Fairfield Road, Bow
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.