eastlondonhistory.com

Robin Hood Gardens likely to be demolished: The decision by culture minister Margaret Hodge not to list Poplar’s Robin Hood Gardens as ‘a building of special architectural signficance’ brings the demolition of the 1970s’ Brutalist block a stage closer. Alison and Peter Smithson’s housing estate, completed in 1972, is a masterpiece to some, with its ’streets in the air’ concept. Alan Powers, Chairman of the 20th Century Society, calling it a “unique place”. It’s a bit tougher to find fans among people who actually live there - I did an admittedly brief vox pop of locals a few years back and comments ranged from ‘horrible’ to ‘really horrible’ to ‘we’re trying to be rehoused to somewhere with a garden’. There is a campaignto get Robin Hood Gardens listed as a historical landmark in order to save it from destruction. However, English Heritage has failed to back the proposal.

You can read more about Robin Hood Gardens here, and there are some great pictures of Robin Hood Gardens on flickr. See what you think. Robin Hood Gardens likely to be demolished … good idea or bad?

When Scotland met Poplar: Two hundred years ago, the area east of the City was still farmland and market gardens, with villages such as Bow and Bethnal Green, Stepney and Limehouse among the fields. Ribbon developments were snaking out along the main highways, such as the Whitechapel and East India Dock Roads, and soon the green would be engulfed by a tide of concrete, mortar and brick.

To the people living there in rural Middlesex, soon to become ‘East Enders’ it must have seemed like a new street was thrown up every week. Perhaps it was a little quicker than that - in 1801 there were 900,000 Londoners, by 1901 more than six million. There was just one problem for the builders racing to erect terraces to house the new workers - finding unused names for all their new streets. Sometimes it was children’s names, famous poets, sometimes places from far flung corners of the Empire, and sometimes towns from across the British Isles. Dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases were plucked from the shelf and pored over in a desperate search for new names. Take a trip out along the Romford Road to Ilford and you see one estate where the builders appear to have given up in despair. You drive past 1st Avenue, 2nd Avenue and all the way through to 8th … hardly names to stir the imagination.

When Scotland met Poplar: And one little part of Poplar, delimited by the Docklands Light Railway to the west, the Limehouse Cut to the north, the River Lea to the east and the East India Dock Road to the south, became forever Caledonia. For the many Scots who headed south to work in the docks, it must have been strange to see names of rural Scottish villages, rivers and valleys cut and pasted onto the templated rows of east London streets. This area had been the Bromley Marsh, but with the development of the riverside, and particular the construction of the East India Docks at Blackwall in 1802, the scrubby land suddenly had potential … though it was a long time before it was realised.

In 1813, the whole area was bought by ‘contractor and excavator’ Hugh McIntosh from the East India Company, his main employer. It was still rural for a long while, with maps of the time showing ‘McIntosh’s Farm’ at the northern end of McIntosh’s Lane. By 1849, his son David seemed to have had an eye on the future sprawl of London east towards and then beyond the River Lea, having a clause on road widening inserted in the Commercial Roads Continuation Act, which was working its way through Parliament.

But it was only with Hugh McIntosh’s grandson, another David, that the streets started going up. By now, the docks and factories of Canning Town were creating a demand for workers’ housing, and Bromley Marsh was an island of green amid the new building. Perhaps the McIntosh’s took their Scottish antecedents as inspiration for the naming, though the estate proved too big for one firm. In 1873, McIntosh sold the land east of 375 East India Dock Road to a manufacturing chemist called John Abbott, of Forbes & Abbott. That firm had its base at the Iceland Wharf Works in Old Ford Road.

Abbott continued the naming convention begun by McIntosh, with a web of streets bearing Scottish place names from A to Z. It wasn’t quite as neat as that - there weren’t 26 streets, and the letter ‘Z’ proved a problem, as detailed below. But within a few years the streets were up, and the two developers were happily sold out and collecting ground rent. Mr Abbott, in an expression of ego, had named the longest road in the development after himself. The area was radically changed in the 1890s with the construction of the Blackwall Tunnel, and the Approach Road would later slice right through this little Caledonia. And to latterday residents of the Aberfeldy Estate, the green fields of Perthshire must have
seemed very far away.

When Scotland met Poplar: those street names … and where they come from

Aberfeldy
Lying on the River Tay in Perthshire, the town features in Robert Burns’s poem ‘The Birks of Aberfeldy’. With a population of less than 2000 people, it has an 18-hole golf course and the Black Watch Memorial.

Ailsa
From Ailsa Craig, an island formed by the plug of an extinct volcano, lying 10 miles west of Girvan in the River Clyde. Ailsa is uninhabited though it has a lighthouse.

Blair
From Blair Atholl, a little town in Perthshire, a rare flat area in the midst of the Grampian Mountains, and recently incorporated into the Cairngorms National Park. The town’s most famous feature is Blair Castle.

Culloden
A village three miles east of Inverness and site of the Battle of Culloden in 1746 - the final meeting of the French-backed Jacobites and the Hanoverian British Government during the Jacobite Rising. Protected by the National Trust for Scotland.

Dee
The River Dee rises in the Cairngorms and flows to the North Sea at Aberdeen, via Braemar, Ballater, Aboyne and Banchory. A stunningly beautiful area of the Highlands.

Ettrick
In the county of Selkirk, in the Scottish borders. Once covered by the Royal Ettrick Forest, now farming country.

Findhorn
A village in Morayshire and on the southern side of the Moray Firth. Traditionally a fishing village, it’s now arguably most famous to outsiders for the Findhorn Foundation spiritual community.

Leven
A seaside town in Fife, which has suffered badly from the closure first of the coal mines then the docks. Has two golf courses.

Lochnagar
A mountain in the Grampians range, Beinn Chiochan in Gaelic. Setting for the story ‘The Old Man of Lochnagar’ written by Prince Charles for his little brothers Andrew and Edward. The area produces Lochnagar malt whisky.

Oban
Seaside resort on the Firth of Lorn, on Scotland’s west coast. Flanked by the mountains of Morvern and Ardgour. Attractions include the Cathedral of St Columba, a brace of castles and the Oban Distillery.

Spey
The fastest flowing river in Scotland, and the second longest. Famed for salmon fishing and the number of whisky distilleries along its banks.

Teviot
A river in the Scottish Borders, flanking Dumfries and Galloway and then flowing north past Hawick and Roxburth to Join the River Tweed near Kelso.

Zetland
Arguably, our builder cheated a little here. After all, you try to find a place in Scotland beginning with the letter ‘Z’. ‘Zetland’ is the archaic spelling of ‘Shetland’, the far flung archipelago way off the north east coast of Britain.

Tags: East End of London

Depending on your point of view, the gentrification of the Isle of Dogs is a vital shot in the arm for a decaying chunk of post-industrial Docklands, or an insensitive example of the way money comes first in the 21st
century – riding roughshod over a solid and established working class community.
But the yuppie homes of the 1980s weren’t the first attempt to entice the middle classes onto the Island. One hundred and fifty years ago, an ambitious builder and entrepreneur was trying to transform the Isle of Dogs into the Belgravia of east London.
Transforming London
William Cubitt was born in Dilham, Norfolk in 1785, with brother Thomas following three years later. They weren’t a pair born to greatness – their father was a poor miller, and William did well, in 1800, to secure an apprenticeship to a cabinet maker and joiner. Thomas had an equally mundane, if secure, trade mapped out, as a ship’s carpenter.
Yet the two of them were to play a huge role in transforming London from the still small city of Stuart England into the vast metropolis it is today.
Although Thomas was the younger, he had the more dramatic career. He had moved from carpentry to engineering and then started building in around 1815.
The 1820s were very productive for Thomas. Working with the Marquis of Westminster, who owned vast tracts of useless bogland to the south-west of the City of Westminster, he began designing, laying out and building streets, squares and whole districts.
His genius lay in forming the first true building firm, employing a wide range of
specialised craftsmen and architects (including another brother, Lewis) on his staff in order to enable the company to provide a one-stop shop.
His extraordinary energy produced the new suburbs of Belgravia, Pimlico, Barnsbury and much of Bloomsbury. Elsewhere, he built Brighton’s huge Kemp Town development, and worked with Prince Albert on Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.
Waste not want not
Belgrave Square was Thomas’ piece de resistance. Ironic, then, that this ‘future residence of the highest class of the fashionable world’ was built on waste from the East End! The energetic Thomas was building St Katharine Dock at the same time, and used the spoil carved out of the river bed to make the posh square’s foundations.
William was equally innovative. In 1807 he had, in a nod to his roots, patented what became the standard design for windmill sails. Then, in 1812, he turned his hand to engineering, specialising particularly in waterways and canals. He built railways and, like his brother, he was to work with the Prince Consort – in his case as consultant engineer on the Crystal Palace. And with a keen utilitarian sense that prisoners should be productive too, he invented that brutal mainstay of the Victorian penal system, the prison treadmill.

But if he had emulated
his brother’s inventiveness, William hadn’t accumulated the same wealth. William decided he too would capitalise on the middle class demand for villa
homes by developing an unexploited patch of the capital.
Back in the 17th century, Christopher Wren had admired the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, though more for its views than its hinterland. He declared it the best spot from which to view the spectacular Greenwich Hospital.
Thomas decided the river views would make it the ideal focus of a villa community. There was only one problem – the resolutely plebeian community. And, ironically, they were outsiders too.
Social reformer Beatrice Webb wrote about the locals at the time. “They are for the most part countrymen imported some years back to break a combination of corn porters” [shipped in to break a strike, in other words].
Stubborn
Even then, she wrote that the Islanders were individuals, different: “Cut off by their
residence from the social
influences of the East End, they have retained many traits of provincial life.”
Most important, they were stubborn. They were not to be moved. The middle classes, meanwhile, sniffed the prevailing winds and proved resis-
tant to Thomas’ marketing attempts. The pragmatic entrepreneur instituted Plan B and built timber wharves, sawmills, cement factories, brickfields, roads and a church… and
terraces of artisans cottages.
Thomas died in 1861 as
Lord Mayor of London, but his work was completed in the 1880s. Sadly, most was swept away by World War II.
But just 40 years later, the architects would move in again, and Cubitt Town would attempt to go upwardly mobile once more.

Ever wondered how your road got its name? If, like East End Life, you live in Mulberry Place and Clove Crescent, it doesn’t take much working out – Docklands is peppered with roads named after the area’s maritime past and the pungent delicacies unloaded on its quays.
Go back a century or two and you can still work out the provenance of most of the East End’s road names. Commercial Road and Street reflect the optimism and delight in trade of the Victorians, these routes carrying the goods from the port to the rest of the country.
Cable Street, meanwhile, was not only the site of cable and rope works from the Middle Ages on, the road itself was a cable in length, a cable being a now-defunct measurement.
But many of the names of places and streets are rooted in the Middle Ages or even back to Roman times, and take some working out. Stepney dates back to the Saxon settlement of a character called Stebba and the name is a corruption of “Stebba’s landing place”.
Another Saxon settlement was “Blida’s Corner”, which somehow became Bethnal Green. The Isle of Dogs is considerably more recent, first appearing on maps in 1588. Nevertheless, there is no definitive answer as to the origins of the name – a popular theory is that Henry VIII kept his hunting dogs there in the days when the island was wild countryside.
Some of the East End hamlets’ names make perfect sense. Bow was the site of a bow-shaped bridge, Old Ford was the lowest point on the tidal River Lea where the Romans would cross on their way to their city of Colchester. And Mile End was a country spot where Londoners would go to take the Sunday air – conveniently sited just at the end of a mile’s walk from the City.

As for Poplar, before it was drained and developed the area was marshland, and dotted with poplar trees.
Limehouse got its name from the 14th Century lime kilns or oasts which grew up round the docks, and Spitalfields was originally the farm land belonging to the medieval priory and hospital of St Mary’s ’spital fields. The name lived on in Whitechapel’s St Mary’s underground station, closed in the early part of this century.
It wasn’t the only legacy of the old abbeys and priories. Minories recalls a “minor” order of the nuns of St Clare, established in 1248 by the Earl of Lancaster. And Bishopsgate was the site of the old Bishop’s Gate from Essex into the City.
Many of the road names mark particular points in East End history. Royal Mint Street was the home of the mint for around 50 years in the 1800s. Previously, and for some years after, the royal coin was struck in the Tower of London.
And Burdett Road marks the philanthropic contributions of Victorian do-gooder Angela Burdett-Coutts. Less celebrated is her fellow philanthropist William Cotton, though he actually paid for the land. Cotton himself is remembered in Cotton Street, Poplar.
Two hundred years back, Fairfield Road in Bow was a field where a regular fair was held – though it was eventually banned due to rowdiness and excessive drinking.
One of the most famous East End streets probably has the most deceptive name. Roman Road, with a name that seems to date back two millennia, was in fact called Drift Street until a century or so ago.
An archeological dig in the mid-1800s uncovered remains near Drift Street, suggesting the old road to Colchester may have lain nearby.
The story caught the popular imagination and Roman Road was born.

Most of us think of history as something we dig out of books and located firmly in the past. But the streets of the East End are steeped in their own history. Take a closer look at your own road, for example – you might be surprised at what you see.

Take Fairfield Road in Bow. Today it’s the home of the Bow Quarter flats, and the final destination for the Number 8 bus. But a century ago Bow Quarter was Fairfield Works, the largest factory in Europe, and the home of Bryant and May matches.

Bryant and May factory

Bryant and May had bought the patent rights of the process for making safety matches from a Quaker, the Swedish inventor Johan Lundstrom, in 1852 and the Fairfield Works were built in 1861 on the model of Lundstrom’s Jon-koping works.
From 1868, chairman Wilberforce Bryant pushed the works towards ever-greater mechanisation, meaning the factory was not just the biggest in Europe but one of the most modern.

Take a closer look at Bow Bus Garage and you will see two arches, one for the buses to enter and one for them to exit. But look a little closer and the lighter-coloured brick in between shows the outline of a third arch, now bricked in.
Until their demise in the 1950s, that was where the trams rolled in and out of the garage on their way up to the West End. Work on Fairfield Road a couple of years ago took the top layer of tarmac from the street and exposed the metal rails, still in place just a few inches below the new road surface, as they sweep out of the garage up towards Bow Road.

Whitechapel Murders

Opposite the Bow Quarter today stand modern factories, such as that of French Connection and Nicole Farhi. But a century ago, the grim buildings of the Bow Infirmary Asylum, a home for the dangerously mentally ill, stood there.
And the asylum played a key role in one of the strangest stories of the unsolved Whitechapel Murders.

A police report of 1888 tells the tale of a man named Iscenscmid, detained in Holloway as a lunatic because of his strange behaviour. The eastern European immigrant had made a living in London as a butcher, but his business had failed. Iscenscmid became depressed, and took to wandering the streets, eventually being confined in an asylum.

The Christmas before the onset of the murders, Iscenscmid was released, apparently cured. But he disappeared from home once more, taking with him two large butcher’s knives – he wasn’t to be seen again for six weeks.

His reappearance came with press reports on the murder of Annie Chapman.
At 7am on the morning of Chapman’s murder, a man entered the Prince Albert public house in Brushfield Street – just 400 yards from the scene of the killing – acting strangely and covered with blood.

Staff at the asylum read the press report and realised it fitted their patient. The police were eager to question the man, but the Bow authorities argued that, with public feelings running high, they could be risking a riot. Eventually the police managed to covertly question Iscenscmid, but to no effect – he couldn’t account for any of his actions, nothing was ever proved and the butcher never regained his mind.

Bow Fair banned for rowdiness

Take a walk to the south end of the road and you visit the scene of more recent history. Today the East End is administered by Tower Hamlets Council but, until 1965, there were a handful of local authorities and the grand building that curves into Bow Road was the offices of Poplar Council. But long before that it was an open field, in the old, rural Tower Hamlets, which gave Fairfield its name.
For hundreds of years, people would gather there for the annual Bow Fair, until its eventual banning in the 18th Century, for rowdiness, drunkenness and vice.
So don’t just assume your road is as it has always been. Take a deeper look – there may be dark secrets lurking there.

Everybody knows the blue plaques dotted around London – Charles Dickens lived here, Winston Churchill died there. But did you ever wonder how your street got its name? The history of the East End is the story of the characters and personalities who built it – philanthropists, politicians, businessmen and entrepreneurs – and they live on in the names of our streets and buildings.

Like Brabazon Street, in Poplar. Reginald Brabazon, Lord Meath, was one of that huge band of Victorians who devoted themselves to philanthropic works. After a time in the diplomatic service he founded, in 1880, the Metropolitan Public Gardens Society, becoming its chairman. And Londoners have Brabazon, who was also a London County Council alderman, to thank for the creation of the capital’s parks and open spaces – among them the disused Victoria Park Cemetery which became Meath Gardens.

East London exploded in size with the massive docks-building of the 18th and 19th century, and no-one played a bigger part than the engineer, John Rennie.
The Scot moved to London in 1791 as consultant and engineer for the West India and East India Docks. In 1798 he became a member of the Royal Society and is commemorated in Rennie Cottages, Colebert Avenue, E1 and John Rennie Walk in Wapping. One of the founding industries of the East End was silk, and one man who became rich through his trade in the fabric was Thomas Parmiter, of Bethnal Green. Parmiter died in 1682 and bequeathed part of his fortune for the setting up of a school for ten poor children and six almshouses for poor and deserving old folk. His original establishments are long gone but were rebuilt in Gloucester Street, E2, now called Parmiter Street.

Every time you pick up a magazine or newspaper you owe a small debt to William Caslon, for he devised some of the most popular typefaces in printing. And though Caslon lived in the East End nearly 300 years ago, many of his designs are still popular today. Caslon was born in Worcestershire in 1692, but set up shop as a gun engraver and tool maker in Minories. He started making type for printers and later retired to his country house in rural Bethnal Green. There is the traditional blue plaque in Chiswell Street, in the City, but he is marked locally by William Caslon House, Patriot Square and Caslon Place, Cudworth Street, E1.

Brewers played a big part in the history of the East End, and more than one left a permanent mark. Edward Mann not only played his part in the history of the Mann, Cross and Paulin brewery in Whitechapel Road, he was the first mayor of Poplar, elected in 1900. Edward Mann Close, in Pitsea Street, E1 marks his contribution to the East End’s history. Henry Raine, born in 1679 into a brewing family in Wapping, may be long forgotten for his beer, but his contribution to education lives on. Raine’s School moved from Wapping more than 100 years ago, but Raine’s original 1719 schoolhouse still stands in Raine Street, Wapping. Just a few of the names and characters who live on in the streets and buildings of the East End. So next time you’re flicking through your London A to Z, just stop and think – you’re reading a true history book.