101 Whitechapel High Street and site of 97-101 High Street
Contributed by Survey of London on July 13, 2018
This 1961 shop and office building, built by Wates Ltd to the designs of S.A.
Burden, architect, for Midland Bank Ltd, is another war-clearance replacement,
rather different in character from others on the High Street. Its outline is
assertively modern, with reinforced-concrete side beams and floor plates set
forward of exposed aggregate panels flanking wide shallow bow windows formed
of delicate concrete mullions, more in the Festival of Britain style, with
pinkish panels below the windows. The basement and ground floor are 100ft from
front to rear, with strong room, WCs and staff room in the basement, and top-
lit former banking hall and offices to the ground floor. Above the front
portion were four more floors of offices, occupied by the bank as a computer
centre in the 1970s. The offices have had a variety of uses since the bank
vacated them around 1995 – law, business and language schools, student
accommodation (‘young international sociable flatshares’), minicab offices;
the ground floor has been a betting shop since the bank, by then HSBC, closed
the branch c. 2003.
The current building occupies the site of the old 99-101 High Street and the
west side of a court known variously as Church Alley, Tewkesbury Church Alley,
Tewkesbury Place and Tewkesbury Buildings. Also discussed here are the former
97 and 98 High Street which fronted the High Street on the east side of
Tewkesbury Buildings, and which has been an empty site since clearance after
the war.
Nos 97-100 were until the war similar shop houses, four storeys high, two
windows wide, all rebuilt or substantially altered in the late 1840s; only No.
98, shorter and with a single window to the third floor, broke the uniformity.
They had acquired some cement embellishments to the frontages, probably around
1860 when, perhaps, the excitement around the creation of Commercial Street
saw much rebuilding and titivating of the High Street frontage.
No 97 was described, in 1808 at the bankruptcy of its silk mercer
occupant, Charles Newman, as having a double bow-front shop window, with two
floors of living quarters above and attics. It had apparently been rebuilt, at
four storeys, by 1836, and was successively occupied thereafter by a
succession of cheesemongers from the 1820s to the 1860s, including Thomas
Marshall who extended the building in 1849, followed briefly in 1863-7 by a
branch of the East London Bank, then in the 1870s, till the First World War by
John Sawyer, hair merchant, and finally by Charles Kleinsmann, ‘hairdressers’
sundriesman’, till the building’s destruction during the war.. No. 98,
like 97 hemmed in by Tewkesbury Buildings, was similarly occupied, by a hosier
from the 1820s to the 1840s, and a tea dealer and grocer until Richard
Spurgeon, an Ipswich draper, opened a shop there in 1868. Although this was
not a large shop, Spurgeon’s was an early signal of the arrival of branches of
multiples on the High Street, as he had thirteen branches in London by 1884,
as well as a warehouse at Newington Causeway. Spurgeon was succeeded in
the 1880s by a various drapers, including from the 1890s the Humphreys who
stayed till c. 1938, succeeded in the business by J. Gold, till wartime
destruction.
Nos 99 and 100 were rebuilt by Symes along with Tewkesbury Buildings
(see below), in 1847. The earlier building on the site of No. 99, on the east
corner, was a pub, the Tewkesbury Church, by 1730, which continued till the
1770s, but in 1666 and 1674 the building on the site, with six hearths, had
been occupied by Mathias Pratt, probably the stationer who died in 1686 and
was buried at Whitechapel (as his will was witnessed by Theodosius Lanphere,
the tinplate worker five doors away. In the1830s and 1840s No 99 housed
George Ferguson, childbed linen warehouse, and, following the rebuilding in
1847, it was a bakers (Robinson then Richard Higdon, who let the long narrow
warehouse to the rear to Gardner’s, the hay salesmen in Spread Eagle Yard from
the 1870s) till 1893, when a severe fire killed the baker Joseph Hermann and
four of his employees. Jewellers (Maizels followed by Steingold)
subsequently occupied the building till its final destruction during the
war. The occupant of the earlier building on the site of No 100 was a
cheesemonger, Roger Redmain, in the 1730s and 40s, then in rag-trade use from
the 1840s, during which time it also suffered a serious fire that affected 99
and 101. From the 1870s bootmakers took over, including, from the 1875
Asher Cruley (‘captains and shippers supplied’, previously at 102 which had
been taken over by the ever-expanding Venables & Sons) and later his widow
(who also had No 90), till 1908 when Morris Spector, confectioner, whose widow
Rebecca remained till the war did for the premises. The repeated fires no
doubt account for substantial repair work needed to both buildings in the
twentieth century.
The former No 101, which occupied only the west half of the present No.
101's site, was rebuilt in 1847 by Mead and Powell, manufacturing stationers,
on a 90-year rebuilding lease from 1848, a sober four-storey brick shophouse
with round-headed windows to first and paired similar to third floor, and a
large top-lit warehouse stretching back between Venables’ premises in
Commercial Street and the west side of Tewkesbury Buildings, on the site of
the former bell foundry (see Nos
102-05). The old foundry
on the north side of the High Street remained empty after the departure of
Thomas Lester, who made the move to the Whitechapel
Road site, until 1752. It
was taken over, along with one of Bartlett’s other former properties, the
house on the site of No. 101, by Thomas Deming, a cooper and commisioner of
Paving for the High Street, who had cooperages in Bishopsgate and Alie Street
by the time of his death in 1776. The site retained its quasi-industrial
character, however, right up to the 1840s rebuilding of both the street-side
shop-house, No 101, and the foundry site, which, after Deming, housed George
Ilsley and later his son Jeremiah (1782-1854), coach-springmakers and
tyresmiths. The shop-house was more genteelly occupied, by Thomas
Spooner, later his son George, pastrycook and ‘ornamental confectioners’, from
1805 till Mead and Powell’s rebuilding in 1847.
Nathaniel Powell, who rebuilt the site in 1847, had previously been at No. 93
High Street and was following his retirement Treasurer to the Salvation
Army/East London Christian Mission’s People’s Market (qv) in the 1870s.
The business offered stationery supply of a typical wholesale kind, of account
books, and school and business supplies, they also offered writing and
dressing cases, work boxes and ‘every variety of fancy stationery’. The
firm became N.J. Powell in 1869, the business retaining the name when taken
over in 1871 by the Quakers Compton and Henry Warner. The brothers had worked
in their father’s brass-founding business in the Barbican, but appear not to
have been involved after his death in 1869. Another brother, Metford, ran the
wallpaper manufacturers Jeffrey & Co., lately removed from Kent and Essex
Yard to Islington. After both Warners’ deaths in the mid-1890s, N.J.
Powell & Co. went into liquidation in 1902 and was finally wound up in
1908.[_^_18] Thereafter A. Goldenfeld & Co. Ltd, warehousemen, who also
had premises at 76 High Street, had No. 101 till it was destroyed in the
war.
Tewkesbury Buildings
Contributed by Survey of London on July 13, 2018
From the seventeenth century until the Second World War a long narrow
courtyard was located off the northside of the High Street, with an entry
thorugh an archway between Nos 99 and 100 Whitechapel High Street. It existed
by 1675 when it was known as Church Alley, and by 1787 Tewkesbury Church
Alley; there was a pub called the Tewkesbury Church adjoining the alley by
1730, source perhaps of the name upgrade. The alley’s trajectory over the
next 250 years was the opposite to Spread Eagle
Yard, in that it became
narrower and more uniform. In the 1670s it had twenty-six houses, mostly of
one hearth, a narrow alley with a subsidiary spur eastwards and a square court
at the north end. The only occupant who can be identified is a cutler, Thomas
Lenton (d. 1695).
By 1823, Tewkesbury Place, on a single lease with No. 99, consisted of sixteen
three-storey houses, a warehouse and stabling for No. 99, a state it remained
in till rebuilding in two phases in 1847-50 as Tewkesbury Buildings, fourteen
three-storey, flat-fronted houses and a warehouse built by Pollock &
MacLennan of Osnaburgh Street and Adcock of Seymour Street. Nos 99-100
Whitechapel High Street had been partially rebuilt presumably in connection
with this, in 1847. They were built for Dr Edmund S. Symes, a physician
long resident in Grosvenor Street, Hanover Square, who seems to have occupied
himself mostly with phrenology and in directorships of various insurance and
loan companies. When Tewkesbury Buildings were rebuilt Symes was
complimented by the Osborn Street Commissioners on the ‘excellent’ arrangement
of the houses, but by 1862 the Whitechapel District Board found that although
they ‘were of the very best class of poor houses in the district, they caused
more trouble to enforce proper sanitary arrangements than any other
houses’. Underground rooms were repeatedly found illegally occupied as
sleeping apartments.
The previous year, the journalist John Hollingshead found: ‘Tewkesbury
Buildings is a colony of Dutch Jews, and, if anything, they are a little
cleaner than their Christian neighbours. A synagogue, Chevrat Ahavei
Shalom [‘Lovers of Peace’] existed at 10 Tewkesbury Buildings from 1863 till,
at least, 1894. In 1879 its Warden, Alexander Saloman Haring (1821-82), in
whose home the synagogue was situated, appealed for funds to repair it.
Haring, a bootmaker, had emigrated from Amsterdam in 1852 or 1853 and the
Census supports the residence in Tewkesbury Buildings of numerous people of
Dutch origin from 1851 onwards, many involved in cigar-making, including the
Zeegen family who established a factory in Chicksand Street. In 1871 40 out of
54 heads of household in the Buildings were born in the Netherlands, mostly in
Amsterdam; in 1881 it was 29 out of 43.
Tewkesbury Buildings was destroyed during the Second World War and the site is
still largely empty. A proposal to redevelop 101
to 105 HIgh Street and the site of Tewkesbury Buildings and Spread Eagle
Yard, is currently (July
2018) out for pre-planning consultation.
