19A Leman Street (former Eastern Dispensary)
Contributed by Survey of London on July 31, 2020
The Eastern Dispensary was one of the oldest institutions of its kind in
London. Founded in 1782 to provide free healthcare to poor local residents,
the dispensary was first housed on the north side of Great Alie Street (in a
shophouse on the site of Central House). It was supported by an ‘on-call’
midwife, able to care for women in their homes, and a resident medical officer
alongside visiting surgeons and physicians of standing, including Thomas
Southwood Smith in the 1820s and ’30s. By the 1850s, against the backdrop of
growing demand from a swollen local population, the Alie Street premises were
inadequate. Livery companies, local merchants and sugar bakers underwrote the
building project. G. H. Simmonds, the secretary of the dispensary and a
surveyor, prepared designs and John Jacobs, a builder on Leman Street,
submitted the lowest tender in January 1858. The new Eastern Dispensary opened
in February 1859. Simmonds, whose confident if staid architectural hand was
active elsewhere in Whitechapel, followed the adjoining parochial school in
deploying an Italianate palazzo style for a broad seven-bay façade with
channelled rustication to its lower storey, pedimented first-floor windows,
and loquacious explanatory courses and panels of incised inscription.
The Eastern Dispensary remained popular until the 1930s. Many of its clinics,
which drew patients from around London and surrounding counties, were held in
the evenings to ensure patients did not lose income, nor employers manpower.
Alterations to the façade in 1929 may have included removal of the cornice
which was still present around 1910 but gone by the 1960s. Improved general
health caused attendances to drop shortly before a loss of staff caused by the
outbreak of war precipitated the dispensary’s closure in 1940. Governors hoped
to re-open, but the establishment of the National Health Service in 1946
rendered the dispensary finally redundant.
The building had been briefly occupied by the Jewish Hospitality Committee in
1944. Substantial renovation was undertaken to adapt the interior for a
canteen and social club for allied forces. Thereafter the lease was
transferred to the Association for Jewish Youth. The property was sold in
1952, and thereafter used for several decades by S. Turner & Co., second-
hand clothes merchants. By 1980 the building was vacant and a period of
neglect followed, punctuated by listing in 1986. It was refurbished and
adapted to use as the Dispensary pub in 1997–8, the interior once again
greatly altered to designs by Ronald S. Hore. Part of this work was
restoration of the missing cornice and other repair that was necessarily
reliant on a view of the building published in the Illustrated London News
in 1859. The pub closed in 2019 leaving the building once again vacant.
Conservation and Restoration 1997
Contributed by cliveraymond on Feb. 19, 2018
In 1997 I was working on a self-employed basis with a conservation company
which was a sub-contractor on the project. We were responsible for all the
exterior work to the former Eastern Dispensary, but to get to our scaffold we
had to climb out of a window on the first floor, and therefore we had a good
view of the original decoration within the dispensary dating from the 1940’s
when it was an entertainment centre for the armed forces and others. Having
previously studied History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute, I was
particularly concerned when alterations were carried out to the building
during the restoration. These would result in a different aspect to the
building from what the patients would have known when the dispensary was in
use. We were told that the exterior alterations would reflect the nineteenth
century engraving in "The Illustrated London News". However, nobody could say
whether this design, which predated the building's construction, was fully
realized.
During restoration in the late 1990s, the heavy cornice was added to the
exterior. Careful examination failed to show any archaeological evidence of
there having been a cornice. If it fell off, or was taken down during the war,
there were no signs of this. Quoin stones were supplied on pallets and affixed
to all available corners on the upper storey. Also, mouldings were supplied as
per the upper left window in the 1967 photo, and fixed around all the
remaining unadorned windows on that level. In effect, details that existed on
the original private residence which was the core of the building were
repeated all around.
To begin with, my work consisted in the mechanical cleaning off of deep
deposits of black sulphation prior to an overall Joss clean. Sulphation was
very deep and solid in the scrolls around the windows and the scallop shell
above the side door. We had to we had to cart the bags of powder up the inside
and out of the window. After cleaning, my job was to repair cracked and
missing cement render, including building up of missing letters/ numerals at
the top of the building.
I remember one particular day when a passing off-duty building safety
inspector looked in and was so horrified by the health and safety issues with
work inside the building that he closed it down. We were all turned to for a
general clean-up and hazard removal, while some people were sent away to get
safety boots.
A few years later, I went in to the building after its conversion into a pub
and recommended to the staff in charge that some sort of story board was
needed. Otherwise the significance of the building would be totally lost on
people who came in from outside East London. Needless to say, the layout of
the interior was greatly altered to create the pub.
