Whitechapel High Street
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Whitechapel High Street - its early history
Contributed by Survey of London on June 11, 2019

Evidence for development before 1500 that can be pinned directly to Whitechapel High Street is scant, but as its hinterlands were largely undeveloped until the mid-sixteenth century, it may be inferred that most early references to Whitechapel refer to the High Street or the west end of Whitechapel Road. Speculation around the route of the Roman road to Colchester has ranged widely: it may have followed a line close to the High Street and Whitechapel Road, or may have followed Hackney Road.1 The discovery of Roman metalling in Aldgate High Street supports ancient use of the route, as does the discovery, about 2m below the level of the High Street, of Roman funerary urns in 1836.2 Whitechapel High Street’s early name was Algatestreet, presumably a reflection of its status as an extension of Aldgate High Street beyond Aldgate Bars, the gates, latterly vestigial, across the west end of Whitechapel High Street that marked the eastern boundary of the City. The land either side of this route was waste of the Manor of Stepney and probably remained unbuilt on until the thirteenth century when the building and siting of the ‘white chapel’ might suggest the High Street to the west was already built up. Taxation evidence indicates that what development there was had then recent origins.3

Algatesetrete is recorded as one of the settlement areas of the Manor of Stepney in 1348-9.4 Some indication of the character of landowners and uses in the High Street is given by property transactions of this universally transformative period, the time of the Black Death. Predictably, perhaps, property holders tended to be wealthy merchants, already possessed of substantial property and influence within the City, and sometimes with connections to the Court. In 1350 John de Gosebourn, who was an auditor of the Exchequer by 1370, was involved in a transfer of unspecified premises in ‘Whitechapel in Algatestrete’, part of a large landholding in Stepney which by 1400 included eighty-six acres, though only a few houses in Whitechapel High Street.5 Sir John de Stodeye (otherwise John Stodie), a vintner and alderman, a Member of Parliament in 1354–7, and Mayor of London in 1357–8, acquired premises in 1358 ‘in the parish of the Blessed Mary “de Whitchapelle” without Aldgate, London, and in Stebenheth’, followed in 1361 by a tenement of Gosebourn’s, ‘by le Whitechappel’.6 Then, in 1365, Stodeye acquired ‘24 shops and two gardens in the parish of St. Mary “Matefeloum”, without Algate’, from John Chaucer, another vintner, and his wife Alice – the parents of the poet. This may have included property that had been left to Alice Chaucer by her uncle Hamo de Copton in 1349, and so many shops strongly suggests a location in the High Street. The same is true of a similar transfer of 1375–6 by John de Cantebrigia and Thomas Broun of ‘3 shops with gardens adjoining’ in ‘St Mary’s parish in Algatestret’.7

In 1430 property on the north side of Algatestrete in the parish of St Mary Matfelon was transferred from John Roppele to Margaret Wyngerworth, a widow who had already held it with her husband from Edmund Bys, a stockfishmonger, Ellis Clidermore, a citizen mercer and Roppele. The location is given as between the tenements of John Stamp on the west, the lands of the heirs of John May on the east, and property of William Haunsard on the north. Haunsard owned large tracts in Stepney and Whitechapel including a messuage north of Algatestreet near the City boundary.8

A list of alehouses compiled from 1418 to 1440 mentions three in Whitechapel, the ‘Hamer’ (hammer), an unusual name, perhaps later the Crown and Hammer on the High Street's north side near present-day Tyne Street, the Swan, perhaps near the east end of the High Street’s north side, and the ‘hertishorn’ (Hart’s Horn). The ‘Cok’ was also present by the 1450s, probably on the High Street’s south side. Firmer indications of activity on the north side of the High Street date from the 1460s. The brewhouse then called the ‘Hertyshorne’ or ‘Herteshorne’ is named in two court cases. It might have been near what became the east corner with Goulston Street, as a house built there in the 1590s by William Megges bore the name the Harte’s Horn. One case concerns the property immediately to the east. This was then in the occupation of John Morth, a bladesmith, and Simon Hollerville, a barber, for a term of eight years from Christmas 1462, and was held by them from William Couper, a butcher. The ‘Hertyshorne’ itself was held by William Wolston and Walter Bodenham (or Bodman), who is described as a citizen Brasier and bellfounder, but there is no evidence nor is it probable that the brewhouse was used as a bellfoundry. The other case concerned the brewery’s owners, the Walssh family, who had acquired it and three shops around 1440 from John Bythewode, a timbermonger. This appears to have been a reversion. In 1394–5 Nicholas Walssh, a citizen clothworker, had granted a messuage and shops in Whitechapel to Christina Bithewode, the widow of a timbermonger, with a remainder to the Abbey of the Minoresses of St Clare without Aldgate. At the end of all this, in 1468 Nicholas Walshe granted the ‘Herteshorn’ to the Minoresses.9

Earliest representations of the High Street, such as Anton van den Wyngaerde’s panorama of around 1543, are somewhat schematic but conform in depicting a continuous frontage of mostly gable-fronted houses of two or three storeys. The only development behind the High Street on the ‘Agas’ map is around what became Goulston Square, and perhaps represents the ‘Herteshorn’ brewery. Beyond walled gardens or yards were the ‘pleasant fields’ whose loss by the end of the century was bemoaned by John Stow.10 East of the ‘Herteshorn’ site a wall on the ‘Agas’ map conforms with a property line that ran roughly parallel to the High Street into the nineteenth century. Seventeenth-century and later maps suggest that this section of the High Street frontage had evolved, presumably in the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries, as many long narrow ‘burgage’ plots, but, developing slowly and piecemeal, was haphazardly laid out and broken by numerous alleys and yards.

Evidence also supports Stow’s assertion that the whole High Street on both sides was by 1600 ‘pestered with cottages and alleys’.11 In March 1616 William Hearne of Whitechapel was charged with having ‘presumptuously endevoured’ to make and erect ‘divers tenements {in} an auntyent stable in a common Inn called the Redd Lyon in Whitechapel Street contrary to his Majesty’s proclamacion, and to the great annoyance of parishioners by bringing poore people there to inhabit, who dying leave their children to be mayntayned by the parish’. He was ordered to pull down the new chimneys and to restore the tenements to use as a stable.12  Others adopted a more positive tone when describing how, by the 1650s, ‘without Aldgate, there is a spacious huge Suburb, about a mile long, as far as White Chappell and further’.13

Topography of the High Street after 1600

By the 1670s, the High Street’s alleys numbered around twenty. Some, such as the Nag’s Head Inn yard (on the site of the Relay Building, previously No. 115) and the Swan brewhouse yard (on the site of the Whitechapel Gallery at Nos 81–82 and returning to Osborn Street) were substantial, while many others had been or remained unnamed, probably private closes leading to a single house and its dependent stables, workshops and outhouses. Some such yards had been lined with small houses and workshops – Bull Alley (on the site of No. 75), Grid Iron Alley (approximately on the site of No. 122), and Harte’s Horne Court (on the site of Nos 133–137). Typical of these was Three Bowl Alley, roughly on the site of Tyne Street. By 1623 it was a short alley containing six small houses.14 They had been built after 1589 when Thomas Golding sold two messuages called the Crowne and Hammer (later the Three Pidgeons) and the Three Bowls, which passed by inheritance to a whitebaker named Ralph Thickness. In leases of 1697 and 1700 from Thickness’s great-grandson the site is described as the two houses (the Three Pidgeons and another now known as the Patten, the Three Bowls having ‘fallen down’), and an entryway between them leading to stables, workshops, garden ground and an old house that Thickness had occupied; this had a 12ft by 8ft jettied window at one end.15 Three Bowl Alley and Grid Iron Alley, immediately to its west, were eradicated in the creation of New Castle Street (later Tyne Street) in the early 1730s.16

Other such closes developed into proper alleys leading northwards into Wentworth Street – George Yard (now Gunthorpe Street), Angel Alley (now truncated), Moses and Aaron Alley and Castle Alley (now Old Castle Street) and Catherine Wheel Alley (obliterated by Commercial Street).

  1. ed. T. F. T. Baker, A History of the County of Middlesex: _vol. 11, Stepney, Bethnal Green_, 1998, pp. 5–6 ↩

  2. Gentleman’s Magazine, vol. 159, April 1836, pp. 371–2 ↩

  3. ed. T. F. T. Baker, A History of the County of Middlesex: _vol. 11, Stepney, Bethnal Green_, 1998, pp. 13–19: Hubert Llewellyn Smith, The History of East London, 1939, pp. 88–9 ↩

  4. The National Archives (TNA), SC2/191/60 ↩

  5. ed. W. J. Hardy and W. Page, A Calendar to the Feet of Fines for London and Middlesex: vol. 1, Richard I – Richard III, 1892, p. 139 ↩

  6. Ibid, p. 136: TNA, C148/48 ↩

  7. ed. W. J. Hardy and W. Page, A Calendar to the Feet of Fines for London and Middlesex: vol. 1, Richard I – Richard III, 1892, p. 143: Alfred Allan Kern_, The Ancestry of Chaucer_, 1906, pp. 95–7, 135–6: ed. R. E. G. Kirk, _Life Records of Chaucer IV: Enrolments and Documents from the Public Record Office,_1900, pp. 136–7: TNA, E40/1507 ↩

  8. ed. A. E. Stamp, Calendar of Close Rolls, Henry VI: vol. 2, 1429–1435, 1933, pp. 63–5 ↩

  9. TNA, CP40/810, rot. 469; C1/26/357; C1/29/115; C143/425/3: John Strype, A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, vol. 1/2, 1720, p. 14: London Metropolitan Archives, CLC/L/BF/A/021/MS05440, ff.120v,150,162v: Laura Wright, Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names, 2020, pp.184–5,191 ↩

  10. John Stow, A Survey of London, 1598 (1994 edn) ↩

  11. Ibid, p. 384 ↩

  12. ed. E. G. Atkinson, Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 34, 1615–16, 1925, p. 460 ↩

  13. James Howel, Londonopolis; an Historicall Discourse or Perlustration of the City of London, 1657, p. 341 ↩

  14. London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), E/PH1/001: Hearth Tax returns 1666, 1674–5 ↩

  15. LMA, EH1/002–3 ↩

  16. West Sussex Record Office, HARRIS/266 ↩

Whitechapel hay market
Contributed by Survey of London on Aug. 26, 2020

From at least the 1660s until 1928, an enduring and divisive feature of Whitechapel High Street that spread to streets adjoining was the Whitechapel hay and straw market, one of the earliest recorded of London’s fodder markets, after those in Westminster (the Haymarket) and the City of London (West Smithfield), the former known by the mid sixteenth century, the latter older. The right to hold markets in Stepney resided with the Lord of the Manor of Stepney, granted by Charles II in 1664 specifying a weekly market at Ratcliff- cross.1 A hay market is reputed to have endured in Ratcliff until 1708, but according to Daniel Defoe, Whitechapel High Street was already in use as a hay market by 1665. While A Journal of the Plague Year is not the most reliable of sources, the Whitechapel portions are reckoned to be those most closely based on a first-hand account. Defoe claimed that during the Plague, owing to the scarcity of grass, ‘Hay in the Market just beyond White-Chapel Bars was sold at 4 l. _per _Load’.2 A more unimpeachable indication that the hay market was established in the High Street before the end of the seventeenth century is the taxation in 1693 of Isaac Blissett, a ‘barrowman’ living on the south side of Whitechapel High Street adjacent to Peacock Court (approximately opposite Old Castle Street), ‘for the Hay Market to the Lady of the Manor … Property assessed: Haymkt’.3

Hay was sold from large carts in the High Street. By tradition, a toll of 6_d._ per cart was collected, twopence of which was payable to the Lord of the Manor. This was codified by the Whitechapel High Street Paving Act of 1770 and the Whitechapel Improvement Act of 1853, which vested the paving commissioners’ powers in what became the markets committee of the parish Vestry. The usual market days, as was the case with the other main hay markets, were Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.4

The market was confined in its early years to the High Street, described in the 1770s as a ‘fine wide street … the principal eastern entrance into London from the great Essex road … the south side of {which} is used for a hay market three times a week’.5 This south-side arrangement prevailed, certainly to the 1830s and probably until the opening of the Whitechapel to Bow tramway in 1870, whose lines ran on the north and south side of the street. Until then, discord between the hay salesmen and local authorities derived largely from untidy arrangements of the hay carts.

The tram coincided with wider changes in transport and the hay and straw business, which saw a proliferation of hay salesmen in London from twenty-nine in 1833–4 to more than fifty in 1870. Surprisingly few were in Whitechapel, probably because it was an open market; Essex farmers could bring their hay directly to Whitechapel to sell. But by 1870 three or four Whitechapel hay salesmen, led by Gardner of Spread Eagle Yard and Gingell of Kent and Essex Yard, were in business in a major way, and were operating an effective cartel. By then Gingell already had a wharf in Shadwell, and a decade later Gardners had one in Limehouse, reflecting the expansion of their supply chain from traditional sources in the Essex countryside, as importing hay became cheaper.6

Business was still conducted with farmers in Essex and Hertfordshire, but those deals were concluded in the shires and the hay and straw transported by train, and collected by the dealers. Where once hay carts had rolled in, principally from Essex, many of the carts that took up position in Whitechapel High Street belonged to the dealers and were stored in their adjacent yards. In the early and mid nineteenth century many of the carts were two-wheelers that could be pulled by a single horse. By the later nineteenth century large four-wheel waggons were the norm.7

As early as 1782 the Whitechapel Paving Commissioners were complaining that hay carts ‘do frequently annoy, obstruct and endanger passengers in carriages and on horse back’. They produced a scheme for regularising the placing of the carts abreast in the street, in blocks of three to five carts, a system that was regularly ignored.8 With the advent of tramways and generally increasing traffic, calls for the removal of the market became frequent, strident and ultimately litigious. From 1870 regular efforts were made to remove the market, principally by local boards and vestries affected by delays traversing Whitechapel, but vested interests and the lack of an alternative site prevented change.9

There was some nostalgic affection for the market. In 1902, one William Stout reported that ‘Whitechapel High Street has long been noted for its Hay Market, which is the last relic of old English life in the neighbourhood, all else is foreign. In the whole length of the High Street, … there are no buildings worthy of notice from an architectural or any other point of view.’10

Matters came to a head on 27 May 1905 when officials of Stepney Borough Council, which had inherited the rights of the Whitechapel hay market commissioners, moved three carts of Gingell, Son, and Foskett, parked on the tramlines in the north part of Leman Street, to their Wentworth Street yard and there destroyed the loads of hay and straw. Gingell, Son and Foskett took the council to court for compensation and the establishment of their rights under ancient precedent to conduct the hay market anywhere within the parish of Whitechapel, which the council disputed on the grounds that some of the streets into which they wished to expand – Commercial Street, Leman Street in its present form, and Commercial Road, did not exist when the market was established. The council lost, on appeal and in the House of Lords, but in concluding this ‘peculiarly absurd case’ the Lords determined that the Whitechapel Improvement Act of 1853 did allow the council to move carts when they caused an obstruction.11

An opportunity to buy the manorial market rights arose in 1909, but a trenchant ratepayers’ campaign prevented the purchase.12 Three years later an attempt by the LCC to purchase the market also ran aground. The market rights were instead acquired by three of the principal hay and straw dealers – Gardner & Gardner, Gingell, Son and Foskett and Harvey & Willis. Congestion increased after the First World War, compounded by the location of a tram terminus. The LCC, wishing to relocate the tramlines to the centre of the street to accommodate increasing volumes of motor traffic, introduced a clause in the London County Council (General Powers) bill of 1927 to acquire the market rights. The fight had no doubt gone out of the hay salesmen, who agreed to accept the offer £18,000and not to oppose the bill, their market depleted by the very motor traffic that their carts were impeding: sales of hay had fallen from 22,500 loads in 1907–8 to 17,761 in 1910. The market ‘succumbed to the motor’ and closed in January 1928. The tramlines were duly relocated to the centre of the road in 1929.13 Gardners hung on in Spread Eagle Yard till 1931 and Gingells were wound up in 1935.

  1. Daniel Lysons, The Environs of London: vol.  3, County of Middlesex, 1795, pp.418–88: F. H. W. Sheppard (ed.), Survey of London: vol. 29, St James Westminster, Part 1, 1960, p.210: A List of the Bye-Laws of the City of London, Unrepealed, 1769, p.93: John Trusler, The London Advisor and Guide, 1790, p.186: Edward Walford, Old and New London, vol.4, 1897, pp.216–17: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives (THLHLA), L/SMB/G/4/3/1: Derek Morris, Whitechapel 1600–1800, 2011, pp.71–8 ↩

  2. Daniel Defoe_, A Journal of the Plague Year_, 1722 (edn 1969), p.222: THLHLA, cuttings 652/12: Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, _vol. 2, 1889, p.138: F. Bastian, ‘Defoe’s _Journal of the Plague Year Reconsidered’, The Review of English Studies, vol. 16/62, May 1965, pp.151–73 (p.165) ↩

  3. British History Online, Four Shillings in the Pound Assessments, 1693–4: Ancestry ↩

  4. THLHLA, L/SMB/G/4/3/1: G. Laurence Gomme, London in the Reign of Victoria (1837–97), 1898, pp.119–20: Post Office Directories (POD): Tower Hamlets Independent and East end of London Advertiser (THIEELA), 30 Nov 1901, p.8 ↩

  5. John Noorthouck, A New History of London Including Westminster and Southwark, 1773, p.664 ↩

  6. POD: F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Horses and Hay in Britain, 1830–1918’, in F.M.L. Thompson (ed.), Horses in European Economic History: a preliminary canter, 1983, pp.50–72: Gomme, London, p.120: East London Observer (ELO), 27 Aug 1881, p.5 ↩

  7. THLHLA, cuttings 652/12; L/SMB/G/4/3/1: The Globe, 27 Sept 1881, p.3 ↩

  8. THLHLA, L/SMB/G/4/3/4 ↩

  9. ELO, 20 Aug 1870, p.5; 3 July 1875, p.5; 9 June 1877, p.7; 20 April 1878, p.3; 18 Jan 1879, p.5 ↩

  10. East London Advertiser, 20 Dec 1902 ↩

  11. THLHLA, L/SMB/G/4/3/1: Morning Post, 14 Aug 1906, p.4 ↩

  12. THLHLA, L/SMB/G/4/3/1; THLHLA, L/SMB/G/4/3/4: ELO, 13 March 1909, p.7: THIEELA, 19 March 1909, p.5; 5 Feb 1910, p.8 ↩

  13. ELO, 7 March 1925, p.3: 26 March 1927, p.3: THIEELA, 30 Nov 1901, p.8: THLHLA, 652/12: Newcastle Journal, 11 Aug 1927, p.8: Harold P. Clunn, The Face of London: The Record of a Century’s Changes and Development, 1937, pp.253,258 ↩

Whitechapel High Street’s obelisk
Contributed by Survey of London on Aug. 26, 2020

A distinctive feature of Whitechapel High Street for sixty years was a stone obelisk. Purchased by ‘the people of Whitechapel’, that is the parish, in 1853, it had been on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, and is probably identifiable as the ‘granite obelisk and base, 20ft high, weighing about 15 tons, of Cornish granite’, exhibited in the external enclosure at the west end of the building by R. Hosken of Penryn.1

It was erected in the middle of the High Street opposite the end of Commercial Street, surrounded by eight stone bollards, ‘for the protection of foot passengers’, and generally to provide a ‘rest’ for pedestrians in the middle of the wide crossroads. It was disparaged in The Builder – ‘rather an attenuated pyramid than an obelisk: it wants the true _needle _character.’2 It also served as a glorified lamp standard, with lights affixed on each side. It had to be moved in 1883 as it was in the way of works for the District Railway line. It was re-erected, its lamps replaced by flanking lamp-posts (also later removed), in a more convenient position between tramlines further east in the High Street, at its widest point south of No. 83. The obelisk met an ignominious end in 1913 when it was knocked down by a lorry.3

  1. Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, 1851, p. 8: Royal Collection, RCIN2800050, photograph by Claude- Marie Ferrier, 1851 ↩

  2. The Builder, 19 Feb and 9 April 1853, pp. 116, 226: Morning Advertiser, 5 Feb 1853, p. 6: East London Observer (ELO), 28 June 1913, p. 6 ↩

  3. Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, L/SMW/A/1/1: ELO, 28 June 1913, p. 6: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, P33919 ↩

Whitechapel High Street in 1861
Contributed by amymilnesmith on July 17, 2016

John Hollingshead, Ragged London in 1861, London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1861.

"There are many different degrees of social degradation and unavoidable poverty, even in the east. Whitechapel, properly so called, may not be the worst of the many districts in this quarter; but it is undoubtedly bad enough. Taking the broad road from Aldgate Church to old Whitechapel Church, a thoroughfare, in some parts, like the high street of an old-fashioned country town, you may pass on either side about twenty narrow avenues, leading to thousands of closely-packed nests, full to overflowing with dirt, and misery, and rags. Many living signs of the inner life behind the busy shops are always oozing out on to the pavements and into the gutters; for all children in low neighbourhoods that are not taken in by the ragged and other charity schools are always living in the streets: they eat in the streets what little they get to eat, they play in the streets in all weathers, and sometimes they have to sleep in the streets. Their fathers and mothers mope in cellars or garrets; their grandfathers or grandmothers huddle and die in the same miserable dustbins (for families, even unto the third and fourth generation, have often to keep together in these places), but the children dart about the roads with naked, muddy feet; slink into corners to play with oyster-shells and pieces of broken china, or are found tossing halfpennies under the arches of a railway. The local clergy, those who really throw themselves heart and soul into the labour of educating these outcasts, are daily pained by seeing one or more drop through into the great pit of crime; and by feeling that ragged schools are often of little good unless they can give food as well as instruction, and offer the children some kind of rude probationary home."

Henrietta Barnett on Whitechapel High Street
Contributed by Survey of London on Aug. 26, 2020

Recalling her arrival in Whitechapel in 1873, Henrietta Barnett remembered ‘Whitechapel High Street, where some forty keepers of small shops lived with their families. ... There were two or three narrow streets lined with fairly decent cottages occupied entirely by Jews, but, with these exceptions, the whole parish [St Jude’s] was covered with a network of courts and alleys. None of these courts had roads. In some the houses were three storeys high and hardly six feet apart, the sanitary accommodation being pits in the cellars; in other courts the houses were lower, wooden and dilapidated, a standpipe at the end providing the only water. Each chamber was the home of a family who sometimes owned their indescribable furniture, but in most cases the rooms were let out furnished for eight-pence a night, a bad system which lent itself to every form of evil. In many instances broken windows had been repaired with paper and rags, the banisters had been used for firewood, and the paper hung from the walls which were the residence of countless vermin. In these homes people lived in whom it was hard to see the likeness of the Divine.’1

  1. Henrietta Barnett, Canon Barnett, His Life, Work, and Friends, vol.1, 1918, pp.73–4 ↩

Whitechapel Gallery and adjoining shops, looking north, August 2017
Contributed by Derek Kendall

Whitechapel High Street and Aldgate Place, August 2017
Contributed by Derek Kendall

Whitechapel High Street and the hay market, c. 1895
Contributed by Aileen Reid

90 to 137 Whitechapel High Street from the south east, August 2017
Contributed by Derek Kendall

Small-scale survivals in Whitechapel High Street
Contributed by Derek Kendall

83 to 87 Whitechapel High Street, August 2017
Contributed by Derek Kendall

Whitechapel High Street's north side in 1890 from the east
Contributed by PMarriage

Brief glimpse of Gardiner's Corner and Whitechapel High Street in 1924

This silent film about the Regent's Canal includes a brief panning shot (at 2.11 to 2.24 on the YouTube timer) of the south side of Whitechapel High Street, from Gardiner's Corner (on the Aldgate Place site) to the parish church of St Mary Matfelon (now Altab Ali Park).

Contributed by Aileen Reid on Sept. 12, 2016

Newsreel offcuts showing 117 to 137 Whitechapel High Street in 1958

This collection of unused (silent) newsreel footage of London includes, at 6.03 to 6.51 on the YouTube timer, an atmospheric view, taken from Gardiner's Corner at the junction of Whitechapel High Street, Leman Street (on the left, with the Old Red Lion public house at No 29 just visible, where the south entrance to Aldgate East tube station can be seen) and Commercial Street (just out of shot to the right). The text accompanying the footage gives a date of 1963 but it must be late 1958 or early 1959. Trolley buses ceased running in London in May 1962 but the most telling evidence is 117 and 118 High Street, the two houses in the middle of the shot sporting a SOLD sign. They were shortly to be demolished for a new Woolworth's store that was under contruction in 1959 and opened in March 1960. It was, in turn, demolished c. 2003 along with 119 and 120 Whitechapel High Street (the next two houses to the west) and the Seven Stars public house for the Relay House development on the whole site.

Contributed by Aileen Reid on Sept. 9, 2016

Tags

hay market high street Passmore Edwards Free Library traffic T. Venables & Son William Megges Hart's Horne John Stow Sir John Stodeye John de Gosebourn Cardigan House Woolworth Aldgate East Whitechapel High Street trolley buses Oceanair House Art Gallery commerce trams regeneration transport department store Gardiner's Corner gentrification public house poverty St Mary Matfelon

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