The Pump House, 19–20 Hooper Street
Contributed by Rebecca Preston on May 11, 2020
The London Tilbury and Southend Railway Company’s Hooper Street hydraulic
pumping station is the only substantial railway goods-handling building to
survive in Whitechapel. It was built in 1886–7, presumably under the
supervision of Arthur Lewis Stride, the railway company's general manager and
engineer, probably working with Augustus Manning, the East and West India Dock
Company's engineer, to power the hoists, capstans and cranes at the Commercial
Road Goods Depot. Hydraulic machinery was supplied by Sir W. G. Armstrong,
Mitchell & Co. The building has the same elevational treatment as that of
the demolished warehouse, of red brick, with stone imposts to arch-headed
windows and striking blue-black engineering-brick dressings. The main part of
the building, which has a steel-framed roof, housed four Lancashire boilers
with an engine room above for two 150hp pumping engines. It was built on the
footprint of a German Lutheran chapel of 1819, the congregation of which moved
to Goulston Street; its passing resemblance to an eighteenth-century church
has been noted. The three-stage square tower at the west end, where the church
porch had stood, housed two weight-loaded hydraulic accumulators. A chimney
rose 125 feet from the south-west corner where its base survives.
The pump house was listed in 1973 and passed into the ownership of the Greater
London Council. Wine-bar and other conversion schemes of 1984 and 1986 came to
nothing. The building appears to have remained semi-derelict until it was
converted to office use in 2002–4. This project by City North Group as
developers was led by Michael Sherley-Dale, working with Peter Thompson,
Easton Masonry, TFA Interiors and Crittall for replacement windows. City North
sold the property to Grainger Trust Plc in 2005, which sold it on in 2006.
First tenants were stockbrokers. In 2019 the Pump House was occupied by
Stockwool architects.
St Paul's German Reformed Church
Contributed by Survey of London on June 5, 2020
Whitechapel’s largely sugar-trade dependent German population had a presence
at Hooper Square for most of the nineteenth century through St Paul’s Reformed
Church. This accommodated London’s third oldest German Protestant
congregation, founded in 1697 as the German Evangelical Reformed Church by
Calvinist refugees from the Palatinate. The church began at the Savoy Palace
and moved to Duchy Lane, close by, in 1771. That site had to be abandoned to
make way for Waterloo Bridge. The church council favoured a move to
Whitechapel to be amid the area’s growing Deutsche Kolonie and a church was
built on the east side of Hooper Square in 1818–19. It was a typical
Nonconformist preaching box with a west porch, probably galleried as there
were 260 sittings in the 1870s. The church prospered under the pastorate of
Johann Gerhard Tiarks from 1822 to 1858, which united Calvinist and Lutheran
strands of Protestantism. George Wicke, a sugar refiner, bequeathed £300 in
1829 and small schools were added to the east, for boys in 1834 and girls in
1852, both rebuilt in 1879 to designs by Thomas and William Stone, architects.
The congregation was once more uprooted in 1884 and the church was demolished
in 1886 to make way for the somewhat church-like pumping station to the
Commercial Road Goods Depot that survives on the south side of Hooper Street
as the Pump House (see p.xx). The congregation opened a newly built church and
schools in Goulston Street in 1887.
The mysterious depths of the Hooper Street railway bridge
Contributed by eric on Nov. 1, 2016
Memories of Eric Shorter, b. 1936
I walked Hooper Street often, either taking left or right from Gower's Walk.
Left was easy, a right at the next corner went down Back Church Lane to Cable
street, and was one way to our shops. The other way went past the famous Pump
House and then dog-legged around to meet with Leman Street and then on to
Cable Street. But first one had to pass under a wide bridge in Hooper Street,
this holding up the spur and sidings from the main line into Fenchurch Street,
with the rails then entering the first-floor goods platforms of the Tilbury
Warehouse. Under the bridge on both sides were large wooden doors entering
into dark caverns, and there were two rail lines across Hooper Street itself.
There was other rail storage, served from above by a single-truck hydraulic
lift from the Tilbury. As a child I regularly saw trucks being hauled by
capstan across the road from one dark cavern to another. An operator would
deftly wind a wagon rope around a moving capstan and the truck would move. As
appropriate the operator would remove the rope from the capstan with a lasso-
ing like motion, and the truck would move on its own at a slow pace. I would
have given a week’s pocket money to look inside these dark places, but while
such transfers were in progress, all traffic of all kinds was prevented from
being under the Hooper Street bridge.
Not long back, in about 2010, I visited Hooper Street again. The bridge has
gone, as have all railway workings and storage and the Tilbury itself. But, I
walked along the gutter on the northern side, and at a point where the road
surface had worn thin, saw the unmistakable glint of a very short piece of
bullhead rail pointing across Hooper street. The track was still there, but
had been overlaid with Tarmac. My heart sang.
Pump house
Contributed by eric on Oct. 26, 2016
I lived in Gowers Walk in the early 1950s, and walked past the Pump House
weekly en route to the Cable Street shops with 'mum'. At the time the nearby
Tilbury Warehouse was active, and goods steam trains would pass over Hooper
Street bridge. The pumphouse was used, I think, to power hydraulic
accumulators, which in turn would power small goods cranes on the platforms of
the Tilbury, and they powered capstans which I saw hauling goods trucks across
Hooper Street from one dark place to another. Trucks were lowered from the
first-floor rail lines to ground-floor sidings.
German church at the Old Pump House
Contributed by eric on Feb. 19, 2017
I knew the Pump House site well as a child, but not was there before it was
constructed. I have a paper from Germany about a particular church
organisation (the St Paul's German Reformed Church) which I believe had a
church on the site of the Pump House, but which was ousted from it when the
Tilbury Warehouse etc. was built. I have no interest in religious matters, but
at the end of WWII I trod the bombed premises of the church on its new site at
Sydenham (I shared my time between living at Aldgate and at Forest Hill, both
of which had German communities.)
