Philpot Street open space

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Philpot Street
Contributed by Survey of London on Feb. 17, 2020

Extending from Newark Street south to Commercial Road Philpot Street presents a contrast between nineteenth-century terraced houses on its west side and twentieth-century hospital blocks to the east. A brick wall extends along the north side of Varden Street, severing the hospital estate’s stretch of Philpot Street from its southern continuation into Commercial Road to form a landscaped and pedestrianized enclave. The present-day aloofness of this part of Philpot Street is at odds with original exertions to integrate it with neighbouring development. When the hospital set about forming a road parallel with Turner Street in 1818, the Hawkins estate had already begun one to the south. The hospital negotiated continuity agreeing a common alignment and the standard of houses. The broad street was intended to be superior to the cross streets, and to have large terraced houses set back behind forecourts.¹

When plans for the street were first proposed, the hospital determined that it ought to be named St Vincent Street in honour of their vice-president Sir John Jervis, the Earl St Vincent. Sewer plans, insurance records and the hospital’s records refer to the street by this name, yet it is marked as Philpot Street on the 1819 edition of Horwood’s map and that is the name that stuck. It is likely it had been adopted on the Hawkins estate to commemorate the Philpot family, whose manor house is thought to have been situated near by. Building on the hospital’s frontages commenced in the early 1820s with the Earl St Vincent public house (No. 41) and St Andrew’s Scotch Church on the east side. Stebon Terrace, a row of seven houses, was built around 1826 by Charles Francis on the east side where Floyer House now stands. The Wycliffe Chapel and its associated school were built near the south end of the hospital’s estate on the east side in the 1830s.²

The Presbyterian congregation at St Andrew’s Scotch Church traced its origins to a chapel founded in 1669 in Broad Street in Wapping. This was flooded after the construction of the London Docks, so worship transferred to a chapel in Shakespear’s Walk Charity School near St Paul’s Church, Shadwell. A building subscription was established in 1822 to raise funds for a new church, intended to be within reach of Scottish mariners lading at the docks. Ground was acquired at the corner of Philpot Street and Suffolk Street (later Walden Street), and construction followed in 1823–4. An illustration from 1849 depicts a neat four-bay rectangular preaching box crowned by a domed cupola, with a projecting entrance porch accessed via a gated forecourt. A school had been built along its north side by 1873, when the church contained 600 sittings in its nave and a three-sided gallery, accessed by staircases on each side of the porch.³ In 1890 the church and schoolhouse were acquired by the Rev. John Wilkinson for the Mildmay Mission to the Jews, an evangelical Christian project. Wilkinson had broken away from twenty-five years of involvement with the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews in 1876 to establish this mission. Its name reflected its connection to the Mildmay organization founded by the Rev. William Pennefather. Wilkinson attempted to convert by preaching, lecturing and conducting house visitations. The opening of a medical clinic in Hooper Square in 1880 represented a new strategy in targeting Jews, most likely influenced by missionary work in Africa and Asia. Free medical care was provided in return for attending a Christian service. The scheme was calculated to tempt Jewish immigrants living in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, especially as medical relief from the Jewish Board of Guardians had been suspended the previous year. The acquisition of St Andrew’s Scotch Church offered space for the mission to expand in a favourable location. A significant enlargement of the buildings by 1893 was overseen by Alfred R. Pite & Son, a firm with experience of mission halls headed by the father of William Alfred Pite and Arthur Beresford Pite. By extensive rebuilding and the addition of a storey, the chapel and schoolhouse were adapted to form a large mission centre, with waiting rooms and reading rooms in the basement, ground-floor meeting rooms and upper floors devoted to a medical department. In 1898, George Herbert Duckworth observed the Mildmay Mission’s ‘large buildings, [and] several poor Jewesses sitting on steps outside with sick children waiting for it to open’. Duckworth’s guide, Inspector H. Drew, elaborated: ‘Medicine given them with a prayer, only the very poorest go, don’t think any are really converted.’ By 1903 the mission had baptized only 140 Jews since its foundation.⁴ Despite its low success rates, the Mildmay Mission persisted at Philpot Street. An inspection in 1956 recorded that the centre was used by approximately twenty people on a daily basis, with weekly meetings and occasional assemblies. By then the basement contained a meeting hall, a games room and a clothing store, while the ground floor comprised two prayer rooms. The first floor housed a medical clinic, including a dispensary and consulting rooms for a doctor and a dentist, while the upper floors provided staff accommodation. The building was demolished soon after for the Princess Alexandra School of Nursing.⁵

To the south, John Harrison House occupies the site of the Wycliffe Chapel, a Congregationalist chapel erected in 1830–1. Established by Dr Andrew Reed, an energetic philanthropist and the minister of a chapel in Cannon Street Road, this chapel derived its name from Reed’s admiration for John Wycliffe, the fourteenth-century theologian and religious reformer. It was a restrained Greek Revival structure intended to exude ‘Doric simplicity’, with an ashlar-faced pedimented front set back behind a railed forecourt, following the precedent of the Scotch Church on a grander scale. The distyle in antis portico opened into a rectangular hall with an apsidal east end, a west organ gallery and long galleries on two sides. It is not implausible that its design was produced by George Goldring, the experienced Limehouse surveyor, and/or William Southcote Inman, these being the joint architects of Reed’s London Orphan Asylum in Clapton, completed in 1823 in a similar neoclassical style. A large graveyard laid out north-east of the chapel was closed for burials from 1854.⁶

Wycliffe Chapel was restored in 1873 under the supervision of Rowland Plumbe, an obvious choice owing to his architectural experience and family connections with the congregation. His late father Samuel had served as a deacon at the chapel and was buried in its graveyard. It is thought that his mother, Ann Serena Plumbe, had encouraged Reed to establish the Highgate Asylum for Idiots, where his brother was admitted as one of the first patients. These ties may also have helped Plumbe gain commissions to design new Congregationalist churches at North Bow and Stratford, both completed in 1867. At the time of the renovation, Wycliffe Chapel contained 1,600 sittings; far more than St Philip’s Church, whose vicar complained that the ‘handsome dissenting chapel’ was luring away his parishioners. The chapel’s popularity had dwindled by 1902, when Charles Booth described the building as ‘now “a world too wide” for its shrunk congregation’. Booth attributed the depletion of Nonconformist worshippers to suburban migration, yet attested that the chapel retained ‘an almost cathedral position for the body’.⁷

In 1904 the School Board for London obtained powers of purchase over Wycliffe Chapel and its burial ground to erect an elementary school for 800 children. The graveyard, described as ‘full of tombstones, closed and untidy’, was estimated to contain 20,000 bodies.⁸ The projected expense of removing the burials persuaded the LCC to abandon the scheme. The Wycliffe Chapel followed its drifting congregation to Ilford in 1907. In the following year, the chapel was acquired by the Federation of Synagogues and consecrated as the Philpot Street Great Synagogue, to provide a permanent base for the Shalom VeEmeth (‘Peace and Truth’) congregation that had previously assembled in a converted warehouse in Old Castle Street. This conversion was carried out by Lewis Kazak, a builder of Belvedere, under the supervision of the Federation’s architect Lewis Solomon, who also designed the Ark. Severe bomb damage was inflicted in 1940, yet the congregation persevered in a smaller structure raised within the ruined carcase of the synagogue. Consecrated in 1943, this temporary synagogue contained a central bimah and an ‘improvised Ark’. The site was subsequently cleared for hospital expansion.⁹

On the west side of Philpot Street, the southern boundary of the London Hospital estate skirts around Porchester House, a four-storey block of flats on the Hawkins estate, designed in 1936 by H. Lee & E. F. Dickens for J. Cohen, and built in 1951. This block stands south-east of a complex of nurses’ residential blocks of 1969–76. One of these, Dawson House to the north on Philpot Street, occupies the site of a school and a pub.

Wycliffe Chapel Charity School was built as a Sunday school in 1833. It was rebuilt in 1878 to designs by the local architect John Hudson, increasing its capacity to 800 children. The School Board used the building as a temporary school from 1895, despite repeated complaints over inadequate conditions. Three separate classes for more than 200 children were crowded into a single first-floor room, as the dark, fusty ground-floor classroom was not fit for purpose and the second-floor classroom was used for storage. The playground was a ‘long asphalted passage’, leading to the graveyard between the Wycliffe Chapel and the Mildmay Mission on the east side of Philpot Street.¹⁰ In 1910 the school was converted to be another synagogue belonging to the Federation of Synagogues. A formal opening took place in the following January, when the building was consecrated as the Philpot Street Sephardish Synagogue. Plans from 1951 indicate that the Ark was on the south wall, bounded by seating for 200 worshippers and a three-sided women’s gallery. The synagogue continued in use until around 1957, when it amalgamated with the East London Central Synagogue in Nelson Street.¹¹ The Earl St Vincent public house was built at 41 Philpot Street in 1823–4, occupying the south-west corner of the crossing with Walden Street. The lot had been taken by Joseph Tickell, the local brewer who was well-connected as a governor of the hospital and Past Master of the Brewers’ Company. The public house was a modest three-storey building with a bar and parlour on the ground floor and a first-floor club room. It was replaced in 1908 when an eighty-year lease of the site was granted to Hyman Finegold. He had Dorothy House built for his family, a large three-storey residence with a two-storey bay window to Philpot Street.¹²