No. 109 New Road has its origins as a three-storey and attic house of the 1790s, set back and narrow with its irregular south wall marking the boundary between the Turner and London Hospital estates. Thomas Ramplee, an early nineteenth-century occupant, had a cooperage to the rear. In place of that a three-storey bedding warehouse went up in 1884, only to be burnt out and rebuilt in 1890. The house was extended forward in 1932–3 to align with its neighbours and given a flat roof, this for Sam Cooper, a (textiles) ‘job buyer’ and shop-fitter, to plans by A. W. Amos & Son, architects, with J. Wood of Leytonstone and Leigh-on-Sea as builder. At the time of writing No. 109 houses a children’s clothing shop beneath a language school.1
London Metropoltan Archives, Tower Hamlets Commissioners of Sewers ratebooks, District Surveyors Returns: The National Archives, C13/2777/49: Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, Building Control files 41186–7: Post Office Directories ↩