12 Settles Street

c.1900 dwellings | Part of Davis's Terrace

Linderman family
Contributed by rv on May 24, 2017

Woolf and Rebecca Linderman were Jewish immigrants from what is now Poland. Woolf Linderman from Plock married Rebecca Tropp from Kolbuszowa at the East London Synagogue in 1891. They settled in the East End of London, where Woolf was a baker.  In 1894-1895, they lived at 12 Settles Street (likely in a house that pre-dates the present-day brick building on the site).

Davis's Terrace and the Davis Brothers
Contributed by IsobelWatson on July 7, 2016

Israel & Hyman Davis were two of the seven builder brothers Davis. Of the brothers, only these two ever used the trading name ‘Davis Brothers’ (though sometimes their brothers’ buildings have been attributed to them.) Like their father, Woolf, and elder brothers Maurice and Abraham, Israel and Hyman had started in the fur trade. They appear first to have first won a building lease from the London Hospital 1 (like others before 1903, granted only for 60 years) in Settles Street (40-72 even, ‘Davis’s Terrace, 1890’) by tender. Then (when the Hospital’s experience of its in-house redevelopment of Parfett Street to the east, after a closed competition, had been disappointing) another lease for a red brick terrace, 10-28 even, south from Fordham Street, from 1899 .2 The two terraces seem to embody two distinct phases in architectural development, and it is interesting to note that between the two phases of building the youngest brothers, Nathaniel and Ralph Davis, the only ones of the seven known to have had any formal training, had started their own business.


  1. London Metropolitan Archives, MDR/1891/1/579, 4/682 

  2. London Hospital estate records, LH/A/9/41 

12 Settles Street, 1980
Contributed by rv