Spratt’s, Far Famed Cakes and Bromley by Bow. My walk on 31st February 1988 was coming to an end as I made my way towards Bromley-by-Bow District Line station to begin my journey home. You can see the previous part at Lansbury, Brownfield, Teviot and St Leonards Road.
St Leonard’s Road beyond Langdon Park becomes Uamvar St, an odd name whose origin I can’t find. It used to be a little west of its current route and I think with St Leonard’s Road used earlier to be Bow Lane. I soon turned left onto Clutton St and climbed onto the footbridge over the railway. The bridge has now been replaced by a metal structure on which it would be rather harder to write ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘I Love You’.
The railway line here carries the Docklands Light Railway line from Poplar to Stratford, but had been a part of the North London Railway (founded in 1846 as the East and West India Docks and Birmingham Junction Railway.) The Spratt’s Patent Limited Offices Fenchurch St are still there, with an entrance from Fawe St.
The Far Famed Cake Company began in 1881, and was bought by Fitch Lovell in 1950. They merged it with another company to form Hales Trent Cakes in 1962. In 1974 this was bought by Lyons. The factory had employed around 320 people. I think this site is now occupied by a large new block of flats with some shops on Morris Road.
Separated by a long yard from the block of Spratt’s Patent beside the DLR is another block of Spratt’s Patent Limited, still there and now the A B Fine Art Foundry.
The Foresters Arms at 253 St Leonards Road, on the corner with Clutton St, a former Charrington & Co pub closed in 2004 and was sold. It was extended and converted to 6 flats in 2005. There had been a pub on this site since before 1856. It still has an address on St Leonards Road lthough my map calls the road huere Uamvar St.
I continued my walk up Uamver St and on to the Blackwall Tunnel Northern Approach, and this picture was taken beside Tweed House, part of which can be seen at the extreme left. The buildings in the centre have now been replaced by a lower-rise redevelopment but that visible above the wall at the right of the picture is still there.
This section of the Limehouse Cut towpath was then rather overgrown and little used. It is now much busier, with a new floating section taking the path from Bow Locks under the busy tunnel approach road.
I photographed this mural on a nursery and clinic in the flats beside the Blackwall Tunnel North Approach close to Devas St. This was part of the Coventry Cross West Estate, built by the LCC in the early 1950s as an addition to their 1935 Coventry Cross Estate. The name Coventry Cross came from a long-closed pub in the area since 1690 – at 68 St Leonards Street in 1861. The estate passed to the GLC and then TOwer Hamlets before after consultation and vote they joined Poplar HARCA.
From here is was a short distance to the end of my walk at Bromley-By-Bow District line station – from where I began my next walk in early August 1988
This had been an good walk for me and I hope readers will have found the pictures and text about them interesting. There are some more pictures from it in my album 1988 London Photos including some from earlier in the day at Petticoat Lane, in Whitechapel and Tower Hamlets cemetery before I started the walk proper.
More pictures continuing my walk on 31st July 1988 – the previous post is Bow Common to West India Dock Road, so this returns to close to where that started. Like most of my walks it was more about exploring a neighbourhood than getting anywhere.
East India Dock Rd, Poplar, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7s-61
East India Dock Road was built as its name suggests when the East India Docks were opened in 1806 to provide a more direct and less congested route than Poplar High Street to them from the end of the Commercial Road, also then recently built in Limehouse. It is now part of the A13 and this section in Poplar has in turn been largely bypassed by the Limehouse Link and Aspen Way opened in 1993. Traffic was still very heavy along it in 1988.
The picture with rubbish on the pavement and gutters, a small rather derelict shop to let gave a picture of a run-down area which contrasted with the word Wonderful on what seems a rather faded fabric on a restaurant at right. Buddleia is growing in front of the billboard, always a sign of dereliction. Interestingly the the advert is for a low alcohol lager, hardly a thing back then when most drivers on the streets after closing time were drunk, although the breathalyser had come in back in twenty-one years earlier. But even the introduction of Kaliber in 1986 had not really galvanised the market – but low alcohol beers are now a massive growth area, and some are even drinkable.
There is still a Chinese restaurant in the building at the right of this picture, and rather surprisingly that small shack is still in place in front of Amory Place, now a minicab office.
Chun Yee Society, East India Dock Rd, Birchfield St, Poplar, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7s-62
There are still traces of London’s first Chinatown in Limehouse, which began in the area around 1900, but the centre of the Chinese community had moved to Soho in the 1950s, partly because of extensive bomb damage in Limehouse, but also because of dirt-cheap rents in an area with a bad reputation where few then wanted to live in central London.
Chun Yee Society, East India Dock Rd, Birchfield St, Poplar, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7s-63
The house on the corner of Birchfield St still has the sign for the Chun Yee Society – Chinese School on Sundays over its doorway. not along with a larger and newer version with fewer Chinese characters. Like many similar societies it began as a Tong, variously described as a criminal gang or a semi-masonic bortherhood, and organised various festivals including those commemorating the dead. Founded in 1906 it was a shelter for Chinese sailors as well as providing a Chinese Sunday school for children and is now largely an old peoples centre. Possibly some of the games of dominoes may have got a little out of hand, but the criminality was largely in the mind of Sax Rohmer, his readers and the sensationalist press.
St Mary & St Joseph, Catholic Church, Upper North St, Poplar, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7s-51
The Roman Catholic Church of SS Mary and Joseph, Poplar impresses mainly by its scale. Built in 1951-4, its architect Adrian Gilbert Scott (1882-63) was the brother of the better-known Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, both from a distinguished family of architects. I always think of it as an ecclesiastical version of Battersea Power Station, without the chimneys but with a rather odd green pyramid on its roof, but that’s rather unfair as it is a very individual design, sometimes described as Byzantine jazz gothic.
According to the Grade II listing text this is a camel arch, and a similar arch appears at the top of the main windows, supposedly inspired by Persian buildings. The church replaced one on the site behind me as I made the picture which was destroyed by bombing – the site is now a Catholic school. I think I chose an interesting viewpoint, but one that needed a slightly wider lens and a more upright photographer.
The second of these LCC temporary buildings has a sign proclaiming it as ‘LANSBURY WORKS OFFICE’ and giving its address in Brabazon St. The street got its name not from the huge white elephant civil airliner that made a few flights in the 1950s before it and the project was scrapped in 1953, but from the 1882 founder of the Metropolitan Gardens Association, the 12th Earl of Meath, Lord Brabazon.
Work began on the layout of the London County Council’s Lansbury Estate in 1949 on a large area devastated by wartime bombing, and its best-known feature, Chrisp Street Market was built the following year and became an integral part of the 1951 Festival of Britain. But construction of the estate continued for many years and was only said to be completed in 1982, by which time it had been transferred first to the GLC and then Tower Hamlets. Since 1998 it has been owned by Poplar HARCA.
But as this picture shows, this part was still not completed in 1988. The large 11-storey tower block Colebrook House with 42 flats was part of the Barchester Street Scheme by the LCC Architects department and completed in 1957-8, named after a shop built at nearby Blackwall Yard. Brabazon St now has a small park to the left of my picture and a row of neat two-story houses along the right side.
Bow Common Bridge, an iron bridge replacing the earlier bridge here in 1929, is where Upper North Street meets Bow Common Lane across the Limehouse Cut and the factory building here on the north-west side has now been replaced by a block of offices and flats built in 2008-2011, with the 13 storey Ingot Tower at one corner of the largely five storey development. This large site alongside the Limehouse Cut was formerly a chemical works between the Cut and Thomas St (now Thomas Road.)
Phoenix Business Centre, Limehouse Cut, Upper North St, Poplarm Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7s-55
Wikipedia recounts that this area had become popular with chemical manufacturers as they could discharge waste into the Cut, and this bridge from at least 1819 was known as Stinkhouse Bridge and the area around became a huge fire risk, culminating in a great fire in 1866. The bridge was also a popular choice for suicides, with a local coroner in 1909 noting he had held over 50 inquests on them there. As Wikipeida comments ‘ In a derisory attempt to enhance its image it was renamed Lavender Bridge.’ But the old name stuck at least until the 1950s.
The Phoenix Business Centre on the north east corner of the bridge has also been demolished and replaced by tower blocks around 2008-2010.
The Sanitas Company Ltd, Council Depot, Watts Grove, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7s-44
The Sanitas Company Limited proudly put their name across the top of their 1914 building in Watts Grove, and it remained written in stone (or at least render) for a hundred years until the building was demolished and replaced by a rather blander building completed in 2017, part of a large development on Watts Grove and the new Pankhurst Avenue.
Previously the site stretching down to Yeo Street annd Glaucus Street had been occupied as it was when I made this photograph as a council depot by various of Tower Hamlet’s Councils municipal services (latterly Veolia.)
The Sanitas Company Limited was a local company which specialised in disinfectant and soap-based products. So far as I’m aware they had no connection with other and now better known companies using the name Sanitas, the Latin for Health.
My walk will continue in a later post.
Clicking on any of the pictures will take you to a larger version in my album 1988 London Photos from where you can browse the album.
Bow Common Lane, Bow Common, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7r-35
Although this image is labelled as being on Cantrell Road in my very skeletal notes written small in black ink on the contact sheet, it is actually still there next to the railway on the west side of the gasworks site in Bow Common Lane.
This fairly substantial house is on the edge of the gas works site mentioned in the previous post and I wondered if it might have been a part of this development, perhaps a manager’s house. The gasholder was removed in 2016-7
Bow Common, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7r-21
I’m fairly sure that Turnbull & Son Builders were not on Cantrell Road as my notes suggest, but certainly somewhere in Bow Common, possibly on Bow Common Lane, Devons Road or St Paul’s Way which were on my route. Little of the older industry in the area now remains.
Bow Common, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7r-23
Again there is a frustrating lack of information on the contact sheet, possibly because I was lost. So I’m unsure of the location of this detached Victorian house, but I think it may have been on Turners Road which I went down on my way to Clemence St.
Finally a location I can be sure of, as the block in the background has two signs on it. ‘No Ball Games’ is on not helpful, but over the entrance way just above the thighs of what looks to me a naked rudimentary female figure I can read ‘Gatwick House’.
Although Trevor Tennant (1900-80) entitled this ‘play sculpture’ Gulliver it still looks female to me. It is described in The Buildings of England London: East as “in Festival of Britain Spirit”, though it looks vaguely Henry Moore to me. Tennant in taught at various art colleges including Camberwell School of Art (1930-4). The sculpture commissioned by the LCC for the Locksley Estatew was probably installed when the block was built in 1954-6 and by the time I photographed it was deteriorating – perhaps due to some rather more robust physical play than anticipated. It was originally at the centre of a large sandpit with the base buried in the sand. I suspect the sand was removed after being too often used as a toilet for dogs, a common fate with sandpits in public places.
A gloomy building by a gloomy canal, close to St Anne’s Church which towers above the tree at right. This building at the rear of a ‘dangerous structure’ on Commercial Road opposite the church is still standing, though the lower structures to the right have been demolished. I think this is 777 Commercial Road, a former sail loft, part of the Grade II listed run of buildings here. According to the listing, 777 dates from 1893-4 and was designed by Marshall & Bradley and built by J.H. Johnson for Caird and Rayner. The site is now ‘Sailmakers’ a mixed-use development which will retain the building frontage.
The Flood barrier on the Limehouse Cut presumably became redundant after the building of the Thames Barrier. On the other side of Commercial Road you can see both St Anne’s Church over a billboard and Limehouse Town Hall.
The Empire Memorial Sailors’ Hostel, now called The Mission Building, was built in 1924 to house some of the many sailors in the city needing lodgings. Money to fund it came from an appeal organised largely by women from across the British Empire to save these men who might otherwise have spent the night and their earnings in the company of the oldest profession. They appealed for the funds to build it as a memorial to the 12,000 merchant seamen who were killed in the Great War.
The Grade II listed building originally had 205 single rooms (cabins) and appears to have been designed to the demands of a committee whose members advocated differing styles. It was enlarged in 1932 along Salmon Lane to meet the huge demand, but as the docks closed became a hostel for the homeless. It closed in 1985, presumably not because of any lack of homeless people but because of the cost of housing them, and in 1994 was sold off to a developer who converted it to a gated and portered residential development.
4-12 West India Dock Road, Limehouse, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7r-14
A little of the old West India Dock Road, this row of shops is now long gone. The large Grade II listed building at right is still there, built as the Passmore Edwards Sailors Palace, the Headquarters of the British And Foreigh Sailors Society in 1901, with a grand frontage including a crowned Britannia holding on each shoulder a strangely morphed galleon and child. The side view here is rather more utilitarian.
Sail Makers, Ships Chandlers, 11, West India Dock Rd, Limehouse, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7r-16
A sign over the door for Pastel Print shows its use in 1988, when local demand for sails, candles and other marine equipment has shrunk to zero. A plaque near the apex of the facade states ‘ERECTED AD.1860’. I think it has now been made into flats and offices retaining the facade.
The next part of my walk, going back into Bow and on towards Bromley-by-Bow will continue in a later post.
Clicking on any of the pictures will take you to a larger version in my album 1988 London Photos from where you can browse the album.
This terrace at 582-588 is still there, considerably restored, with the wrought iron railings now continuing in front of 588, but the two storey building beyond the traffic lights for Branch Road, here with a sign GEC Mowlem Railway Group and on its roof the former occupants, scrap metal firm 600 Group has been replaced by a tall I think 12 storey block, the Zenith building, one of the new buildings on Commercial Road with views over Limehouse Basin. Mowlem had presumably been there for the conversion of the old railway line along the viaduct next to the basin into the recently opened Docklands Light Railway.
My notes say that this slender detached house with doorway and detailing that could have graced a rather grander residence was on Clemence Street, and I’ve no particular reason to doubt them, but it may have been in a neighbouring street. I didn’t hear any neighing from the two horses heads in the picture.
G Fawkes Is Innocent, Turners Rd, Limehouse,Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-7n-12
‘G.FAWKES IS. INNOCENT’ is I think a play on the iconic East End graffiti about George Davis, who was framed by Det Sgt Mathews for an armed robbery at the London Electricity Board’s offices in Ilford, Essex in 1974, for which he was sentenced to 20 years in jail. Eventually in 2011 he won his appeal against that verdict. He was imprisoned for other crimes, but never protested his innocence after being convicted. Guy Fawkes, often said to be the only person to enter Parliament with honest intentions was tortured terribly and fell from the scaffold on which he was to be hanged, breaking his neck and thus avoiding being hung, drawn and quartered but is celebrated by being burnt on bonfires every 5th November in an anti-Catholic celebration.
The same building as the picture above but showing its Rhodeswell Rd side and terraced houses down Turners Road. The terrace has surviced, but the building at the left and the empty site at right have both been replaced by new housing.
All of the houses on the north side of Turners Road here have been demolished and replaced by new housing. The terraced houses have equally small but much neater front gardens. No 43 here has the house name ‘City View’.
One of several small alleys leading off from Copenhagen Place which I think have disappeared, although there is a short cobbled section leading off to Carmine Wharf, and another yard – clearly not this one – at the rear of properties on Pixley St. But most of the area has been completely redeveloped since I made this picture.
The Limehouse Cut is the oldest canal in London, first dug in 1770 but widened a few years later to allow barges to pass each other and travel in both directions. Later it was widened to the current width. It provided a route from the Lea Navigation to the River Thames avoiding the convoluted meandering of the tidal Bow Creek and initially had its own basin and entrance lock to the Thames in Limehouse, although the canal was still tidal, at the level of Bow Locks. In 1854 the basin was linked to the nearby Regents Canal Dock but after a legal dispute because bargees didn’t like the Regents Canal terms this was filled in a few years later and only restored in 1968, after which the lock and short length of the cut leader to the Thames were filled in.
310 Burdett Road is now the Royal Mail Delivery Office in Docklands, on the large site of Last’s Wharf leading down to the Limehouse Cut. The picture of the Cut from the Burdett Road Bridge above is looking roughly west, and the different constructions of the bank of the canal remains recognisable but nothing else in the picture from 1988 remains.
My walk will continue in a later post.
Clicking on any of the images will take you to a larger version in the album 1988 London Photos, from where you can browse the other pictures, though in a different order to this post which has them in the order I made them.
