The site of 102 to 105 Whitechapel High Street before 1700
Contributed by Survey of London on July 13, 2018
The history of the site between Tewkesbury Buildings and Commercial Street
(formerly Catherine Wheel Alley/Essex Street) is known from the sixteenth
century and is significant as it included the Whitechapel bell foundry from,
at latest, 1631, until it moved to its site in Whitechapel Road in the 1740s.
The rest of the site is unusually well recorded in a series of seventeenth-,
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century deeds which demonstrate a process that must
have occurred all along the High Street: the development in the sixteenth
century of alleys northwards along what were originally narrow burgage plots
behind relatively modest earlier street-side houses, followed in the
seventeenth century by the gradual reduction in number by amalgamation and
rebuilding of both these alley cottages, and of the street-side houses, and
the eventual elimination by building-over of the alleys and yet further
amalgamation/rebuilding of street-side houses into larger buildings, in the
eighteenth century and beyond.
The site of Nos 102-105, along with No. 101, included two alleys: Bell Alley,
to the west of Tewkesbury Church
Alley, on the site of the
warehouse built by Mead
and Powell behind Nos 101 and 102 in the 1840s; and Bolt and Tun Alley, later
site of No. 103, to the west of Bell Alley. Nos 104-05, a single large
building from 1786 to 1909, covered a site originally of three smaller houses,
a silk-twisting ground and other smaller properties on the east side of
Catherine Wheel Alley.
The site of the bell foundry was on the eastern part of the block of land,
somewhere on the hinterland of the later 101 and 102 High Street. Connected
with this was the purchase in 1627 by Thomas Bartlett, bellfounder, from
William Hewson, Citizen and Skinner, for £240 of the freehold of two houses on
the High Street, by then divided into four tenements, the price reflecting the
size of the sites which stretched north roughly 130ft to Sugar Loaf Alley,
later Commercial Place..
Richard Hewson, William Hewson’s father, had acquired them in 1564 from
Lawrence Bradshaw (d. 1581), citizen and carpenter, who had been Surveyor of
the Royal Works from 1547 to 1560. Possibly Bradshaw had been the
builder/designer of the High Street houses, as he was also apparently building
houses, half a mile away, in (Great) Tower Street near the Tower, in the
1560s, when, as Mark Girouard has argued, he may have been designing Cecil
House in the Strand for Sir Robert Cecil. The retrospectively bathetic
implausibility of Bradshaw building in Whitechapel High Street is perhaps
deceptive: as Surveyor of the Royal Works his income fluctuated enormously,
with a retainer of only 2s a day. Such property speculation may have been a
financial imperative. The occupants of Richard Hewson’s two houses in 1564
were Henry Beard, apparently another sometime servant of the Court, described
in 1627 as ‘yeoman trumpeter of the late Queen Elizabeth’, and Lawrence Clark,
barber-surgeon, probably the Lawrence Clark, who gave evidence in 1539 against
John Harrydance, a Whitechapel bricklayer, called to account by
the authorities for preaching across his garden fence while Clark was
attempting to enjoy a quiet game of bowls, and also from his window on ‘the
King’s Highway’ (ie, the High Street), for several hours at a time late at
night.
Richard Hewson died in 1587, leaving the rental of a house in St Mary (at)
Hill, to his wife, and his own house, also in St Dunstan in the East, along
with, in Whitechapel, four ‘new-built’ houses ‘at the Horseshoe’ (ie, off
Petticoat Lane), to his son William, then a minor, and four other houses in
Whitechapel to his four daughters. As the four daughters were parties to
William Hewson’s sale of the two houses to Thomas Bartlett in 1627, it may be
inferred, these two houses were among the four not ‘at the Horseshoe’. By the
time of that sale the two were divided into four tenements, and by indentures
of 1609 and 1620 one each leased to Edward Franckton, citizen and grocer, and
Christopher Hewett, citizen and glazier, who were perhaps responsible for the
subdivision of each house, as they had both previously occupied a part each;
one of the others was Henry Sacheverell, possibly the Whitechapel vintner
indicted in 1613 for refusing to work on or pay for the King’s Highway..
In 1627 Hewett and Franckton surrendered their underleases to Bartlett, the
then-occupants of the four tenements being John Potterton, gentlemant, Peter
Wheeler, a silk weaver, and Robert Gray, a farrier. It appears from later
transactions that the property Bartlett acquired had been assembled by the
Hewsons and was located on either side of the Bolt and Tun/Pomegranate site,
that is on the sites of both 101 and 102 High Street, and 104 and parts of
105.
Thomas Bartlett died in 1631, four years after he acquired the houses from
William Hewson, leaving the houses in trust for his wife Ellen, so long as she
remained a widow, and thence to his daughter Mary Cape, and son Anthony, also
a bellfounder.
In 1631 Bartlett left his house ‘by the sign of the three bells’, plus the
‘back buildings thereto belonging’ (including, presumably, the foundry) to his
son Anthony, also a bellfounder. He also left three other houses to his
wife Ellen, so long as she remained a widow, so when she remarried in 1632,
these passed to Anthony Bartlett, and his sister, Mary Cape. One of these was
the single house between the site of the foundry, ie, Bell Alley, and Bolt and
Tun Alley, which was later numbered No. 102, probably that then occupied by
Edward Symes (d. 1632), probably the man of that name fined in 1618 for
‘tippling without licence’. The other two, one behind the other separated
by a small yard were ‘one away from Catherine Wheel Alley’, ie, site of No.
104, to the west of Bolt and Tun Alley.
Anthony Bartlett, while he retained the foundry, sold or leased some of the
property accumulated by his father on the High Street. In 1659 he was involved
in a Chancery case with Anthony Cass, bricklayer and tiler of St Botolph
Aldgate (cousin of Thomas Cass, the father of the celebrated Sir John Cass),
involving the small house fronting the High Street between Bell and Bolt and
Tun Alleys, whose freehold Cass’s son sold on in 1678. Occupied in 1659 by a
cordwainer, John Bourne, it sat on a plot less than 42ft deep (presumably as
Bartlett had retained the rest of the site for his foundry), with a 10ft
frontage to the street, its rear 12ft ‘below the stairs’ and 14ft above the
stairs, suggesting typical sixteenth-century timber-jettied construction. It
included a cellar below a shop, with two chambers above and a kitchen behind
with another little chamber. The house passed through many owners, the timber-
framed house rebuilt c. 1702 presumably in brick.
Bartlett’s other property, on the site of 104 High Street, included two houses
small houses, 10ft wide, one behind the other, on a site that included the
large stretch of open ground behind evident on the Ogilby and Morgan map. By
1638 (and probably earlier, under the Hewsons, when one of the tenants, was a
weaver, Peter Wheeler), the year he sold it to James Best, a silk throwster,
this was ‘used for a twisting place’, that is for preparing thread for
weaving, part of the throwing process.
The front house was then occupied by Richard Choppin, a strongwater man, or
seller of spirits, the rear by Peter Houghtropp or Hewtrop, a weaver. By 1680
part of the twisting ground had been built over with a small house by John
Kidvill, a relative of Bartlett, and the High Street property was occupied by
Theodosius Lanphere (sometimes Lamphere), tin-plate worker.
The final property on the site developed by Venables in the 19th century, lay
between the Bartlett’s two holdings, on the site of the later 103 High Street.
Bolt and Tun Alley is known by 1616 when it was described as ‘lately
purchased’ by the testator Daniel Swarts, or Swartes, of St Andrew Holborn,
possibly the non-juring cordwainer of that name recorded in 1578. The
property consisted in 1616 of two conjoined houses on the High Street known by
the signs of the Pomegranate and the Bolt and Tun, possibly inns but by the
later 17th century apparently in other use, and eighteen small houses in an
alley running north between them..
Swarts described the property then as ‘lately purchased’ of one Philipp
Demaryne, perhaps the Phillip Demarine buried at St Mary Matfelon in
1609. By 1680 the eighteen houses had been ‘reduced to fewer’, which fits
with the 1666 Hearth Tax which recorded thirteen houses of between none and
three hearths, with seven houses empty, and the 1674-5 Hearth Tax which
records nine houses (two empty) of one to three hearths, and Ogilby &
Morgan’s map of 1676 which shows an alley with, at its south end, four houses
on the west side, then a slight dogleg as the four next houses are to the east
and at the north end a slightly larger house. Fronting the High Street, either
side of Bolt and Tun Alley, were the Pomegranate and the Bolt and Tun. The
whole site passed by inheritance through the family of John Wilkinson, of
Lenham, Kent, till the 1690s.
The sites of 102-105 High Street from 1700 till the advent of Venables
Contributed by Survey of London on July 13, 2018
While No. 102 had been rebuilt around 1702 and, hemmed in by the foundry site,
occupied in the eighteenth century as in the seventeenth, by a cordwainer
(Henry Pedley), The Bolt and Tun and Pomegranate houses were still separate in
1737. In 1709 William Chadsey, by 1712 apparently the landlord of the Seven
Stars on the High Street west of Catherine Wheel
Alley, was described as living ‘by Bolt & Tun Alley’, so one or other of
the Bolt and Tun and the Pomegranate, probably the Bolt & Tun as the named
persisted longer, was still an inn. Both houses were, from 1737, in the
occupation of Nicholas Miller (d. 1765), a grocer and tea dealer, who appears
to have rebuilt them as a single building in 1749; ‘premises behind’ may have
been the vestiges of the Bolt and Tun Alley houses, or storage built on their
site. Miller’s daughter Sarah and her husband, George Pindar, sold the
building and the ‘premises’ in 1784, by then occupied by another grocer,
Thomas Henry, and known by the sign of the Tea Canister. The buyer was a
pawnbroker and silversmith, William Windsor (d. 1817). He probably refronted
No. 103 as, at the same time, he acquired the house next west that Anthony
Bartlett had sold to James Best in 1638, which from a description in 1764
appears to have changed little since the sixteenth century, both houses of
three storeys, that to the street also with garrets, and presumably of timber-
frame construction.
Windsor rebuilt these old houses and the neighbour at the corner, No. 105, as
substantial premises and house for himself, with coachhouse behind, and had
added four new houses on the old twisting ground, on Catherine Wheel Alley, by
the time of his death. No. 103 remained a wholesale grocers, Joshua and
David Hill (later Joshua and John Hill), till the Venableses took over the
building around 1827 (though the Hills appear to have retained premises to the
rear fronting Essex Street for a few more years), and Nos 104-05 also remained
a pawnbrokers (Thomas and James Fleming, associates of Windsor, later George
Bonham, who then moved to No. 88) till swallowed up by the Venables empire
(see below) in 1846. Windsor had been building his own empire, having
also, in 1806, acquired the tiny No. 102, from the daughter of the hosier
James Backhouse, who had occupied it since c. 1749. Already presumably brick-
built, it was not rebuilt again till 1847, remaining as a hosier and
shirtmaker’s till the 1860s when it was a milliners, then from the early 1870s
another branch of Asher Cruley, bootmaker, till Venables took it over in
1885.
T. Venables & Sons Ltd buildings, 102 to 105 Whitechapel High Street
Contributed by Survey of London on July 13, 2018
This corner building was erected in 1909 as part of T. Venables & Sons
Ltd, general drapers and furnishers. Apart from
Gardiner's on the
opposite side of the road, Venables was the largest store that ever graced the
High Street. Although it began as a typical linen drapers and silk mercers, by
1858 it had become a proto-department store. The stress was always on
‘extraordinarily low prices’. From small beginnings at No. 103 in 1825,
over the next fifty years the firm expanded greatly on this corner site and
into other buildings on Commercial Street and the High Street before finally
being wound up in 1927.
The business started in 1825 when the two young sons of Cornelius Venables
(1773-1841), a mercer and linen draper in Whitchurch, Shropshire, set up in
London. They were William (b. 1799, fl. 1851) and Thomas (1800-1875) Venables,
who first appear briefly in 1825 as ‘silk mercers of 234 Whitechapel Road'
(the building adjoining Meggs’s almshouses, giving access to Hampshire Court
and later deployed to give access to the Earl of
Effingham theatre),
though with no evidence they had a shop there, and ‘of’ 134 High Street the
same year.
By 1827 W. & T. Venables had opened a shop at the more central High Street
site at No. 103, near the corner with Essex Street, formerly Catherine Wheel
Alley, later Commercial Street. They dissolved their partnership in 1830
when William went off to set up his own less-than-successful venture in Lamb’s
Conduit Street in Holborn (bankrupt by 1834, and sentenced to four months’
imprisonment for giving an unsatisfactory account of his losses).. Thomas
was then joined in partnership by a younger brother, John (1803-79). The
Whitechapel shop at No. 103 appears, from a description during a court case in
1842, to have been predictably domestic in scale, with a separate ‘bonnet
room’ at the rear. Although only four storeys high, including the shop, in
1841 the building accommodated Thomas Venables, his wife and young son,
another younger brother Charles (1815-77), who soon returned to Shropshire,
and twenty-three shop assistants, mostly men in their early twenties, living
in presumably cramped dormitory conditions, with five servants, to cater for
both the family and assistants.
There were a further half dozen assistants and servants living in 1841, along
with John and Robert Venables, at No.
106 High Street, on
the west corner with Essex Street, where the family had opened another shop in
1837. They had to give it up in 1843 for the widening of Essex Street into
Commercial Street, instead decamping to 132 High Street, between Old Castle
Street and Goulston Street, and seeking a lavish £4,000 compensation (knocked
down to £1,300) from the Commissioners of Woods and Forests for the loss of
the advantageous corner site - one which may have been chosen, one ventures,
given the brief sojourn there of the business, with a view to the compensation
in the long-projected new street.
An opportunity to expand on a single site came in 1846 when Venables gave up
No. 132 and took over the building that adjoined No. 103, on the east corner
with Commercial Street. The new premises, formerly 104 and 105, were already a
substantial building three windows wide, soon to be renamed ‘Commerce
House’.
The same year the Venables brothers had taken over a bankrupt drapers at 34
Aldgate High Street. The two businesses, although each brother was a partner
in both, were separate companies and different in character, the Aldgate shop,
run by John and another brother, Robert (1817-80), described as ‘woollen
drapers’ and the Whitechapel shop, run by Thomas, as ‘silk mercers’ and
‘Manchester warehouse’ (ie, cotton goods).
In 1854 the partnerships were dissolved and the businesses separated and
Thomas Venables was joined in Whitechapel in 1858 by his two sons, Thomas
Glascott (1830-1903) and Charles (1832-92). The infusion of young blood
saw a major expansion of Venables business, with carpets augmenting the
drapery business, by 1858, ‘the largest and cheapest stock in the
kingdom’. The stress on low prices in a poor area had perhaps predictable
consequences: on a number of occasions in the 1820s and 1830s one or other
Venables had been called as a witness in court cases where they had purchased
at a suspiciously low price goods later discovered to have been stolen; as the
business expanded, however, they were more likely to be the victims of
shoplifting, swindles and staff pilfering.
By 1861 Thomas Venables senior and his two sons were living in large houses in
East and West Ham, but the Whitechapel shops still housed around thirty
assistants and servants. In 1862 a substantial range of buildings was put
up along the slow-to-develop Commercial Street – Nos 2 to 16, later numbered
2, 4, 6 and 8 - adjoining the rear of Venables’ corner building at 104-5 High
Street.
The handsome four-storey range in stock brick was to the designs of the City
architect Isaac Clarke (1800-85), a friend of the Venableses since the early
1850s. It featured Italianate stucco surrounds to the windows (similar
being added to the existing High Street frontage, as a stab at visual
uniformity), those on the first floor tall and round-headed. It was probably
at this time that the prominent flank wall of No. 105 at the corner was fully
rendered and a sign added the full height of the building with incised
lettering: ‘VENABLES Estabd. 1825 FURNITURE CARPETS SILKS DRAPERY.’,
signifying Venables’ expansion into commercial and domestic contract
carpeting, and furniture. A reflection of this was the opening in 1873 of
an extensive new furniture department in one of the deep new warehouses (No.
16, later No. 29) on the
opposite side of Commercial Street, north of the Baptist church, complete
with a wall-crane and loading doors at first and second floors.
They further extended the Commercial Street block to nearly 170ft, matching
Clarke’s design, taking in Nos 10-12 (now No. 4) and the sites of two small
houses on the south side of Commercial Place, in 1874. By then Thomas
Venables Senior was retired to a large house in Wanstead and by 1881 ninety-
seven men and women were employed in the business. That year the
furniture warehouse at No. 29 closed, though perhaps only because its location
was some distance from the main shop, as further expansion on the main site
took place in 1885, when 102 High Street was absorbed. By 1891, with both
the younger Venables brothers retired, and no further generations involved in
the trade, T. Venables & Sons became a limited company, with Thomas Eagle
Bye (1854-1932) as managing director by 1894 till at least 1914, though the
Venables family retained the freehold of the building.
Venables’ final expansion, in 1894, compensated for the loss of the furniture
outlet, when they occupied 10,000 sq ft of premises at 115 High
Street as a
furniture outlet (see xx). Its acquisition freed up space at the main corner
site for expanded displays of china, electroplate, glass and ironmongery, and
a full house-furnishing service, including furniture, floor coverings of all
kinds, china, electroplate, glass, and carpet-laying was available: ‘Houses
furnished throughout at London’s lowest prices’. House removals and
funerals were also offered, which may account for the firm’s stable yard on
the east side of Back Church Lane, corner of Batty’s Gardens, south of
Commercial Road, in the 1890s.
By the early 20th century, Nos 102-05 were showing their age, and were
demolished and rebuilt by C.R. Price of Bishopsgate in 1909, probably to the
designs of John Wallis Chapman (1843-1915), as a single building, with the
Commercial Street premises brought up to LCC standards with a new concrete
staircase at the north end. The staff accommodation was improved, with
the second floor of the whole premises devoted to women assistants’ rooms, the
third to men’s; in 1911 the 36 assistants had 26 rooms, including a dining
room each for the men and women The new building at 102-05 High Street,
which also took in the first four bays of the 1860s Commercial Street
building, is still extant. It is of orange-red brick to second and third
floors, the plain windows with thin raised stone keystones, the first floor
fully faced in cream faience with large shallow canted-bay display windows set
within semi-circular arches. The canted corner of the building has a bulls-eye
window set in a stone plaque topped with a pediment to the second floor, and
originally had a prominent semi-circular oriel to the first floor, destroyed
in the Second World War.
Venables finally went out of business in 1928, remaining at No. 115 (see
below) for a year after F.W. Woolworth acquired the whole building at 102-05,
making various alterations in 1928-30 and 1939, including an island vitrine in
the canted corner. The building was severely damaged during the war, the
1862 Commercial Street building burnt out and its frontage partly destroyed
but Woolworth’s remained trading on the ground and first floors of the 1909
building.
Essential repairs were carried out in 1948-51, and the upper floors of the
1862 building rebuilt and the frontage reinstated in 1955. Woolworth’s
offered the lease of their premises for sale in 1954 and moved out of 102-05
High Street in 1960 when their purpose-built store at 114-18 High Street
opened.
The shop has since been a shoe shop, a knitwear shop, and for the past ten
years sportswear, currently a branch of Sports Direct. The upper floors, known
after the war as Fairholt House, housed shipping and freight agencies, though
by 1970 the former drapers’ assistants’ floors had become the students’ union
of City of London Polytechnic; in 1972 the building was owned by Eastern
Avenue Investments, largely taken over by Guardian Properties (Holdings) Ltd
that year. In 2001 another property firm, Valson International, converted
the student union floors to offices, though educational use returned in 2010
with the opening there of the Al Ashraaf secondary school, which appears to
have closed recently (chk) following unfavourable Ofsted inspection in
2017. Other current/recent occupants and users include the College of
Advanced Studies, latterly operating only for venue hire, ‘Now Believe Glory
Time’, community of street evangelists, the Al-Awaal language school, Eynsford
College tutors and the chambers of barrister Anis Rahman, OBE. In April
2018 South Street Asset Management revealed a radical outline proposal to
demolish the 1860s and 1890s buildings at 2-6 Commercial Street, and replace
the whole site with 40,000 sq ft of offices in a 12- to 19--storey glass
building, the altered façade of the 1909 building retained at the corner. The
proposal includes landscaping the car park on the site of Spread Eagle Yard as
a public garden.
