A colour slide from the collection of the Tower Hamlets Archives:
105–113 Whitechapel Road are three-storey and garret two-bay shophouses that have origins of about 1816–18, probably as a development by James Schooling, an ironmonger who had a stove and range factory to the rear. Among early tenants plying quotidian shop use, Isaac Anderton, a grocer, was a stalwart. He occupied No. 105 up to around 1840, then moved to No. 117 where he continued into the 1850s, identified as a tea-dealer. There was extensive rebuilding in 1921–3, by James Jennings & Son, local builders. Nos 109–111, the premises of Mrs Fanny Woolfe, photographer, in the early twentieth century, gained a stylish shopfront for Dolcis Shoes in 1935. The white rendering of the façades was an alteration of the 1970s when the properties were adapted for wholesale clothing. Nos 107–115 were until Aytan’s clothing factory, reduced at the time of writing (2017) to No. 115, Nos 107–109 housing Criminal Damage, ‘East London streetwear since 1991’. Into the 1970s there was an open carriageway through to No. 113 which was a yard and workshop to the rear. Edward Stubbs, a coach and harness maker, was here in the early nineteenth century. Charles James Bone, a cheesemonger who had been at No. 107 since the 1850s, had these stables and warehouses rebuilt in 1900 as a two-storey range. They passed to H. Lotery & Co. who in 1922 raised the building. In the 1950s it was taken for an extension of Mornessa Ltd’s mantle factory and warehouse further north.1
London Metropolitan Archives, Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks; M/93/159/1; CLC/B/192/F/001/MS11936/473/933469: District Surveyors Returns: Post Office Directories: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control file 13774; photographs ↩