In 1904/1905 Abraham Davis (the second of the seven builder sons of Woolf Davis) was granted building leases of 28 Nelson Street and 95-97 Commercial Road. His building at the latter site has gone, as have contemporary buildings of his at 12-14 Turner Street and 31-33 Nelson Street ('Turner House'), and (though many large blocks of flats of his still stand near Kings Cross and in St Johns Wood) of all his buildings in East London this is one of a very few that survive. It is his only known surviving domestic building in east London. Despite its frontage it appears to be laid out as flats. His younger brothers Israel and Hyman (trading as Davis Brothers) had revised their approach to building flats when the LCC succeeded in showing that buildings of theirs in Brick Lane fell foul of the London Building Act because they were (in effect) self-contained1; this could be (and thereafter was) avoided if the design showed they were intended to be let as a whole. It would be interesting to know how 28 Nelson Street (the architect for which may have been Frank Dolley) was designed originally to be configured, as the side elevation indicates a flatted pattern.
L.C.C. v Davis, 1898 QB; LCC minutes, 22 November 1896, ↩