Fieldgate Mansions
Contributed by Survey of London on July 2, 2018
Fieldgate Mansions is a substantial complex of tenement dwellings of 1903–7.
In the 1790s Thomas Barnes had created a 10ft-wide alley between New Road and
York (Myrdle) Street on this part of the London Hospital estate. Lined with
small one- and two-storey houses as Essex Street and renamed Romford Street in
1882, this was not a place that reflected well on the hospital and its closure
was contemplated. In 1897 Rowland Plumbe, the hospital’s surveyor, produced a
plan for the widening of Romford Street, intending to redevelop both sides all
the way down to Commercial Road with terraced houses, standard save for the
inclusion of top-floor workshops, an arrangement the propriety of which the
hospital’s estate sub-committee questioned. In any case, the Ministry of
Health thought the scheme left too little space at the backs and the LCC
refused permission for the road widening. Plumbe made revisions and,
exasperated by hold-ups, in January 1899 went to see Thomas Blashill, the
London County Council’s Superintending Architect, with Arthur Crow,
Whitechapel’s District Surveyor. LCC approval was immediately secured,
provided the new houses did not exceed 24ft in height.
Davis Brothers (Israel and Hyman Davis) were lined up as the developers, but
Plumbe now faced another unco-operative interlocutor in the person of Henry
Legg, Mile End Old Town’s District Surveyor. After further delay, the southern
part of the project was abandoned, land there having been compulsorily
purchased by the School Board for London (Myrdle Street School opened in
1905). The northern part was recast to extend to Myrdle Street and in 1903
Israel Davis (Hyman had died in 1902) projected tenements, gaining the London
Hospital’s approval for 80-year leases and for designs to be prepared by
Rowland Plumbe & Harvey. Work began in late 1903. Disagreement as to
whether the 24ft restriction applied to the eaves or overall height caused
further difficulty – Plumbe prevailed with the former interpretation. By the
end of 1905 the west side of Romford Street had been largely built-up. The
eastern and western rows and a final pair of blocks (Nos 33 and 34) on
Fieldgate Street west of Myrdle Street followed by 1907.
There were originally thirty-four blocks or sets of dwellings in all. Each had
eight one-bedroom flats, so was deemed suitable for thirty-two people, all the
flats having sculleries and WCs. Of red brick, variegated with stock-brick
bands in the upper storeys, the elevations are broken and significantly
enhanced by arched gablets over open staircases of fire-resistant (concrete)
construction. The first occupants were largely Jewish immigrants.
Leases were sold on, repairs were neglected by shady companies and their
agents (slum landlords), a war-time bomb took out Blocks 20 to 22 at the south
end of Romford Street, and by the 1950s overcrowding was recognised as a
problem. In 1961 Edith Ramsay organised a conference to consider the growth of
prostitution in the area. Better lighting was urged to deter casual sex in the
playgrounds between and behind the mansions, yards that were regularly bridged
by laundry. St Mary’s Ward, of which this area formed the western part,
elected three Communist councillors in 1964 and 1968. From 1972 the mansions
and nearby streets, particularly Myrdle Street and Parfett Street where many
properties had been left deliberately empty, attracted squatters, including to
all but the eastern row of Fieldgate Mansions. This occupation was inspired by
the London Squatters Campaign, formed in 1968 to rehouse families from hostels
or slums. With numerous local spin-offs this led to licensed squatting. Terry
Fitzpatrick, in particular, worked with homeless Bengalis as the Bengali
Family Housing Association to establish squatted tenure here and elsewhere in
East London. The Bengali Housing Action Group ('bhag'_ _means tiger in
Bengali) was formed in 1976.
At the request of Tower Hamlets Council, the Greater London Council took
action to outflank the squatters and to improve local living conditions. In
1979 David Levitt of Levitt Bernstein Associates (architects), Frances
Bradshaw and Geoffrey Morris prepared a feasibility study for the
rehabilitation and conversion of the remaining 256 flats in Fieldgate Mansions
for the Samuel Lewis Housing Trust. The Parfett Street Housing Action Area was
declared in 1983 through the GLC’s Area Improvement & Modernisation
office. Enabled by the Housing Act of 1974, this attracted improvement grants
and aimed to encourage existing residents to stay. The designation included
all of Fieldgate Mansions. Plans for conversions involved knocking through to
create some maisonettes to reduce crowding and to provide for some of the
larger families in what was referred to in a GLC Press Release as ‘a close
knit Bengali population’. Otherwise conservative in its treatment of the
buildings, the overhaul involved the introduction of balconettes and the
demolition of one block on the west side side of Romford Street for a tenants’
meeting room. The work was carried out to designs by Levitt Bernstein
Associates. Fordham Bros Ltd of Dagenham were the builders in the first two
phases of 1983–5, Thomas Bates & Son Ltd in the three later phases of
1986–91 that included the communal building and a playground.
First development of the London Hospital estate west of New Road
Contributed by Survey of London on July 2, 2018
Until the middle of the eighteenth century, Whitechapel’s ‘field gate’ marked
an edge of the built-up district at the west end of a footpath that led across
fields to Stepney, a route the other end of which was to become Stepney Way.
Once this path had been bisected by the New Road in 1754–6 its west end was
less rural and ripe for development. Buildings followed in two phases,
reflecting two landholdings. The western section, haphazardly built up from
1759 was initially called Baynes Street, after Edward Baynes, the landowner.
But he sold up a decade later and it soon came to be known as Fieldgate Street
through the older association. The eastern stretch was built up from 1787 as
Charlotte Street, part of the London Hospital estate and named in honour of
the Queen. In 1894 the whole road was unified and renumbered as Fieldgate
Street.
Cooke’s Close, so called in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, was a ten-
or twelve-acre holding to the east of Baynes's land and south of Whitechapel
Road properties on what by 1730 had become the Turner estate, from which it
was separated by a ditch. It was held from the manor with the Red Lion Farm
estate in the sixteenth century, descending from Sir Ralph Warren, mercer and
Lord Mayor, to Anthony Holmead, merchant tailor, in 1598, and on to the Heath
family. Cooke’s Close was mostly outside the parish of Whitechapel in Mile
End Old Town, but its north part did cover what became Charlotte Street (the
east end of Fieldgate Street) and the top ends of streets to the south that
are now Settles, Parfett, Myrdle and Romford streets. The entire Cooke’s Close
and Red Lion Farm landholding was sold to the Governors of the London Hospital
by Henry Knight and Bailey Heath in 1755 and Thomas Heath in 1772.
While Baynes and a successor, Anthony Forman, had taken action to develop
their land, the part of the London Hospital estate immediately eastwards
remained quiet until the 1780s. There was a four-acre tenter ground in its
south-west corner, where now the southern parts of Settles, Parfett and Myrdle
Streets run, present by the 1740s and occupied by John Cardell up to 1771. The
builders of Greenfield Street were said to be infringing on hospital land in
1773 and in 1782 John Trapp, a local ropemaker, offered to spend £1,000
building on what was called Bun House Field, possibly a reference to Matthias
Meacham’s tea gardens at the King's Head public house on the site of 32
Fieldgate Street. There was another ropewalk running east–west along the
hospital estate’s northern edge.
In April 1787 the hospital’s House Committee viewed ‘buildings now erecting in
the vicinity of the Tenter Ground’ (presumably Greenfield Street) and decided
to improve their rents by letting eight acres west of New Road on 61-year
building leases. The hospital itself was safely distant and the completion of
Greenfield Street seemed to demonstrate viability. John Robinson, the
hospital’s surveyor, was directed to prepare an elevation and plan of ‘small
streets’ in January 1788. Proposals for what were now lengthened to 99-year
leases were invited and the first lots were let in July.
Robinson had prepared a scheme for a rectilinear grid of narrow and mostly
long streets, to be packed with terraces of two- and three-storey houses
separated by small yards, scarcely gardens. Intended density was to be
compounded by unintended interstitial development. Robinson’s approach was not
repeated when development moved east nearer the hospital after 1810. Charlotte
Street was laid down as a continuation of Fieldgate Street through to New
Road, off of which Gloucester (Settles) Street and York (Myrdle) Street
branched down to White Horse Street (Commercial Road). These roads were to be
bisected by William (Fordham) Street. Building work progressed from the west
and north, principally through Thomas Barnes, the prolific local
bricklayer–builder,who had been active elsewhere on the hospital estate since
at least 1773. Robinson attempted to impose close control and Barnes was
reprimanded for using poor quality timber in June 1789.
Barnes took most of the north side of Charlotte Street in three parcels, the
westernmost in December 1789 having already built a row of thirteen two-storey
houses on an 118ft frontage (so only 9ft each). The next sections eastwards
had been similarly built up by Barnes with around twenty somewhat larger
houses by 1792. Barnes also laid out Charlotte Court to the rear, building
fourteen houses on its south side in the 1790s and another twenty-some on the
north side around 1810, all small, with one-room plans; living conditions here
were later documented as particularly poor. West of the eastern entrance to
the court was the Queen’s Head public house (see 83 Fieldgate Street), another
nod to Charlotte. The easternmost 111ft of frontage pertained to Thomas
Kincey, a New Road wheelwright–coachmaker.
Land on the west side of Gloucester Street went to John Langley, another
builder, in March 1790. He proceeded from north to south. The other lots
proved harder to place. Charles Wilmot, a surveyor based close by on Union
(Adler) Street where he had probably been involved in Holloway’s developments,
took a large plot bounded by Gloucester Street (west), Charlotte Street
(north), York Street (east) and William Street (south). He had begun building
on more northerly frontages by March 1793, working with John Stocker, a
Whitechapel carpenter. The early buildings that still stand on Parfett Street
and the west side of Myrdle Street were all part of Wilmot’s development.
Everything else further east and south, including the New Road frontage went
in due course to Barnes.
Wilmot, seemingly unrelated to the notorious Bethnal Green magistrate Davy
Wilmot, was born in 1756, the son of Zaccheus Wilmot, a coffee-house keeper
close to the Tower of London, who died in 1757. Charles Wilmot married Sarah
Chapman in 1778 and was paying land tax for a property on Prescot Street in
1779. He was active on Greenfield Street as a surveyor from 1781. From 1784 he
had a lease on two houses at the north end of Union Street on its east side.
Sarah died in childbirth in 1786. Wilmot remarried in 1792 and was living on
Greenfield Street by 1796 (at No. 82 in 1805) when he was advertising and
selling bricks made in Southend, Essex. This suggests a source for the early
stock bricks that can be seen in and around Parfett Street and Myrdle Street.
By 1800 he was selling Southend property. Wilmot died in 1815 and was buried
at St Mary Matfelon, Whitechapel.
The war years from 1793 were difficult for builders, and, as in many other
places, plans were compromised in terms of quality and space to make ends meet
by packing more houses in. Robinson evidently did not resist these densifying
changes which had no real effect on the hospital itself. Essex (Romford)
Street appears to have been an afterthought of the mid 1790s by Barnes. Wilmot
inserted Nottingham Place (Parfett Street) after 1803, running north off
William Street as a cul de sac, initially not opening into Charlotte Street
other than as a footway. Thomas Street and Roberts Place (either side of the
south end of Parfett Street) were squeezed in by Barnes after 1800. The
surviving houses of Nottingham Place (Parfett Street) and the west side of
York (Myrdle) Street seem all to have been built after 1800. By 1807 Wilmot
had built seventeen houses on the west side of York Street (of these 8–28
Myrdle Street survive) and Nottingham Place had been begun. All was complete
by 1812, including the survivors at 15–21, 37–53, 22–26 and 34–60 Parfett
Street, like those on Myrdle Street all in Mile End Old Town, not
Whitechapel.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Fieldgate Street and the streets to its
south, especially Plumber’s Row, Greenfield Street and Nottingham Place, made
up one of the areas in and around Whitechapel where Jewish immigrant
settlement was densest. On Fieldgate Street alone there were at least five and
possibly more small synagogues or _minyanim_in the period from the 1880s to
the 1930s.
