in 1898, a single-storey workshop was built to the rear.¹⁴ No.10 was the residence of John Sequeira and Isaac Sequeira junior, Sephardi merchants, in the 1790s, Thomas Glover, who claimed to be both a carpenter and a bricklayer, in the late 1820s, and Lion Benedictus Leman (d. 1838), a goldsmith and jeweller, his wife, who had an outfitting warehouse, and his son, into the 1850s. When the lease of No. 10 was advertised in 1870, it was noted that the ground behind the house was suitable for the building of a factory. After brief use in 1880 by the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception (see below) the property did become a tailoring workshop in the 1890s, by when a rear extension was present. Joseph Klein, a surgeon and physician, lived here in the early twentieth century.¹⁵

Houses further west were rebuilt in 1746–9 by Thomas Quarrill (see above). No. 11 housed Abraham Fonseca, Aboas and Bros, merchants in 1800, giving way to Edward Hubbard, who ran a bookshop and stationers. By 1834 and into the 1840s, this was the home of Charles Edward Jenkins, surgeon to St John’s British Hospital and director of the Eclectic Society of London, which met here. This learned society had been founded in 1829 to promote literature, science and the arts, including through the establishment of a library and museum. In 1834 the Society planned a botanical garden of British plants, possibly in Jenkins’s garden.¹⁶

From 1749, when it was newly rebuilt, No. 12 housed John Matthews (d. 1768), a salesman. It was again rebuilt and enlarged to the rear around 1873 to be a hotel. Aimed at ‘commercial gentlemen’, this was overseen by B. I. van Staveren, and was judged to have a ‘handsome elevation’.¹⁷ By 1880, now under Joseph Bonn, a Dutch-born Kosher caterer from Wentworth Street, the hotel had taken in No. 11, which had also been extended to the rear. Further rebuilding ensued in 1891 for Henry Friedlander, with Wigg, Oliver & Hudson as architects, after which advertisements lauded the ‘magnificent suite of rooms’, including a new ‘elaborate ball room … as comfortable and commodious as modern science can suggest and worthy of any West End establishment’.¹⁸ By 1915 the hotel was at Nos 12–13.¹⁹

Nos 13 and 14 had particularly fine gardens into the 1880s, retained through the mid-nineteenth century tenancies of Moss Joseph and William Harris, jewellers, and including a fountain at No. 14. Friedlander had taken No. 13 for tailoring by 1894.²⁰