Business Development Centre, formerly Great Garden Street Synagogue and Morris Lederman House

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7-11 Greatorex Street, the former Great Garden Street Synagogue with Morris Lederman House (now a Business Development Centre)
Contributed by Survey of London on March 29, 2017

Greatorex Street is named after the Rev. Daniel Greatorex, the vicar of St Paul’s Dock Street in the late nineteenth century. Until 1936 it was Great Garden Street, taking its original name from being the way from Whitechapel Road to Leonard Gurle’s seventeenth-century nursery. Daniel Fenning (1714/15–1767), a grammarian and textbook writer, was resident in Whitechapel from the late 1740s, and lived at what later became 7–9 Great Garden Street from at least 1760 to his death.¹ This was a big double-fronted five-bay house, possibly built for Fenning. Next door, No. 11 was a later and smaller Georgian building, of two bays and accommodating offices. To their rear a square-plan skylit foundry building was added around 1870, probably by Charles Stanley Osborne, a bellfounder who became a metal manufacturer.²

This property was taken in 1894 and the back ‘warehouse’ converted to be a synagogue, an unusually large one for the area at the time, the work complete by 1896 when the synagogue was consecrated. Lewis Solomon was the architect, I. Silverman the President. A timber building was added on the south side in 1896–7 and the Great Garden Street Synagogue became part of the Federation of Synagogues. Refurbishment took place in 1914 and further more extensive rebuilding in 1923-4 followed amalgamations with the Wellclose Square and Voice of Jacob and Good Heart synagogues. This was overseen by Frank J. Potter, architect, £1,000 of the overall cost of about £8,000 being raised through loans from members as the Federation refused a request for a second advance. The work included a new entrance at No. 7 immediately south of the large house, and it is to this phase that much of the interior that survived up to the 1990s can be ascribed. The space remained top-lit with a large lantern, and had galleries on three sides on iron columns. On the fourth side (to the west, which is liturgically surprising in such an important synagogue) there was a half-dome on columns over the Ark. The centrally placed Bimah was a gift of 1932. There was only minor war damage. Membership of what was one of the area’s principal synagogues is said to have peaked at around 1700 families.³

Deemed unsafe the houses at Nos 7–11 were demolished in 1971 to permit redevelopment in front of the synagogue. This was carried out in 1972–4 to plans by Preston Rubin Associates, architects (Theo Rubin, job architect). This gave the Federation of Synagogues a ‘Social Services Building’, in fact a headquarters, strikingly designed to emphasise the first floor which housed a court to the north, with adjuncts of a judge’s lounge, prayers’ robing room and rabbi’s room. The ground floor accommodated a burial department and, under a steeply raking roof over two upper storeys, there were administrative offices for the Federation and the London Talmud Torah Council. The building was not formally opened until 1979 when it was named Morris Lederman House in honour of the Federation’s long-standing President.⁴

Much of the congregation and the Federation’s offices moved away. The synagogue, used for worship for the last time in January 1997, saw transitional use for raves and art projects. The complex (including the adjacent building to the north) had been acquired by the Bethnal Green Business Development Centre Trust, with the help of a European Union grant as part of the Bethnal Green City Challenge, for a conversion to offices and studios that was carried out in 1999 by Ankur Architects. The synagogue was gutted, with windows inserted into its external walls, for use as a Business Development Centre. A high-level coloured-glass Star of David round window, which once lit the gallery, survives at the centre of the west wall. Foundation stones of 1896, 1914 and 1962 are retained in an internal courtyard.⁵