eastlondonhistory.com

It is fitting that a society dedicated to the preservation of historical buildings should be housed in one of the relics of the East End’s past. But it’s ironic that, though 37 Spital Square has survived, its foundations stand on the site of an even more ancient Spitalfields’ building, one which was demolished in an age when preservation of the past wasn’t even an issue.
The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) was founded by famed Victorian craftsman-designer William Morris (see box below), in 1877.
By the time SPAB took up residence in 37 Spital Square in 1981, the house was in a state of dereliction and in urgent need of repair. But the building had a fascinating past.
Spital Square was laid out in the 1720s and 30s on the site of the earlier Spital Yard. That in turn stood on the site of the Augustinian Priory and Hospital (hence the abbreviated name ‘Spital’). The hospital had been the first major building on the existing farmland, and was founded in 1197.
Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries signed its death warrant in 1539, and the area subsequently housed a mansion called Spittle House, on the site of the present St Botolph’s Hall. Tenements were built and demolished before a much grander development was undertaken in the early 18th century.
Spital Square was built to house a wealthy Huguenot silk weaver. The first owner was the man who built it – Peter Ogier III, the scion of a rich French Huguenot family. As a boy Peter was smuggled from France as a religious refugee. His family settled in Spitalfields and prospered as a silk merchant. In 1740, Peter was in his late twenties, and had probably just inherited the family fortune following his father’s death. This could explain why he made the decision to build such a substantial home.

Beneath that home lay the remnants of the old Augustinian hospital. The south transept of the Priory Church lies beneath what is now number 37. The basement of the house also includes a stone corbel, probably from the Priory, and the foundations are made from re-used medieval stonework.
A century later, an 1842 account mentions that “a large proportion of houses in the square are inhabited by silk manufacturers”.
During the first two decades of the 20th century the house was occupied by the Greensteins – Jewish immigrants from Russia, who made leather bags and purses on the site. After World War II it was occupied by umbrella company James Ince & Sons.
By the latter half of the last century, so much demolition and redevelopment had taken place that number 37 was the only Georgian house left of the old Spital Square.
SPAB took over the property just in time, saving the building and carrying out extensive repairs during the 1980s. Fitting then, that from this site the society now oversees the saving and repair of similarly impressive architectural fabric throughout the country.

George Peabody grew up on the other side of the world from the East End. And as he left school at 11, going to work to help support his seven siblings, it was unlikely that he learned much about London in the classroom either.
But the grinding poverty of the East End was to strike a chord with this extraordinary figure – and to set in chain a huge charitable venture that bears his name to this day.

US war with Britain 1812

Peabody was born in Danvers, Massachusetts in 1795, and had already been a working ‘man’ for seven years when he signed up as a volunteer in the United States’ war with Britain in 1812. While serving, he showed the first signs of the financial acumen that was to make his fortune, raising the financial backing to found the dry goods firm of Peabody, Riggs and Co.
In 1816, Peabody moved to Baltimore and the thriving business soon established branches in Philadelphia and New York. Seeking still wider business opportunities, Peabody travelled to England in 1827 to negotiate the sale of American cotton in Lancashire. In 1837, the year Queen Victoria ascended the throne, he made his home in London.

Great Exhibition 1851

In 1851, Britain staged The Great Exhibition of the World of Industry of All Nations in London. But despite the brave new world promised by the scientific and technical marvels on show in the spectacular Crystal Palace, England was in social turmoil.
London was paying a terrible price for the uncontrolled industrialization and sprawling urban growth. The homeless and destitute were increasingly seen on East End streets, while Charles Dickens scourged the heartless industrialists in works including Hard Times.
The East End has a couple of remnants of those days – one of Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged Schools and Burdett Road, named after benefactor Angela Burdett-Coutts.

Shaftesbury and Peabody

It was Shaftesbury who was the catalyst when the shaken Peabody asked what he could do to alleviate the suffering of his fellow Londoners. “Low-rent housing,” was the politician’s reply, and Peabody stumped up the at-the- time astonishing figure of $2.5 million. The trustees’ brief was to use the cash to benefit Londoners, who had to be poor, have moral character and be a good member of society.

First Peabody Buildings

And so the first of dozens of Peabody Buildings was raised in the East End. The buildings at 135-153 Commercial Road were for the housing of 40 low-income families, with shops, laundries and baths – undreamed-of luxuries at the time. The buildings still stand but, in a sign of the times, they are now privately owned.
In an 1831 letter to his nephew, David Peabody, George gave some clues to the reasons for his philanthropy: “Deprived as I was of the opportunity of obtaining anything more than the most common education, I am well qualified to estimate its value by the disadvantages I labour under in the society in which my business and situation in life frequently throws me,
and willingly would I now give 20 times the expense attending a good education could I possess it.
“But it is now too late for me to learn and I can only do to those that come under my care, as I could have wished circumstances had permitted others to have done by me.”
Nobody knows for sure how much the benevolent millionaire gave away, but there are recorded donations of more than $8 million, most of it in his own lifetime.
George Peabody died in London on November 4, 1869. At the request of the Dean of Westminster and with the approval of Queen Victoria, he was given a temporary burial in Westminster Abbey. His will said he should be buried in the town of his birth, Danvers, and the prime minster, William Gladstone, arranged for Peabody’s remains to be returned to America on the Monarch, the newest and largest ship in Her Majesty’s Navy.

Peabody gets freedom of City of London

Peabody was honoured on both sides of the Atlantic for his generosity. He was one of only two Americans ever to have been awarded the Freedom of the City of London (the other was General Dwight D Eisenhower.) A statute to George Peabody still stands in the heart of London’s financial district. In the United States, he was awarded the Congressional Medal in 1867. Commercial Road may have gone but, throughout London, the Peabody Trust provides affordable housing for 26,000 people.

With thanks to Elizabeth Schaaf, archivist of the Peabody Institute.

EARLY on Sunday September 2 1666, the wholesale destr-uction of London began.
A fire started in the house of Thomas Farynor, the king’s baker, in Pudding Lane.
Sparks from the burning bakehouse fell on hay and fodder in the yard of the Star Inn in Fish Street Hill and, just six hours later at 8am, fire was halfway across London Bridge.
The wooden buildings, stretching across the streets so their roofs almost touched, made ideal tinder for the fire.
Five days later an area measuring one-and-a-half miles by half a mile lay in ashes, 87 churches were razed along with 13,200 homes. The city that Shakespeare had known had gone for ever.
But little of this would be known today were it not for the work of a Whitechapel woman’s son, and for the safekeeping of the world’s most famous diary in Bethnal Green at the height of the blaze.
Samuel Pepys had been born in Fleet Street in 1633, the son of tailor John and Margaret, the sister of a Whitechapel butcher.
During the English Civil War, the young Samuel was sent to the Huntingdon countryside, much as East End kids were evacuated centuries later. But he returned to London to study at St Paul’s School.
Returning from Magdalene College, Cambridge, he entered the service of Edward Mountagu as his secretary and agent.

Pepys was also building a career in naval administration, winning government posts and addressing the Commons on maritime matters.
The year he started his diary, 1660, was a turbulent year. Charles II returned to the throne following Oliver Cromwell’s death two years earlier, and our knowledge of Restoration Period England is largely down to Pepys.
But it was his recording of the Great Fire that provides our most vivid image of the history of the time. He was one of the first on the scene and quickly hurried to Whitehall, returning with a royal warrant to allow houses to be demolished to create a fire break – Lord Mayor Bludworth had dithered, frightened that he would be held responsible for rebuilding costs.
As the fire spread, Pepys journeyed to Bethnall House in Bethnal Green, the home of his friend Sir William Ryder, and deposited his diary for safe-keeping.
The diaries ended in 1669, the year his wife Elizabeth died of a fever, and are only a brief snapshot of a long and successful career. Pepys went on to have two turns as Master of Trinity House in Stepney, a job as Secretary to the Admiralty, and he also became President of the Royal Society in 1684 and Member of Parliament for Harwich a year later.
But by 1669, although only 36, the terrible headaches brought on by his writing and re-reading made Pepys fear he was going blind, and he closed the book forever.
They might have been lost for good too, for Pepys wrote in an arcane code, perhaps fearful of political opponents.
But in 1825 the code was finally cracked, although it was not until 1970 that the entire diaries were published.
Pepys died on May 26 1703, aged 70, leaving no children. His only heir was his diaries.

Today, everybody knows where the Isle of Dogs is. The presence of the tallest building in Britain, most of the ex-Fleet Street papers and some of the priciest new housing in the country has seen to that.
The thing is, whether they come from Inverness or Islington, they’ll probably call it Docklands.
“Even now, try and say to someone you live on the Isle of Dogs, and they go ‘Where’s that?’” laments Christine, an Island dweller.
People have always known that the Island was a bit different, remote even from the rest of the East End.
Now, a new book, Docklands – Cultures in Conflict, Worlds in Collision*, looks at the history of this idiosyncratic chunk of Tower Hamlets, what makes it unique, and how a self-contained, isolated area dealt with the upheaval of the biggest urban regeneration project in British history.
Author Janet Foster starts with the background history of the Island and how despite its hundreds of years of habitation, most particularly the boom years between 1800 and the start of this century, many Londoners passed by, with no idea of the Island’s existence.
Local disenchantment
All that was to change in 1981 with the foundation of the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC). Something needed to be done to rejuvenate 5,100 moribund acres in the heart of London, that was for sure. Whether it was done right depends on your point of view.
As the Canary Wharf development gathered pace, local disenchantment set in.
“The people on the Isle of Dogs started to realise this glossy utopia was not for them,” comments one local woman.
One protest march showed the depth of feeling. In May 1986, hundreds dressed in black and carried a coffin down the streets, mourning the death of their community. Their destination was Canary Wharf where a symbolic burial took place.
An incoming businesswoman could see the problem. “This is the first time since the dock wall went up in 1800 that the area has been open to the public,” she commented.
And it wasn’t just the Islanders who felt railroaded by the furious and sometimes insensitive development. Rich-ard Rogers, himself a modernist and architect of the Lloyds Building, Stansted Air-port and the Pompidou Centre in Paris described the development as “a hymn to greed”.
“The tragedy is immense,” wrote D Widgery in 1991, in Some Lives, A GP’s East End.
“Docklands was the world’s choicest building site… an area larger than the city of Venice. It didn’t need to become a jumble lot of giant offices at the whim of land prices driven dizzy by speculation and recession.”

Even the former chairman of the LDDC, Sir Christopher Benson, admits the new authority made big mistakes with a population which had recently had the trauma of having its core industry, dockwork, entirely swept away.
Demoralised people
“There’s no shortage of hard-working people in Docklands, but they’d been utterly demoralised,” he said.
“We failed to discover how deep was that desolation. We just regarded them as people who didn’t understand what we were about. Perhaps we should have started with community feeling on the board.”
The contrasts were the hardest thing for many Islanders to take. As redundant land was sold off as prime development real estate, and the Govern-ment poured in millions of pounds in grants, many campaigned in vain for cash to be spent on their decaying council properties.
Foster spent most of the Nineties collecting the material for her book.
In the meantime much more has been swept away and big business seems to dominate the Island more and more. The LDDC has gone but there’s probably another seven years of development to come.
But the overwhelming feeling from reading this book is one of sadness. Not just from what has gone – the Island had to change and be rebuilt – but at what could have been.

Docklands – Cultures in Conflict, Worlds in Collision
by Janet Foster.
Published by UCL Press, ISBN 1-85728-274-4, price £14.99.

THE East End suffered badly from bombs in the Second World War, Stepney worse than most. And what the Luft-waffe’s bombs didn’t flatten was to meet its fate at the hands of developers’ wrecking balls in the 1960s.
But take a walk down past Stepney Green, pass by Ben Jonson Road, and cut down the tiny stretch of Stepney High Street and you come to St Dunstan’s Church.
Suddenly you get a sensation of how the old village of Stebenhethe must have looked in the hundreds of years before it was swallowed in the eastward sprawl of the City.
The medieval church stands on a winding stretch of road, quaint and countrylike amidst the regimented grid of modern roads. Look at the pictorial map of Stepney, drawn in 1681, and compare it with the modern A-Z layout, and the reason becomes clear.
Amid massive redevelopment, the church – the heart of the ancient village – survives untouched, as it was hundreds of years ago.
It’s all the more remarkable as St Dunstan’s is by the far the oldest church in the borough. It dates from not long after Stibba, the Saxon warrior who gave Stepney its name, first landed.
Three millennia
Before Stibba’s Hythe, meaning landing place, became Stybbanhythe, then Stibenhede, and afterwards Stebenee, there was a church there. In this fast-changing world, it’s amazing to reflect that in January next year, Stepney will have been in existence through three millennia.
And for hundreds of years after its foundation, St Dunstan’s remained the sole church standing to the east of the City gates.
In fact, Stepney can lay claim to being the first of the Tower Hamlets. Shoreditch and Aldgate were hard by the walls of the City itself – suburbs in modern parlance – but Bow didn’t get its own church till 1311, and the famous White Chapel had only been built a hundred years before that.

With its enviable position as an established village amidst the Essex countryside, Stepney became popular and fashionable. It was thriving and prosperous, with a rich mix of farmers, millers, silk weavers, coopers, brewers and throwsters – the men and women who made the silk thread into yarn.
And in 1299, the good burghers of Stepney included the Lord Mayor of London, Henry le Waleys, emphasising the hamlet’s status as a rural retreat for the wealthy Londoner.
In the Middle Ages, parliament would tour, sitting in different halls in London. And so it was in 1299 that Stepney became, briefly, the home of the mother of parliaments.
And it could offer stiff competition to modern-day Mayfair for its sprinkling of nobs and aristos.
By the early 1500s, Stepney was still a fashionable spot and, in 1503, the wife of Henry VII made a note in her account book, detailing her payments to the Duchess of Suffolk, for a stay in her house in ‘Stebenhath’.
And just to the east of St Dunstan’s stood the mansion of the Marquis of Worcester. Visit the adventure playground today and you’ll be standing on the same spot.
Excellent hunting
What made Stepney so popular with kings of the time was its access to the excellent hunting in the old forest which covered the land, and all within an easy hour’s ride of London.
There’s little of the rural idyll left today of course. Snatches were saved in the establishing of Victoria Park, and the open green space of Stepney Green itself.
But walk by St Dunstan’s on a warm summer’s evening. Let your eye travel along the curve of the road and settle on the medieval, tree-flanked church – and you can picture the village that was.

The East End has been renowned for many trades down the centuries – home for what was once the biggest docks on the planet, the sweatshops of the London garment trade, further back it was even the market garden for the neighbouring city.
Few people, though, picture Tower Hamlets as a refuge for those engaged in the quiet and introspection of religious devotion. But in the Middle Ages the area east of the City was home to many of London’s monasteries and nunneries.
Seeking escape from the noise and disease of the capital, the monks, sisters and friars had built their establishments in what was then countryside.
In the few short years between 1535 and 1540 they would all be swept away, as Henry VIII and his Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, set about dissolving the monasteries, casting their members into the streets and plundering their wealth for the royal coffers.
Henry changed the social and religious fabric of his country in the process. But in the decades beforehand, the old English social order of power vested in the competing religious orders, their fabulous wealth housed in the monasteries, was seen in miniature in Tower Hamlets.
Debauchery
The Augustinian, or Austin Friars, were a mendicant, or travelling order of friars, and had first come to England from the Continent in 1248. Augustine himself had become bishop of Hippo in North Africa in 396AD, after renouncing his earlier life of debauchery and self-indulgence. His order was founded on its leader’s fierce opposition to heresy.
By the Middle Ages the Augustinians had become a familiar sight on the streets of London, begging money to continue their charitable works. And by Henry’s time their work on the street had been so successful they had funded both a friary at Aldgate and an Augustine nunnery at Shoreditch.
St Benedict was born in 480 in North Italy, and this Catholic priest invented the whole monastic way of life.

By the Middle Ages, the Benedictine monasteries were largely responsible for the spread of education, the copying of religious scripts, and the teaching of reading in Europe – they founded several Oxford colleges.
The Benedictine nunnery at Bishopsgate was therefore a beacon of learning in the Dark Ages of medieval London.
The third major order vying for the charitable pennies of the East Enders of the time was the Franciscans.
Their founder, St Francis of Assisi, may have eschewed material possessions to live in poverty with the animals, but by the 1500s the Franciscan nunnery at Minories was very rich indeed, as its Greyfriars, or Friars Minor (from who Minories took its name) did their work of soliciting funds on the City’s streets.
Add to the list St Mary’s Hospital at Bishopsgate and St Mary Bethlehem – the notorious Bedlam hospital on the site of what is now Liverpool Street Station – and much of the wealth of the nation resided in Tower Hamlets.
Divorce
Henry had a pressing practical need to subvert the power of the Catholic Church – he was seeking a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and legitimisation of his new wife Anne Boleyn and their children, and the Pope was refusing to play along.
But just as important to such a proud king was that the London monasteries possessed wealth to dwarf his own treasury – and the leaders of those monasteries and nunneries looked to Rome for their authority, not to England’s King.
In 1530, the brown and black-habited mendicant friars were a common sight on the streets of the East End. In 1534, Cromwell’s Acts of Supremacy demanded that all religious orders pledge their allegiance to the Crown instead of the Pope, and made him head of the English Church.
Many agreed. Many didn’t and were executed. But by 1540 the monasteries were gone. Henry had rifled £140,000 in the process – a huge sum, the normal Crown income being only £100,000 a year.
The medieval Tower Hamlets, with its religious authority, was dead. From now on the power and wealth in the East End would rest with the merchants, as Britain’s new fleets brought riches back from all over the globe.

Currency seems to be constantly changing these days – two-pound coins, ever smaller notes. And if the politicians have their way we will soon all be spending euros, and pounds and pence will be a fond memory.
Of course, for many of us it doesn’t seem too long since shillings, ten-bob notes and half-crowns disappeared. And, as sterling looks set to disappear for good, we can reflect that it was only 30 years ago that all of Britain’s spending cash was minted in the borough.
The only legacy of Tower Hamlets’ job supplying the cash that oiled the wheels of the British economy is in the name – Royal Mint Street.
Previously the road, just below Tower Gateway DLR station, was known as Rosemary Lane. But by 1810, space was running short at the Tower of London, the Mint’s previous home. A new building was raised on ‘Little Tower Hill’, the road became Royal Mint Street, and manufacture of the coinage began.
Coins had been minted in the City since 825 and a dedicated building was constructed between the inner and outer walls of the Tower of London in 1300.
Up until then it had been difficult to control the coinage supply. Britain in Anglo-Saxon times was a collection of kingdoms, rather than a unified realm, with all the warlords issuing their own currency. There was huge confusion, with different denominations, and differing values of precious metals within each coin.
The new mint aimed to unify production. And there was summary justice for anyone who fancied knocking out their own coins – amputation of the right hand and castration.
Unsurprisingly, offences were rare and soon all money was struck in the new Royal Mint, under the supervision of the new Master Moneyer, William de Turnemire.

By the time Isaac Newton held the post, from 1699 to 1727, the job carried the title of Master of the Mint.
The mint was now a much more sophisticated operation, with artist-engravers working on sophisticated likenesses of the sovereign of the day, a far cry from the crude drawings on the medieval coins.
And there was a proliferation of new coins too – pounds, shillings, sovereigns, crowns and guineas. In previous times there had just been the humble penny, cast from precious metal of course, and then cut up into pieces to ease smaller transactions.
The eventual moving of the mint from the Tower was not just driven by lack of space. Even at this well-guarded fortress, the home of the Crown Jewels, security was a concern.
In 1798 a thief by the name of Turnbull succeeded in robbing the mint. At gunpoint, he relieved the shocked staff of 2,084 guineas (around one million pounds at current values). The purpose-built edifice in Wapping was far more secure.
But evidence seemed to have been unearthed of another plot, back in 1971. Excavations uncovered a tunnel leading from St Katharine Dock to the very walls of the Rosemary Street mint. At first the authorities thought they had unearthed an aborted robbery – until plans revealed it to be part of a feasibility study for a new pedestrian subway!
When the mint was born, the entire exchequer of Britain was worth around £20,000. By the late 1960s there was billions of pounds-worth of currency in circulation and, with decimalisation fast approaching, it was all going to need replacing.
Sadly, the Government decided the Wapping site was just not big enough, and to modernise and extend it would have been a costly operation.
So in 1968, the operation moved to Wales and, in 1975, the last coin was struck in Tower Hamlets.

The growth of the East End has been intertwined with the railways for over a century and a half.
Nowadays the emerging metropolis of Canary Wharf is fed by the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) and the Jubilee Line extension – soon the East End will be linked up with the Millennium Dome site in Greenwich.
Back in the last century, steam trains carried the goods from the docks and met the huge demand for passenger transport as people began to move around the country for the first time.
Railway companies sprung up almost overnight and huge amounts of venture capital were poured into the new business. It meant that there was often over-capacity – in addition to Bow Road Tube station there were another two Bow stations which have since closed.
The platforms of one are still visible above the Ferodo Bridge on Bow Road, though the line is now simply a spur connecting the Fenchurch Street and Liverpool Street lines.
The London and Blackwall Railway was the company covering most of the East End in early Victorian times, but its lines into the City terminated at the Minories.
In 1841, the company won the race to build the first rail terminus in the City of London.
Bizarrely though, until 1849, they didn’t use steam engines. Trains were dragged from Blackwall to the Minories by cable and had to reach Fenchurch Street by their own momentum. The return trip relied on gravity, needing just “a slight push by platform staff to get them started”!
Liverpool Street is the other surviving terminus. In 1862, the newly-formed Great Eastern Railway began looking for a site for a new City station, to extend from the existing terminus at Shoreditch.
The ground they chose had a notorious history in itself, standing on the site occupied by the Bethlem Hospital (Bedlam) till the late 17th century.

Ornate terminus
In typical Victorian style, the various companies competed to build the biggest, grandest and most ornate terminus – and Liverpool Street had to be better than Fenchurch Street.
The original plan was to build a huge edifice standing as high as the neighbouring Broad Street Station and stretching to London Wall. The authorities said no, which is why you will find Edward Wilson’s Victorian Gothic redbrick pile tucked down, its platforms well below ground level.
It opened in 1874, and was extended in 1891 to have more platforms than any other station in the world – until Victoria Station was enlarged in 1908.
Many of us will recall how dismal Liverpool Street was before the refurbishment of the eighties. That refit was a long time coming. During the winter of 1944, Labour MP Tom Driberg described it as “almost completely squalid”.
Poet Laureate John Betjeman had a different view, calling it “the most picturesque and interesting of London termini”.
The third great terminus was Broad Street Station. Immortal- ised in the title of the Paul McCartney movie nobody saw, Give My Regards To Broad Street, the station has become quickly forgotten since its demolition in 1984.
Yet in its day, it was London’s third busiest station, and was planned as the hub of a network linking London with the Midlands.
French design
Broad Street was built in 1865 as the North London Railway terminus – the design, by William Baker, made it look like a French town hall.
The original idea was that Broad Street would be the starting point for goods from the docks on their journey to the heart of England. But by the time the station was finished, it had moved from freight to people.
At the turn of the century, it ranked only behind Liverpool Street and Victoria in passenger volume, but its proximity to the former proved its downfall.
Broad Street lost its passengers to buses, trams and the Tube. The main station was shut in 1950 and spent its last years in sad dereliction. It was demolished in 1984 and replaced by the Broadgate development.