London buildings at risk
Last week we looked at the welcome news that the Victorian Limehouse Town Hall had been saved with a grant of £80,000 - just as importantly, this will allow the building to be pressed into service for the community once again. It’s one of the perennial challenges conservation campaigns face - just how worth saving is an old building? With limited funds, there is always the temptation to knock down and start afresh - it’s often cheaper to build anew than repair the old.
And it’s a problem the East End is facing more and more, with a decaying, ageing building stock … and an awful lot of it. Many slums were swept away in the nineteenth century and grand new buildings erected in their place. But many of those edifices now find themselves on English Heritage’s ‘Buildings at Risk Register. One of those is the Bandstand that sits at the heart of Arnold Circus near Club Row. The Boundary Estate was a model development when it replaced the notorious Jago slum in 1899. Now the bandstand has rusting railings and the stonework plinths are falling away.
In fact Tower Hamlets had 32 buildings on the list, until the reprieve for Limehouse Town Hall made it 31 (see the box below for the full list).
Understandably, most of the buildings are standing empty, and neglect and the risk of vandalism only accelerate the decline. Not all of them are buildings though. Tower Hamlets Cemetery, Southern Grove, E3 isn’t a ‘listed building’ as such, but it is important. Opened in 1841, it was one of the seven private cemeteries of early Victorian London, and among the least known. Laid out on picturesque principles, with serpentine paths and (formerly) elaborate planting, huge damage was done by World War 2 bombs and neglect. An active friends group does stout work but ‘a conservation plan is needed as the basis for repair and fundraising’. English Heritage rate its condition as ‘poor’.
19 Princelet Street in Spitalfields has occupied these pages before, being the home of the quite unique ‘Museum of Diversity’, but the fabric of the Grade 2 listed house itself is ‘poor’. This terraced house of 1719 was built by Samuel Worrall, with a synagogue added in 1869 by a Mr Hudson, and combines a well-preserved Spitalfields Huguenot merchant’s house with weaving garrets, and the synagogue itself. English Heritage describes the house as ‘in need of sympathetic use’.
Some buildings are more humble. The mortuary chapel, in the churchyard of St George in the East, Cannon Street Road, looks to the untrained eye like a tumbledown brick shed, but the unlisted building (classified as in ‘very bad’ repair) is part of a Grade 1 listed church. Adapted in the 1930s as a nature study centre, it was abandoned again during World War 2. Now the Spitalfields Trust proposes to buy the building and repair it.
Often, the answer is to find a new use for an old building. That could be the answer for St Botolph’s Hall (formerly the Central Foundation School for Girls), Spital Square, E1. The Grade 2 listed building is in ‘fair’ condition, and there are proposals under discussion for restaurant use with a new adjacent development. Many buildings have been left behind by industrial and commercial progress. The Wool Warehouse at 74 Back Church Lane is one such. Built in 1896, next to the Commercial Road Goods depot of the London Tilbury and Southend Railway, this large brick warehouse building was once a crucial staging post in the passage of raw materials through the city - but those days have long gone. The buildinghas a traditional structural form: masonry walls, timber floors, cast iron, (and in places, steel) columns. Today, the Grade 2 building is in ‘fair’ condition, but stands vacant with no agreed end use. Already it’s suffering from minor vandalism and damp.
Other structures you would think simply too useful to be allowed to decay. The Bonner Hall Bridge provides a vital footpath over the Regent’s Canal. The early Victorian bridge (1842-1845) is arched ‘in red brick with stone voussoirs’. The balustrade on the west side has collapsed taking the cast iron panels and granite setts into the canal. The list goes on (and
For a full list and details of buildings at risk in Tower Hamlets, go to www.english-heritage.org.uk
19 Princelet Street, E1
St Botolph’s Hall (Central Foundation School for Girls), Spital Square, E1
Shadwell Dock Stairs, The Highway
4-16 (even), Walden Street
Fire Station Cottages, 1-5, West Ferry Road
Sailmakers and Chandlers, 11, West India Dock Road,
Braithwaite Viaduct, Bishopsgate Goodsyard, Wheler Street/Brick Lane,
Drinking Fountain set in wall of former St Mary’s Churchyard, Whitechapel Road,
2, Wilkes Street
Trinity Methodist Church and attached hall and community rooms, East India Dock Road, Poplar
Former Whitechapel Library, High Street, Whitechapel High Street
Bonner Hall Bridge, Regents Canal
Arnold Circus Bandstand and Railings
Wool Warehouse, 74, Back Church Lane
Well and Bucket Public House, 143, Bethnal Green Road
St John on Bethnal Green, Cambridge Heath Road
Bethnal Green Town Hall, Cambridge Heath Road
126, Cannon Street Road
Mortuary chapel, churchyard of St George in the East, Cannon Street Road
795, Commercial Road
Former Caird & Rayner Ltd Warehouse
Limehouse Town Hall, Commercial Road
Poplar Baths, East India Dock Road
Dowgate Wharf warehouses, 22-23, Gillender Street
Wiltons Music Hall, Graces Alley
Tablet in the North Wall of the Portuguese Jewish Burial Ground, Mile End Road,
415, Mile End Road
Holy Trinity Church, Morgan Street
24 and 26, New Road
Tobacco Dock, Pennington Street
19, Princelet Street