The Goulston Street Improvement
Contributed by Survey of London on Aug. 1, 2019
The topography of the area between Middlesex Street and Old Castle Street
changed radically in the 1880s as a consequence of concerted slum clearances
and road widenings. This owed much to the Rev. Samuel Barnett and John Liddle,
the Whitechapel District Board of Works' Medical Officer of Health, who had
been campaigning for improvements in living conditions since the 1840s.
Drainage aside, little had changed in the huddled streets north of Whitechapel
High Street. The Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Act of 1868 (the Torrens
Act) to encourage large-scale slum clearance and rebuilding had lacked the
force of Torrens’ original bill, as was pointed out by an influential report
of 1873 (and subsequent memorial to Parliament) by the Charity Organisation
Society, with which Barnett was closely involved. This recommended that local
authorities be given compulsory purchase powers in slum areas. The Society’s
aim was not philanthropic and it opposed municipal house building except as a
last resort. Rather it aspired to social engineering through improved housing.
If the slum houses were demolished and replaced with good-quality blocks,
better tenants would be drawn in and the most resilient of the poor (the
‘deserving’) would occupy the houses they had left, thus ‘levelling up’ an
area. Barnett put it more starkly: ‘If the gang of thieves and idlers who
inhabit this quarter could be scattered and good houses built, the boon would
be immense’.
The Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Improvement Act of 1875, introduced by
the Home Secretary Richard Assheton Cross, aimed to remedy the shortcomings of
the Torrens Act by enabling local authorities (in London, the Metropolitan
Board of Works) to conduct slum clearance on a scale large enough to generate
sites attractive to model dwellings companies. The thorniest issue was
compensation to the slum landlord – not to give full market value was
considered inequitable, selling sites below market value an unjustified
imposition on ratepayers, yet selling them at full market value made them
unattractive to builders. Barnett’s view was that ‘the community must be
content to lose money by letting the ground at a lower rate’. This played
out in wrangling over compensation that dragged on through arbitration and saw
awards that made slum clearance onerous to the Board, and slow in the time it
took to sell cleared sites.
Whitechapel was subject early and extensively to the Cross Act, first in the
Whitechapel and Limehouse Improvement Act of 1876, the implementation of which
in an area south of Royal Mint Street benefited from the early involvement of
the Peabody Trust, and shortly after in the Metropolis (Goulston Street and
Flower and Dean Street, Whitechapel) Improvement Act of 1877, which led to a
slower process. These Acts came about through representations to the MBW by
Liddle, the later one in particular concerning two sites, one of about three
acres, encompassing Queen’s Court off the High Street (the site of Whitechapel
Gallery) and parts of Angel Alley and George Yard, running north across
Wentworth Street into Spitalfields to Flower and Dean Street, and, the subject
here, four and a half acres bounded by Middlesex Street and Goulston Street
east and west, and Wentworth Street and the backs of High Street properties
north and south.
Fragmented ownership and displacement from both areas of more than 4,000
people, meant that assembling the sites was laborious. Amendments to the Cross
Act in 1879 and 1882, reducing both the rate of compensation to slum
landlords, and the proportion of displaced persons who had to be rehoused
locally, speeded up clearances, much of which occurred in 1880–1, though it
was not until 1884 that final acquisitions of the many crowded and insanitary
courts were made. The amended legislation enabled widening of the main
streets; sections of Middlesex Street, Goulston Street and Wentworth Street
were widened to 40ft, and New Goulston Street to 30ft.
The scheme proposed commercial redevelopment of the main street frontages
(Middlesex Street, the eastern part of Wentworth Street, and odd plots on
Commercial Street), and envisaged five-storey parallel blocks mostly end-on to
New Goulston Street and the western part of Wentworth Street. Model-dwelling
use for eighty years was to be stipulated. Some smaller commercial sites were
built up in 1883–4, including the Bell on Middlesex Street and the Princess
Alice on Commercial Street, and widened Middlesex Street was paved in granite,
with York-stone pavements, by J. J. Griffiths, builder. But the core work of
building blocks of model dwellings was slow to start. As Barnett bemoaned in
1884: ‘During the whole year acres of ground cleared by the Metropolitan Board
of Works … have remained barren as a desert’. Another short-term
consequence of the slow pace of demolition was, as Barnett had predicted, that
slum property deteriorated as landlords saw no reason to improve condemned
houses. Before 1882 local authorities were reluctant to buy and demolish as
there was a requirement to rehouse occupants locally. Moreover, the scale of
clearances when they finally happened and subsequent delays in selling sites
were also deleterious. At the end of 1884 the Whitechapel Board of Works
estimated that 12,000 had been made homeless in its district. The need for
many to remain close to their places of work, or simply to stay with their
friends and family, meant that overcrowding increased sharply.
The MBW’s first sale of property scheduled for blocks of dwellings was of the
largest site, fronting Wentworth Street, the north end of Goulston Street on
both sides and Old Castle Street’s west side. The buyer in June 1884 was
William Boutcher, of the Wentworth Dwellings Company Ltd. Boutcher was unusual
as a developer of model dwellings: he was an artist and illustrator, who had
travelled in 1854–5 at the behest of the British Museum to make record
drawings of Nimrud for W. K. Loftus’s excavation; a some-time architectural
student at the Royal Academy (and designer of, inter alia, model dairies); a
crack-shot member of the Artists’ Rifles; and, in the late 1880s, the MBW’s
member for Kensington. He declined to deal with T. J. Robertson, an MBW
Architects’ clerk under investigation for taking bribes to secure tenders.
Complete by the end of 1886, Wentworth Dwellings, 471 flats in all, comprised
four main and largely surviving blocks of five storeys over basements, with
shops on the ground floors of the Wentworth Street and Goulston Street
frontages. An additional four-storey block and six single-storey workshops
stood behind the eastern L. There were also washhouse blocks in the yards.
Boutcher’s scheme was architecturally a cut above standard model dwellings.
The stock-brick elevations were enlivened with occasional red-brick courses,
gauged window heads and residually Gothic Revival composite-stone doorheads on
Goulston Street. Open staircases under red-brick arches sub-divided the
blocks.
The flats varied from one to three rooms, the majority being of two. The
return for Boutcher and his investors was healthy, six per cent in the 1890s,
a consequence of the rents, at 6s.6d.to 10s.6d., which, as often observed,
precluded the poorest class of labourers. The shops reflected Wentworth
Street’s status as an adjunct to Petticoat Lane market. There was from the
outset a fair representation of the rag trade (milliners, drapers, silk
mercers, trimmings), but most shops housed such as fishmongers, fruiterers,
grocers, butchers and tobacconists. The workshops fell to use mainly as
builders’ stores.
In February 1885 Samuel Toye bought the whole west side of Goulston Street
south of New Goulston Street for the erection of model dwellings. Toye was an
intermediary for James Hartnoll, a joiner turned developer and self-styled
‘architect’, with whom he had worked on at least one other scheme in
Clerkenwell. Hartnoll, who died at forty-six in 1900, made a fortune in the
1880s and ’90s building model dwellings and mansion flats on ground left over
from public schemes – slum clearances, railway developments and street
improvements. He was undeterred by the statutory requirements and restrictive
conditions that often made such sites unattractive to philanthropic societies
and other developers. According to Hartnoll gave evidence in 1888 to the
Royal Commission examining alleged irregularities at the Metropolitan Board.
The MBW had declined to deal with him as they doubted his competence to build
such a large scheme; this despite him having paid for the services of T. J.
Robertson, the allegedly corrupt clerk. In his own words, Hartnoll was
‘exceptionally experienced in the successful planning, erection and
maintenance of Model Dwellings, as well as being the largest individual owner
of this class of property in London’. Brunswick Buildings, the vast scheme he
built on Goulston Street in 1885–6, contributed greatly to that claim.
Hartnoll had lived in Germany, and used German names for many of his
developments. Brunswick Buildings was a continuous run of fifteen six- and
seven-storey blocks that turned the corner to New Goulston Street with a
further four blocks. There were also a few more blocks behind the Goulston
Street range for 280 flats altogether. In a manner typical of Hartnoll,
the development was of stock brick with stone quoins and two continuous
reconstituted-stone courses stepped up as window heads, articulation like that
at Hartnoll’s surviving shophouses at 52–72 Middlesex Street. Most flats were
of two rooms plus a scullery, though a number had one or three rooms, all were
reached by open stone stairs.
Barnett noted: ‘In the broad streets with their clean, tall dwellings it is
almost impossible to recall the net of squalid courts and filthy passages
which went by the name of streets. After nine years’ waiting and the delays
which seem to be necessary in the action of the Metropolitan Board of Works,
the improvement has been completed. Brunswick Buildings in Goulston Street and
Wentworth Buildings {sic} in Wentworth Street, are inhabited.’ Charles
Booth’s researcher found the residents ‘decent working people … mainly
Jews’. By the First World War Hartnoll Estates had disposed of Brunswick
Buildings to the UK Temperance and General Provident Institution, and they
were described as ‘in a pretty bad state with poor class of tenants’.
The north side of New Goulston Street was excluded from the clearance area in
the Improvement Act of 1877 on account, no doubt, of the cost of acquiring the
former sugarhouse there (see above). When the site did come up for sale in
1890, with the suggestion that it might be adapted for commercial purposes, it
was acquired by Abraham Davis (1857–1924), the third of the seven Davis
brothers who built widely in Whitechapel, generally putting up working-class
tenements. Abraham went on to have a hugely versatile career, but the building
of Davis Mansions on this site, in a part of Whitechapel he had lived in as a
child, was his first major solo development. It followed an established model,
with five floors of flats over shops to New Goulston Street. Built in 1894–5,
there were 148 flats in four contiguous blocks behind the western blocks of
Wentworth Dwellings.
Davis Mansions bore more than a passing resemblance to red-brick ‘mansion’
blocks erected by James Hartnoll on Rosebery Avenue and Gray’s Inn Road to a
higher specification than Brunswick Buildings. They had similar architectural
pretension, with Queen Anne details, pedimented shop fronts, high-level
arcading and a modest corner tourelle, but they were not ‘mansion flats’ in
the West End sense. They had a higher proportion of three-room flats than
Wentworth Dwellings and Brunswick Buildings and were aimed at a class of
tenant one step up. As in other Davis developments, Davis Mansions included
workshops, here in the basements, to cater for local domestic industries.
Davis Mansions was notable for its almost exclusively Jewish occupancy, an
apparently deliberate policy of Davis’s that provoked controversy when notices
that ‘No English need apply’ were displayed to prospective tenants. The
shops were almost exclusively in clothing-trade use throughout the buildings’
existence. One exception was a small synagogue, possibly a successor to a
synagogue on Newcastle Street, converted from a shop unit by Davis in 1895–6.
This was known as the Sons of Lodz, or Lodzer, Synagogue until around1934 when
it closed following merger with the Lubner synagogue, which merged in turn
with the Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue after 1947.
The west end of the westernmost Wentworth Dwellings block was a casualty of
the Second World War, rebuilt in 1954 in Utility style with plain brick fronts
and metal windows. All but the six northernmost Brunswick Buildings blocks
were also damaged beyond repair after a direct hit by a V2 rocket bomb on 10
November 1944; the corner block was rebuilt in 1955. By the 1960s the
remaining dwelling blocks in the area were scheduled for slum clearance by the
London County Council, but work was slow to be implemented.
Davis Mansions had been the first of the late-nineteenth-century dwellings in
the Goulston Street–Wentworth Street nexus to be condemned as unfit for
habitation and in 1965 the first for which a Compulsory Purchase Order was
secured. Clearance was completed by the GLC in 1974, and the site was laid out
as public open space for a time from 1976.
A survey of 1972 found what remained of Brunswick Buildings beset by
‘disrepair, dampness, unsatisfactory internal arrangements, insufficient
natural lighting and ventilation, inconveniently situated sanitary
accommodation and water supplies and inadequate facilities for the preparation
of food’. Compulsory Purchase Orders for Brunswick Buildings were secured
in 1975–6, despite objections from the several freeholders. Interviews with
tenants to assess compensation for good maintenance revealed the poor
condition of the buildings and the shifting demography of
Whitechapel.Alexander Solomons at Flat 264 on New Goulston Street said he had
lived there for seventy-one years and that ‘the flat is rotting, the ceiling
is in places wood, the windows [are] rotting’, complaints echoed by Tuta Miah
at Flat 242. An unnamed tenant at Flat 233 said ‘I am only living here with
great difficulties’. The corner block, only twenty years old, had a
factory in its basement.
The last old blocks of Brunswick Buildings were duly demolished in 1981. There
was less certainty about how far a redevelopment scheme should include
Wentworth Dwellings. The view in Tower Hamlets Council in 1965 was that ‘the
only really effective way to deal with tenement blocks is to demolish and
rebuild’. But the issues with this for Roy Archer, the GLC’s Valuer, were
cost and disruption. Wentworth Dwellings incorporated ground-floor commerce,
‘which accounts for a lot of the value of the blocks but doesn’t come under
the terms of [Section III of] the [1957] Housing Act’. Similar exemption
also applied to the two rebuilds of the 1950s, the corner block at Brunswick
Buildings and the section of Wentworth Dwellings at 6–14 Wentworth Street.
Rehabilitation was under contemplation by the mid-1970s, but there was fierce
resistance to the idea, even within the GLC. Archer pursued the possibility
and considered the commercial activity in social as well as economic terms:
‘These streets (Wentworth and Goulston) form part of the “Petticoat Lane”
complex, a dedicated market area, with a vigorous barrow trade, and provide a
focal point for the local community’. The GLC decided to acquire
Wentworth Dwellings, then still in private ownership, under another clause of
the Housing Act, and carried out a feasibility study with a view to
rehabilitation.
In parallel, designs for replacing Brunswick Buildings, Wentworth Dwellings
and Davis Mansions were prepared in 1982–3 by the GLC Architect’s Department.
The scheme proposed extinguishing Goulston Street north of New Goulston Street
to create a glass-roofed pedestrian market extending westwards, between blocks
of low-rise flats on the site of Davis Mansions and all but the 1950s part of
Wentworth Dwellings, with a further block on the Brunswick Buildings site
south of New Goulston Street. Three phases were intended, to start at
Brunswick Buildings and proceed clockwise to conclude east of Goulston Street.
In the event only the first phase was built, in 1985, as blocks either side of
New Goulston Street: Brunswick House, twenty flats to the south; and 20–27
Wentworth Dwellings, to the north, set back to allow for the intended market
and finished abruptly at the flank wall of the reprieved Wentworth Dwellings.
These buildings of up to four storeys are in a late-GLC neo-vernacular style,
of brown brick with canted oriel windows, slate-effect hipped roofs and canted
corners creating rhomboid shapes on plan. Bright-red tubular canopies over the
shops were removed in 2018. At 20–27 Wentworth Dwellings single-storey shops
form a podium for raised communal gardens and private terraces. Brunswick
House has glazed sunrooms to the rear. In 2005 a flat was added above 21
Wentworth Dwellings, a consequence of tenants exercising their ‘right to
buy’.
By 1986 the old Wentworth Dwellings blocks were empty and boarded up, awaiting
refurbishment which eventually came in 1991–2 when the name Arcadia Court was
introduced; the western ranges had come to be known as Merchant House. To the
rear, podiums were formed above space for market storage, with gardens on the
roof and access to staircases, now lit by glass louvres. On the west side of
Goulston Street new access came via a mildly Post-modern gateway to the south.
A new four-storey block of eleven flats, architecturally in keeping, was built
on the west side of Old Castle Street. Arcadia Court and Brunswick House were
transferred to East End Homes in 2006, along with the New Holland Estate and
Jacobson and Herbert Houses.
Brunswick Buildings had survived long enough to provide a base, in a basement
flat (No. 269), for the founding in 1977 by Anwara Begum and Muhammad Nurul
Huq of the East End Community School, a mother-tongue supplementary school for
children of Bengali heritage. This reflected concern among parents at their
children’s lack of access to Bengali language and culture. In 1980, after a
period in a classroom on the site of Davis Mansions, the school moved to
Portakabins on the east side of Old Castle Street behind Denning Point where
it remained for more than thirty years. By 2011 there were more than ninety
Bengali supplementary schools in Tower Hamlets. In 1995 a shop at 33–35
Goulston Street, opened as the Brunswick and Wentworth Community Centre, a
registered charity offering housing, health and welfare advice, a children’s
supplementary evening school, and IT training. The area in front has been
enclosed since 2001 with low railed walls with bench seats. Around 2011 the
East End Community School transferred here from its Old Castle Street
Portakabins. In 2019 it is a branch of Tanzeel, a chain of Islamic schools
founded in 2007, providing after-school courses in Qu’ranic studies and
Arabic.
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