Great Eastern Railway from Liverpool Street to Iford. Mile End New Town
Great Eastern Railway Liverpool Street to Ilford
The Great Eastern Railway runs due east from Bishopsgate
Post to the west Spitalfields
Post to the east Three Colt Lane
Buxton Street
The east end the road was Luke Street and the west end was Spicer Street
Mile End New Town Workhouse. This was set up in 1783 and consisted of two houses and one room was used as a meeting-place for the Vestry. It was closed after the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the buildings were demolished and the site passed to the Church Building Commissioners in 1838
35 All Saints Vicarage is a plain brick house in the Gothic style. Now it provides a flat for the curate at Christ Church and 4 flats for other people.
All Saints’ Church. This was built in 1839 and the architect was Thomas Larkins Walker, a pupil of Pugin. In 1894 the spire was taken down. The church survived the Second World War of 1939–45 afterwards, the parish was joined to Christ Church, Spitalfields, and the building was demolished.
Hanbury Hall. This was All Saints church hall which built later in the 19th and which is now used as a community hall by Christ Church.
St. Patrick's R.C. Primary School. This was on Land to the west of the Mile End Workhouse purchased by trustees of the ’Spitalfields Catholic Charity School’. In 1833 a building was erected which provided for the’ education of poor boys and girls ....in the practice of the Roman Catholic Church’. The girls moved to different premises in 1857. A building on the site now is described as Old St. Patrick’s School and is a woodcarver'
Spicer Street British School. The Soup Ladling Society was formed in 1797 and planned to open schools. In 1811 a site on the north side of Spicer Street was leased, and schoolroom built. This opened in 1812 as a boys' school under a former assistant of Joseph Lancaster. However the payment of a 1d was too much for many families and attendance was low and debt remained so the school closed in 1840. Its site was taken by the National Schools of All Saints' Church.
All Saints' National School was founded in1840 and the lease transferred to the incumbent of All Saints ‘Church, and Robert Hanbury, brewer. New buildings showing bearing the date 1840 were erected in the same style as All Saints' Church.
Spitalfields Farm. Spitalfields City Farm was originally set up by volunteers in 1978. It was built on the site of a goods shed, part of the Great Eastern’s Pedley Street goods yard. The East London Railway Line from Whitechapel to Shoreditch ran underneath it. Rail line to the south of the site was built in 1876 and ran underground in a tunnel beneath the goods shed
Thomas Buxton Primary School
65 Prince of Wales Pub. Closed and demolished
37 Rose and Crown Pub. Closed and demolished
Cheshire Street
Known as Hare Street in the 18th when it ran alongside Harefields. The open ground was taken in 1839 for use by the Eastern Counties Railway.
St. Matthias Church. The church was set up in part of St.Matthew’s Parish and a Commissioners' church. The first incumbent refused to live in unhealthy district. Throughout the 1850s there was a close association with the London. City Mission, which supplied additional staff .The building, was in yellow brick by T.H. Wyatt and D.Brandon. In 1944 the parish was united with St.Matthew ad it was demolished in 1951.
City Pavilion. On the site of St.Matthais Church. Flats, workshops and offices built 1980 by Spiromega, behind gates on the street to its courtyard.
Great Eastern Goods Depot. Built by the Great Eastern Railway as a large 1860s goods depot, along the street. There is a single-storey gabled range of five units in bricks with a taller two-storey w range adjoining designed as multi-storey stables. This site is described as an engine shed in the 1870s and was a railway horse stable from the 1880s. There was a ramp o the West Side for the horses to go up and down by which has now been truncated but a first floor door to the street remains. The current occupants, Beyond Retro, claim the building was a ‘dairy factory’ because of the sloping floors inside.
Reflection House. Engelfields. The Great Eastern Horse Stable building was used in the 1980s for the manufacture of high quality pewter ware by Engelfields. This was the only firm of its kind in Europe producing pewter ware by traditional methods and said to have originated from the pewter casting business of Thomas Scattergood founded in 1700. . Since then the Company has had many names and in 1885, when U.J. Englefield took over, he was soon the only pewterer in London. He became Master of the worshipful Company of Pewterers in 1909. The Crown & Rose mark was put on all Englefield's products - syringes, ice cream moulds, World War II aeroplane models, candlesticks, handbells, facsimiles of historic items, ornaments and tankards. Engelfields were eventually taken over by Malaysian pewter specialists Royal Selangor who operate from a unit in Beckton.
73 Carpenters Arms Pub. Somewhere else that the Kray twins are said to have frequented.
88 Duke of Uke. Said to be London’s only banjo and ukulele shop.
89 The King & Queen Pub. This was a Truman’s house present here by 1771. It closed in 1996 and is now flats.
118-122. Coppermill Ltd. have been in the textile recycling business for over 100 years. They make industrial cleaning wipers and have a Royal Warrant for it
Repton Boys Club and Repton Boxing Club. Repton Boys Club, which was established in 1884 by Repton Public School as a way of giving support and encouragement to the young men in one of the country's poorest communities. It is now housed in the old Bethnal Green baths since 1978 having previously been in Bethnal Green Road.
Bethnal Green Baths. Former public baths and washhouse. Built 1898-1900 by R. Stephen Ayling and partly converted for flats 1999-2000 by Yeates Design Architecture. They were the first baths built in Bethnal Green under the 1897 Public Baths and Washhouses Act and it is a Two-storey red brick block with carvings of cherubs over the male and female entrances. The iron and glass bathhouse was demolished for a discreet, uninspired new wing but the utilitarian single-storey former washhouse survives, with its iron and glass lantern roof. Its provision of space for prams 'in which the washers usually bring their linen' was a noted improvement. It was built on the site of Hereford buildings tenements.
44 this was The White Horse Pub. It was there in 1818 and was rebuilt in its present form in 1860. It closed in 1917 and is now a shop. In 1821 it was selling beers from what is described as the Hanbury Brewery, one of the partners in what became Truman, Hanbury, and Buxton. It has kept its arcaded and shuttered front.
46 18th building with a later, glazed and shuttered shopfront. There are tripartite weaver's windows on the first and second floors
Dunbridge Street
Before the Second World War this was called London Street
89 Cavalier Pub. This was a Truman’s House previously called The Lord Hood. Demolished and replaced with flats.
Fakruddin Street
This was formerly Peace Street and renamed after a community activist and founder of Spitalfields Housing Association
The housing is the Shahjalal Estate, named after the Sufi Saint of Sylhet. It was built by the Spitalfields Housing Association.
Fleet Street Hill
This is/was a small street with granite setts leading from Pedley Street under one rail line and then to an enclosed bridge to Cheshire Street. Above it was one of the wagon hoists on the goods yard. It runs alongside a redundant railway embankment. As a through way it was changed by the building of the new East London Line.
Hare Marsh
Hare Marsh was the name of the area before any building began and was used as the name for this small side street. It is now reduced to a few yards of road which finishes at an iron fence.
Hemming Street
The road is made up of trading and light industrial units several of them connected with the London taxi trade which has traditionally had a base in this area.
South of the tunnel under the rail line the road is crossed by the obvious sites of rail tracks which went from goods yards to the Spitalfields Coal Drop viaducts to the east. A hydraulic hoist transferred trucks to and from viaduct level, and gave access to a number of sidings via wagon turntables.
26 Royal Standard pub. This dated from the early 19th and is now demolished.
Hereford Street
St. Matthews Rectory. Built 1905 in a 17th style
St. Matthews Parish Hall. Built 1904 on the garden area of the previous rectory
Kelsey Street
Weavers Fields Community NurseryDrapers' City Foyer. This was Hague Street Board School by E.R. Robson opened in 1883. It was reorganised 1930 and after the Second World War as a primary school. It moved from the site in 1965. The building then became Weavers' Field School for maladjusted children. It is now Drapers' City Foyer formed in the 1990s with a partnership between the Drapers Company and Providence Row a major housing and homelessness charity. It is now run by East Potential, an economic and social regeneration charity and designed to provide temporary accommodation for young people who are homeless and in need of support.
Pedley Street
Pedley Street Goods Depot. This was here from 1875 until 1990. But By 1978 the railway lines to the site had been removed along with the sidings
Railway
Granary Signal Box. The first box was installed here in 1872 and was replaced in 1880 and again in 1899.
Granary Signal Box. This box controlled traffic in and out of Bishopsgate Goods Yard and was situated on the railway near the end of a turning off Dunbridge Street called Carlisle Road. This box had the very first power-operated installation in Great Britain, the frame being imported from the USA. An electro pneumatic frame it was installed in 1899 by McKenzie and Holland. It is said that this was the only box to ever have this system. This the box finally closed in 1966 and the frame is now in the National Railway Museu
Ramsey Street
Abbey Street British Schools. The Spitalfields and Bethnal Green British School was here on a site purchased in 1838. A day school opened in 1839 and a Sunday school in 1840. The day school was transferred to the School Board for London in 1883 and part of the Sunday school united with Hope Street Ragged School in 1884 – the rest becoming the sole tenants of the premises. The site was sold to the School Board for London in 1894 and the proceeds invested and as the Abbey Street Educational .Foundation makes grants. The buildings are now flats. They were probably built by William Wallen and faced a narrow alley. There was a central block for washrooms and rooms for master and visitors flanked by two large classrooms. The original cast-iron windows, iron truss roof and original joinery to the boys' classroom were removed on conversion. The infants' school, probably added in 1841, lies behind at right angles.
Selby Street
Coal drop viaducts. In the 19th until at least the 1970s the entrance to the coal drops and works around the line to Whitechapel was at the east end of this road. There were three sidings of the East London Railway in a brick lined cutting tunneling under the coal-drops.
St.Matthew’s Row
St.Matthew’s Church built in 1743 By George Dance, senior, to serve the new parish and in a spacious churchyard. It was remodelled in 1859-61 by T.E. Knightly, after a fire. The interior was gutted by incendiary bombs in 1940 leaving only the outer walls and the clock tower. In 1952 a temporary church was opened within the wall and it was rest reconstructed 1958-61 by J. Anthony Lewis and using Dance’s drawings. It was one of the Commissioners churches on a site bought in 1725 chosen to be near the dense population of weavers. Ebenezer Mussell, a trustee and vestryman, laid the foundation stone He gave a silver chalice and there is also a Parish Beadle's mace from 1690, engraved with the figure of the blind beggar and the names of the parish officials. The interior follow the parish's Anglo-Catholic tradition from the 19th set up by radicals Septimus Hansard and curate Stewart Headlam. The gallery is however, a cantilevered steel structure, with concave front. Furnishings are by a variety of young artists.
Churchyard. This was converted into a public garden by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association in 1897. Before that Dog-fighting and bullock hunting events were held on Sunday morning hundreds in a adjoining fields
Little watch house. This dates from 1754, for a watchman to guard against body-snatchers. It was extended in 1826 to house a fire engine.
Former St Matthew's National Schools. Built over vaults to ease pressure on the burial ground with aid from the Bishop of London and the Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church and from tithe rate. The National Society built the school on the corner of churchyard with burial vaults underneath in 1819. They suffered the stench of corpses on one side and a slaughterhouse on other and in 1854 the Master absconded. In 1859 the buildings were conveyed to the rector and churchwardens and it was in disrepair by 1879. T was closed after the rector refused to let the School Board for London use it and it was later occupied by the Parochial Charity School.
Infants' schools. Added in 1862 by Caesar A. Long. Converted for flats 1998-9
The Parochial Charity (Greencoat) School was founded in 1763 by voluntary subscription and various bequests. In 1879 they moved to the empty National school buildings
Town Hall. This stood opposite the church gates. It was built of Caen stone in 1851 by G.H. Simmonds and demolished in the early 1970s for housing. It was built for the Commissioners for Improving the Parish and was recognized by The Builder as 'one of the first kind’. It housed the clerk's office on the ground floor with a board room and committee room above
Granby Hall Day Centre
Underwood Road
St Anne’s Roman Catholic School. Girls from the Buxton Street School moved here in the 1850s and a site for a permanent school on the north side of what was Hunt Court was acquired and Marist Sisters came from France to take it over. In 1862–3 a convent and school were built in Hunton Court to the designs of Gilbert Blount. The school is a tall brick building on a semi-basement
St.Anne's Roman Catholic Church built 1855 with the presbytery to the east.
38 Infant Welfare Centre set up here, where free milk supplements were available to nursing mother, part of the Jewish Maternity Home...
24-26 Mother Levy’s Jewish Maternity Hospital. In 1895 Mrs Alice Model founded the Sick Room Help Society, concerned with maternal welfare and linked to 'Helps' which provided maternity nurses. The Sick Room Helps Society evolved into the Jewish Maternity Home opened by Mrs Bischoffstein in 1911 plus a Midwifery Training School. Old houses were demolished and a two-storey building erected with three maternity wards, an operating theatre and three annexes. It was extended between 1927 and 1928 and was renamed the Bearstead Memorial Hospital in memory of Lord Bearsted but the need for larger premises meant a move to stoke Newington after the Second World War. Stepney Council bought the buildings and established the Mary Hughes Centre and Day Nursery. This included an antenatal clinic, a day nursery and a hostel for nursery nurses, and a school treatment centre. This Centre closed in 1996, but the building continued in use. The buildings were passed to Peabody, who demolished them to build housing on the site.
Osmani Centre
Vallance Road
Formerly Baker's Row, and named after a late c19 clerk of the Whitechapel Union, responsible for the Workhouse Infirmary which stood at the southern end of the road and destroyed in air raids in 1940.
71 Earl Grey's Castle. This dated from around 1901 and was bought by Quaker philanthropist Mary Hughes in 1926 and renamed the Dew Drop Inn, converting it to ‘a place of rest and refreshment for the homeless’. Trade Union meetings took place here, and Sunday services for the Christian Socialists. It is now flats.
79 Rinkoffs, making beigels since 1911. Hyman Rinkoff’s handlebar moustache greets customers above the shop at first floor level.
110 Royal George. This was here in 1895 & earlier but rebuilt as part of the flats in the 1950s. It is now a café
114-118 Knowledge school. Potential black cab drivers need to have the knowledge
Hughes Mansions. Built 1952-4 by the Borough of Stepney. Red brick grouped on a staggered plan. They are on the site of the pre war group was built in 1928 by B.J. Belsher, Borough Architect. A plaque says the flats were named after social worker Mary Hughes the daughter of author Hughes of ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays.’ They were destroyed in 1945 by a rocket bomb 131 killed and 40 severely injured.
Houses. Between Selby Street and the railway line filling the site of the Spitalfields Coal Depot, in red and yellow brick, 1992 by Feilden
Spitalfields Coal Depot. In 1866 the Great Eastern Railway opened Whitechapel Goal Depot later renamed Spitalfields Coal Depot. It had six sidings on a spur viaduct south of the Eastern Counties Railway viaduct used to supply coal drops. Each arch was divided by a wall parallel to the railway tracks with a par of holes In the crown of the arch through which coal could be dropped. Each half-arch was let to a coal merchant. The whole viaduct of 50 arches, about a mile long and 70 ft broad, survived into the 1990s. In 1900 a second "loop" viaduct was built to serve the ‘ Spitalfields Hoist', a hydraulic wagon hoist which could transfer two trucks at a time. This worked until 1955. The coal depot closed in 1967.
Weaver’s Fields
Landscaped open land created in the 1970s by the removal of an area of early 19th two-storey weavers' cottages.
Weaving Identities by Pete Dunn, has steel figures on a mast carrying security cameras rising from a base of bricks laid in a warping woven pattern
Wood Close
Recorded in 1643 as a field 'new dug for brick' but built up with houses on both sides by the late 18th.
William Davis Primary School. Board School of 1900-1 by T.J. Bailey, serving a largely Jewish population. A classic three-decker. The school was built following the compulsory purchase and demolition of houses surrounding the site with no alternative accommodation was offered to the displaced owners. At first it was named Wood Close School. From 1902 more Jewish children enrolled at the school, and the building was hired in the evenings and weekends to the Jewish Religious Education Board for Hebrew and Religious Education classes. Fromm 1903 the building also began to be used as an evening continuation school to allow adult workers to improve their trade skills. At the outbreak the Second World War it was evacuated to Egham to escape bombing. In 1953 the school closed and re-opened in 1959, as St. Gregory the Great Secondary School. It then became St. Bernard’s Roman Catholic School and remained so until the 1980s. The building then became temporary accommodation for Swanlea School until 1993 and then a permanent site for William Davis Primary School which had begun, in the Osmani building,
Sources
British History online. Bethnal Green. Web site
Business Cavalcade of London
CAMRA City and East London Beer Guide
Clarke. Glimpses of Ancient Hackney and Stoke Newington
Clunn. The Face of London
Connor. Liverpool Street to Chingford
Connor. Liverpool Street to Ilford.
East London History Society. Newsletter
GLIAS Newsletter
Great Eastern Railway Journal special; summer 1989
London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Parks Leaflet
London Enyclopdiea
Lost Hospital of London. Web site
Nairn. Nairn’s London
Pevsner and Cherry. East London
Pevsner and Cherry. London North
Robins. North London Railway
TBIAGC A Survey of Industrial Monuments of Greater London
The Green
TourEast. Leaflet
The Great Eastern Railway runs due east from Bishopsgate
Post to the west Spitalfields
Post to the east Three Colt Lane
Buxton Street
The east end the road was Luke Street and the west end was Spicer Street
Mile End New Town Workhouse. This was set up in 1783 and consisted of two houses and one room was used as a meeting-place for the Vestry. It was closed after the passing of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the buildings were demolished and the site passed to the Church Building Commissioners in 1838
35 All Saints Vicarage is a plain brick house in the Gothic style. Now it provides a flat for the curate at Christ Church and 4 flats for other people.
All Saints’ Church. This was built in 1839 and the architect was Thomas Larkins Walker, a pupil of Pugin. In 1894 the spire was taken down. The church survived the Second World War of 1939–45 afterwards, the parish was joined to Christ Church, Spitalfields, and the building was demolished.
Hanbury Hall. This was All Saints church hall which built later in the 19th and which is now used as a community hall by Christ Church.
St. Patrick's R.C. Primary School. This was on Land to the west of the Mile End Workhouse purchased by trustees of the ’Spitalfields Catholic Charity School’. In 1833 a building was erected which provided for the’ education of poor boys and girls ....in the practice of the Roman Catholic Church’. The girls moved to different premises in 1857. A building on the site now is described as Old St. Patrick’s School and is a woodcarver'
Spicer Street British School. The Soup Ladling Society was formed in 1797 and planned to open schools. In 1811 a site on the north side of Spicer Street was leased, and schoolroom built. This opened in 1812 as a boys' school under a former assistant of Joseph Lancaster. However the payment of a 1d was too much for many families and attendance was low and debt remained so the school closed in 1840. Its site was taken by the National Schools of All Saints' Church.
All Saints' National School was founded in1840 and the lease transferred to the incumbent of All Saints ‘Church, and Robert Hanbury, brewer. New buildings showing bearing the date 1840 were erected in the same style as All Saints' Church.
Spitalfields Farm. Spitalfields City Farm was originally set up by volunteers in 1978. It was built on the site of a goods shed, part of the Great Eastern’s Pedley Street goods yard. The East London Railway Line from Whitechapel to Shoreditch ran underneath it. Rail line to the south of the site was built in 1876 and ran underground in a tunnel beneath the goods shed
Thomas Buxton Primary School
65 Prince of Wales Pub. Closed and demolished
37 Rose and Crown Pub. Closed and demolished
Cheshire Street
Known as Hare Street in the 18th when it ran alongside Harefields. The open ground was taken in 1839 for use by the Eastern Counties Railway.
St. Matthias Church. The church was set up in part of St.Matthew’s Parish and a Commissioners' church. The first incumbent refused to live in unhealthy district. Throughout the 1850s there was a close association with the London. City Mission, which supplied additional staff .The building, was in yellow brick by T.H. Wyatt and D.Brandon. In 1944 the parish was united with St.Matthew ad it was demolished in 1951.
City Pavilion. On the site of St.Matthais Church. Flats, workshops and offices built 1980 by Spiromega, behind gates on the street to its courtyard.
Great Eastern Goods Depot. Built by the Great Eastern Railway as a large 1860s goods depot, along the street. There is a single-storey gabled range of five units in bricks with a taller two-storey w range adjoining designed as multi-storey stables. This site is described as an engine shed in the 1870s and was a railway horse stable from the 1880s. There was a ramp o the West Side for the horses to go up and down by which has now been truncated but a first floor door to the street remains. The current occupants, Beyond Retro, claim the building was a ‘dairy factory’ because of the sloping floors inside.
Reflection House. Engelfields. The Great Eastern Horse Stable building was used in the 1980s for the manufacture of high quality pewter ware by Engelfields. This was the only firm of its kind in Europe producing pewter ware by traditional methods and said to have originated from the pewter casting business of Thomas Scattergood founded in 1700. . Since then the Company has had many names and in 1885, when U.J. Englefield took over, he was soon the only pewterer in London. He became Master of the worshipful Company of Pewterers in 1909. The Crown & Rose mark was put on all Englefield's products - syringes, ice cream moulds, World War II aeroplane models, candlesticks, handbells, facsimiles of historic items, ornaments and tankards. Engelfields were eventually taken over by Malaysian pewter specialists Royal Selangor who operate from a unit in Beckton.
73 Carpenters Arms Pub. Somewhere else that the Kray twins are said to have frequented.
88 Duke of Uke. Said to be London’s only banjo and ukulele shop.
89 The King & Queen Pub. This was a Truman’s house present here by 1771. It closed in 1996 and is now flats.
118-122. Coppermill Ltd. have been in the textile recycling business for over 100 years. They make industrial cleaning wipers and have a Royal Warrant for it
Repton Boys Club and Repton Boxing Club. Repton Boys Club, which was established in 1884 by Repton Public School as a way of giving support and encouragement to the young men in one of the country's poorest communities. It is now housed in the old Bethnal Green baths since 1978 having previously been in Bethnal Green Road.
Bethnal Green Baths. Former public baths and washhouse. Built 1898-1900 by R. Stephen Ayling and partly converted for flats 1999-2000 by Yeates Design Architecture. They were the first baths built in Bethnal Green under the 1897 Public Baths and Washhouses Act and it is a Two-storey red brick block with carvings of cherubs over the male and female entrances. The iron and glass bathhouse was demolished for a discreet, uninspired new wing but the utilitarian single-storey former washhouse survives, with its iron and glass lantern roof. Its provision of space for prams 'in which the washers usually bring their linen' was a noted improvement. It was built on the site of Hereford buildings tenements.
44 this was The White Horse Pub. It was there in 1818 and was rebuilt in its present form in 1860. It closed in 1917 and is now a shop. In 1821 it was selling beers from what is described as the Hanbury Brewery, one of the partners in what became Truman, Hanbury, and Buxton. It has kept its arcaded and shuttered front.
46 18th building with a later, glazed and shuttered shopfront. There are tripartite weaver's windows on the first and second floors
Dunbridge Street
Before the Second World War this was called London Street
89 Cavalier Pub. This was a Truman’s House previously called The Lord Hood. Demolished and replaced with flats.
Fakruddin Street
This was formerly Peace Street and renamed after a community activist and founder of Spitalfields Housing Association
The housing is the Shahjalal Estate, named after the Sufi Saint of Sylhet. It was built by the Spitalfields Housing Association.
Fleet Street Hill
This is/was a small street with granite setts leading from Pedley Street under one rail line and then to an enclosed bridge to Cheshire Street. Above it was one of the wagon hoists on the goods yard. It runs alongside a redundant railway embankment. As a through way it was changed by the building of the new East London Line.
Hare Marsh
Hare Marsh was the name of the area before any building began and was used as the name for this small side street. It is now reduced to a few yards of road which finishes at an iron fence.
Hemming Street
The road is made up of trading and light industrial units several of them connected with the London taxi trade which has traditionally had a base in this area.
South of the tunnel under the rail line the road is crossed by the obvious sites of rail tracks which went from goods yards to the Spitalfields Coal Drop viaducts to the east. A hydraulic hoist transferred trucks to and from viaduct level, and gave access to a number of sidings via wagon turntables.
26 Royal Standard pub. This dated from the early 19th and is now demolished.
Hereford Street
St. Matthews Rectory. Built 1905 in a 17th style
St. Matthews Parish Hall. Built 1904 on the garden area of the previous rectory
Kelsey Street
Weavers Fields Community NurseryDrapers' City Foyer. This was Hague Street Board School by E.R. Robson opened in 1883. It was reorganised 1930 and after the Second World War as a primary school. It moved from the site in 1965. The building then became Weavers' Field School for maladjusted children. It is now Drapers' City Foyer formed in the 1990s with a partnership between the Drapers Company and Providence Row a major housing and homelessness charity. It is now run by East Potential, an economic and social regeneration charity and designed to provide temporary accommodation for young people who are homeless and in need of support.
Pedley Street
Pedley Street Goods Depot. This was here from 1875 until 1990. But By 1978 the railway lines to the site had been removed along with the sidings
Railway
Granary Signal Box. The first box was installed here in 1872 and was replaced in 1880 and again in 1899.
Granary Signal Box. This box controlled traffic in and out of Bishopsgate Goods Yard and was situated on the railway near the end of a turning off Dunbridge Street called Carlisle Road. This box had the very first power-operated installation in Great Britain, the frame being imported from the USA. An electro pneumatic frame it was installed in 1899 by McKenzie and Holland. It is said that this was the only box to ever have this system. This the box finally closed in 1966 and the frame is now in the National Railway Museu
Ramsey Street
Abbey Street British Schools. The Spitalfields and Bethnal Green British School was here on a site purchased in 1838. A day school opened in 1839 and a Sunday school in 1840. The day school was transferred to the School Board for London in 1883 and part of the Sunday school united with Hope Street Ragged School in 1884 – the rest becoming the sole tenants of the premises. The site was sold to the School Board for London in 1894 and the proceeds invested and as the Abbey Street Educational .Foundation makes grants. The buildings are now flats. They were probably built by William Wallen and faced a narrow alley. There was a central block for washrooms and rooms for master and visitors flanked by two large classrooms. The original cast-iron windows, iron truss roof and original joinery to the boys' classroom were removed on conversion. The infants' school, probably added in 1841, lies behind at right angles.
Selby Street
Coal drop viaducts. In the 19th until at least the 1970s the entrance to the coal drops and works around the line to Whitechapel was at the east end of this road. There were three sidings of the East London Railway in a brick lined cutting tunneling under the coal-drops.
St.Matthew’s Row
St.Matthew’s Church built in 1743 By George Dance, senior, to serve the new parish and in a spacious churchyard. It was remodelled in 1859-61 by T.E. Knightly, after a fire. The interior was gutted by incendiary bombs in 1940 leaving only the outer walls and the clock tower. In 1952 a temporary church was opened within the wall and it was rest reconstructed 1958-61 by J. Anthony Lewis and using Dance’s drawings. It was one of the Commissioners churches on a site bought in 1725 chosen to be near the dense population of weavers. Ebenezer Mussell, a trustee and vestryman, laid the foundation stone He gave a silver chalice and there is also a Parish Beadle's mace from 1690, engraved with the figure of the blind beggar and the names of the parish officials. The interior follow the parish's Anglo-Catholic tradition from the 19th set up by radicals Septimus Hansard and curate Stewart Headlam. The gallery is however, a cantilevered steel structure, with concave front. Furnishings are by a variety of young artists.
Churchyard. This was converted into a public garden by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association in 1897. Before that Dog-fighting and bullock hunting events were held on Sunday morning hundreds in a adjoining fields
Little watch house. This dates from 1754, for a watchman to guard against body-snatchers. It was extended in 1826 to house a fire engine.
Former St Matthew's National Schools. Built over vaults to ease pressure on the burial ground with aid from the Bishop of London and the Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church and from tithe rate. The National Society built the school on the corner of churchyard with burial vaults underneath in 1819. They suffered the stench of corpses on one side and a slaughterhouse on other and in 1854 the Master absconded. In 1859 the buildings were conveyed to the rector and churchwardens and it was in disrepair by 1879. T was closed after the rector refused to let the School Board for London use it and it was later occupied by the Parochial Charity School.
Infants' schools. Added in 1862 by Caesar A. Long. Converted for flats 1998-9
The Parochial Charity (Greencoat) School was founded in 1763 by voluntary subscription and various bequests. In 1879 they moved to the empty National school buildings
Town Hall. This stood opposite the church gates. It was built of Caen stone in 1851 by G.H. Simmonds and demolished in the early 1970s for housing. It was built for the Commissioners for Improving the Parish and was recognized by The Builder as 'one of the first kind’. It housed the clerk's office on the ground floor with a board room and committee room above
Granby Hall Day Centre
Underwood Road
St Anne’s Roman Catholic School. Girls from the Buxton Street School moved here in the 1850s and a site for a permanent school on the north side of what was Hunt Court was acquired and Marist Sisters came from France to take it over. In 1862–3 a convent and school were built in Hunton Court to the designs of Gilbert Blount. The school is a tall brick building on a semi-basement
St.Anne's Roman Catholic Church built 1855 with the presbytery to the east.
38 Infant Welfare Centre set up here, where free milk supplements were available to nursing mother, part of the Jewish Maternity Home...
24-26 Mother Levy’s Jewish Maternity Hospital. In 1895 Mrs Alice Model founded the Sick Room Help Society, concerned with maternal welfare and linked to 'Helps' which provided maternity nurses. The Sick Room Helps Society evolved into the Jewish Maternity Home opened by Mrs Bischoffstein in 1911 plus a Midwifery Training School. Old houses were demolished and a two-storey building erected with three maternity wards, an operating theatre and three annexes. It was extended between 1927 and 1928 and was renamed the Bearstead Memorial Hospital in memory of Lord Bearsted but the need for larger premises meant a move to stoke Newington after the Second World War. Stepney Council bought the buildings and established the Mary Hughes Centre and Day Nursery. This included an antenatal clinic, a day nursery and a hostel for nursery nurses, and a school treatment centre. This Centre closed in 1996, but the building continued in use. The buildings were passed to Peabody, who demolished them to build housing on the site.
Osmani Centre
Vallance Road
Formerly Baker's Row, and named after a late c19 clerk of the Whitechapel Union, responsible for the Workhouse Infirmary which stood at the southern end of the road and destroyed in air raids in 1940.
71 Earl Grey's Castle. This dated from around 1901 and was bought by Quaker philanthropist Mary Hughes in 1926 and renamed the Dew Drop Inn, converting it to ‘a place of rest and refreshment for the homeless’. Trade Union meetings took place here, and Sunday services for the Christian Socialists. It is now flats.
79 Rinkoffs, making beigels since 1911. Hyman Rinkoff’s handlebar moustache greets customers above the shop at first floor level.
110 Royal George. This was here in 1895 & earlier but rebuilt as part of the flats in the 1950s. It is now a café
114-118 Knowledge school. Potential black cab drivers need to have the knowledge
Hughes Mansions. Built 1952-4 by the Borough of Stepney. Red brick grouped on a staggered plan. They are on the site of the pre war group was built in 1928 by B.J. Belsher, Borough Architect. A plaque says the flats were named after social worker Mary Hughes the daughter of author Hughes of ‘Tom Brown’s Schooldays.’ They were destroyed in 1945 by a rocket bomb 131 killed and 40 severely injured.
Houses. Between Selby Street and the railway line filling the site of the Spitalfields Coal Depot, in red and yellow brick, 1992 by Feilden
Spitalfields Coal Depot. In 1866 the Great Eastern Railway opened Whitechapel Goal Depot later renamed Spitalfields Coal Depot. It had six sidings on a spur viaduct south of the Eastern Counties Railway viaduct used to supply coal drops. Each arch was divided by a wall parallel to the railway tracks with a par of holes In the crown of the arch through which coal could be dropped. Each half-arch was let to a coal merchant. The whole viaduct of 50 arches, about a mile long and 70 ft broad, survived into the 1990s. In 1900 a second "loop" viaduct was built to serve the ‘ Spitalfields Hoist', a hydraulic wagon hoist which could transfer two trucks at a time. This worked until 1955. The coal depot closed in 1967.
Weaver’s Fields
Landscaped open land created in the 1970s by the removal of an area of early 19th two-storey weavers' cottages.
Weaving Identities by Pete Dunn, has steel figures on a mast carrying security cameras rising from a base of bricks laid in a warping woven pattern
Wood Close
Recorded in 1643 as a field 'new dug for brick' but built up with houses on both sides by the late 18th.
William Davis Primary School. Board School of 1900-1 by T.J. Bailey, serving a largely Jewish population. A classic three-decker. The school was built following the compulsory purchase and demolition of houses surrounding the site with no alternative accommodation was offered to the displaced owners. At first it was named Wood Close School. From 1902 more Jewish children enrolled at the school, and the building was hired in the evenings and weekends to the Jewish Religious Education Board for Hebrew and Religious Education classes. Fromm 1903 the building also began to be used as an evening continuation school to allow adult workers to improve their trade skills. At the outbreak the Second World War it was evacuated to Egham to escape bombing. In 1953 the school closed and re-opened in 1959, as St. Gregory the Great Secondary School. It then became St. Bernard’s Roman Catholic School and remained so until the 1980s. The building then became temporary accommodation for Swanlea School until 1993 and then a permanent site for William Davis Primary School which had begun, in the Osmani building,
Sources
British History online. Bethnal Green. Web site
Business Cavalcade of London
CAMRA City and East London Beer Guide
Clarke. Glimpses of Ancient Hackney and Stoke Newington
Clunn. The Face of London
Connor. Liverpool Street to Chingford
Connor. Liverpool Street to Ilford.
East London History Society. Newsletter
GLIAS Newsletter
Great Eastern Railway Journal special; summer 1989
London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Parks Leaflet
London Enyclopdiea
Lost Hospital of London. Web site
Nairn. Nairn’s London
Pevsner and Cherry. East London
Pevsner and Cherry. London North
Robins. North London Railway
TBIAGC A Survey of Industrial Monuments of Greater London
The Green
TourEast. Leaflet
Comments
Thanks again,
Tony Wetjen.