32-38 Osborn Street

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32-38 Osborn Street
Contributed by Survey of London on March 30, 2017

A nine-storey sugarhouse was built on the site of 30–34 Osborn Street around 1799 for Josiah Lucas and Henry Martin (d. 1817). It was soon fire-damaged, then when run by Lucas and Son all but destroyed by fire in 1824. The premises and stock were insured to the sum of £28,8828, so were perhaps rebuilt, with Bulmer & Co. as successors in the 1830s.¹

From around 1905 to the mid-1930s, the building at No. 32 housed Alec Snelwar’s Warsaw Kosher Restaurant, frequented by Leon Beron, a notorious slum landlord who was murdered in 1911, and otherwise linked to gangsters and anarchists. No. 38 was Morris (Curley) and Rosie Kersch’s Curley’s Café from 1937, a haunt of artists and anti-fascists until this group of shophouses was destroyed in the Blitz.²

The site was redeveloped in 1961–2 for Commerce House (Gower Street) Ltd, to designs by J. E. Morgan and Partners, surveyors of 226 Whitechapel Road, by Courtney & Fairbairn Ltd, builders. Of four storeys, basement and attic and brick-faced, the building was intended for office use with ground-floor shops. However, it immediately fell to use as cutting and machine rooms for clothes manufacturing, and was extended in 1987–8. The ground floor, a restaurant since 2003, became the Sonargaon Restaurant, Bangladeshi and Indian Cuisine.³ This was replaced in 2018–19 with a six-storey block for fifteen flats (The Osborn Apartments) over commercial spaces, including a basement gym. The developer was Goldenstone working with Kitesgrove, Mirfield Contracting Ltd, Moreno:Massey, architects, and Barnes Webster & Sons Ltd, builders.⁴