Goodman's Fields

Goodman's Fields ~ Theatres
Prescot Street ~ Leman Street ~ Alie Street &c
see also Magdalen Hospital and St Mark Whitechapel

A Romano-British cemetery on the site of what is now West Tenter Street was excavated in 1990 - and see below on the finds in Prescot Street. [See aerial view of the whole area, left.]

A House of Minoresses [whence the street name 'Minories'] or Abbey of St Clare was established in Aldgate in 1293, by Edward I's brother Edmund, Duke of Lancaster and his French wife Blanche of Navarre. They were Franciscan Poor Clares and although they lived in poverty the King and/or Pope granted them freedom from taxation and tithes, episcopal control and prosecution under the law except for treason or felony touching our crown. When Edmund died in 1296 his heart was buried under the high altar, and many significant medieval figures, particularly women, were buried within the convent walls, including in 1360 Elizabeth de Burgh, Countess of Clare and founder of Clare College Cambridge in 1360, and Anne Mowbray, Duchess of York and wife of the younger prince murdered in the Tower in 1481 (her coffin was discovered in 1964 and transferred to Westminster Abbey). The House continued to attract the widows and daughters of the wealthy, and gradually increased its holdings of land, rents and tenements.

In 1515, 27 of the nuns died of infection and shortly after the outbreak of plague, the convent buildings were destroyed by fire. Rebuilding was aided by contributions from the mayor, aldermen, and citizens of London to the sum of 200 marks but at the special request of Cardinal Wolsey to the Court of Common Council, it was decided in 1520 to give 100 marks more to complete the building. The king donated £200. After the Dissolution, the nunnery was surrendered to Henry VIII by the last abbess, Dame Elizabeth Salvage, in 1539, who was subsequently granted a pension of £40, and the nunnery became the residence of John Clark, Bishop of Bath and Wells, Henry VIII’s ambassador to the Duke of Cleve. [pictured is a drawing of the ruined abbey in 1797]

Goodman's Fields
The convent ran a farm in the area, which in time was tenanted, the first recorded tenant being one Trolop or Trollope, who sold it to Goodman, giving the area its name. John Stow, whose Survey of London was published in 1598, reported that Near adjoining to this abbey, on the south side thereof, was sometime a farm belonging to the said nunnery; at the which farm I myself in my youth have fetched many a halfpenny worth of milk, and never had less than three ale pints for a halfpenny in the summer, nor less than one ale quart for a halfpenny in the winter, always hot from the kine, as the same was milked and strained. One Trolop, and afterwards Goodman, were farmers there, and had thirty or forty kine to the pail. Goodman’s son being heir to his father’s purchase, let out the ground first for the grazing of horses, and then for garden-plots, and lived like a gentleman thereby.

Tenter Streets

Boggy land was drained for tenter grounds, with frames (tenters) for drying washed woven cloth: hence Tenter Street, and the expression 'to be on tenterhooks'. There were other Tenter Streets and Grounds - including the one in Spitalfields which in time became the centre of the Dutch Jewish community. There was a meat market between Red Lion Street and Minories, and a thrice-weekly hay and straw market until 1928. By 1678, the land was beginning to to be sold off for the construction of housing, and this process continued apace. As explained here, by the 19th century the area was criss-crossed with small streets and houses. Pictured are houses in East Tenter Street (built c1900 by N & R Davis, with attic workrooms - perhaps with Jewish tenants in view?); a former warehouse (now flats) in North Tenter Street; South Tenter Street (looking westwards) after bomb damage in 1940; and West Tenter Street today.

Dick Turpin

By the 18th century the area had acquired a reputation for wild behaviour. John Walsh's collection of dance tunes, published in the 1730s, includes a 'Goodman's Fields Hornpipe' [left].

In 1737 there was a shoot-out in Goodman's Fields involving the highwaymen Dick Turpin and 'Captain' Tom King. Turpin had recklessly stolen a Mr Major's horse in Epping, renaming him 'Black Bess', and hiding him in stables at the Red Lion inn in Whitechapel. Constables tracked down the horse, and when King came to collect it, with Turpin in wait nearby, a gun battle ensued. In the confusion Turpin shot King, who as he lay dying revealed the location of their hideout. Turpin escaped, but was hanged two years later in York for sheep-stealing. Legends about him abounded - see Harrison Ainsworth's romance Rookwood (1834).

Theatres [see here for an earlier attempt to establish a playhouse in the area]
Beazley, in his 1703 Historical Account of the London Theatres, mentions a New Wells Theatre in the passage betwixt Prescot Street & Chambers Street - but there are no references to plays there in the papers of the period.

The first Goodman's Field Theatre - and the first theatre outside the West End, and beyond the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of London - was opened by Thomas Odell under Letters Patent (which gave a certain authority), in a converted shop in Ayliffe [now Alie] Street in 1727. The opening play was George Farquhar’s Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer, and in 1730 Henry Fielding's The Temple Beau was premiered.

But there were protests. A 'general meeting' in 1729 in the Hoop and Grapes alleged that being so near several publick Offices, and the Thames, where so much Business is negotiated, and carried on for the support of Trade and Navigation, will draw away Tradesmen's servants and others from their lawful Calling, and corrupt their Manners, and also occasion great numbers of loose, idle and disorderly Persons, as Street-Robbers and Common Night-Walkers, so to infest the streets, that it will be very dangerous for His Majesty's subjects to pass the same. Arthur Bedford, chaplain of Hoxton Hospital and Sunday afternoon preacher at St Botolph Aldgate, inveighed against the project from the pulpit. He cited a line from the play Gibraltar: 'Whores are dog-cheap here in London. For a man may slip into the play-house Passage, and pick up half-a-dozen for half-a-crown'. Odell was forced out, and handed over management to the audacious Henry Giffard.

Sir John Hawkins commented, around this time, What was apprehended from the advertisement of plays to be exhibited in that quarter of the town, soon followed: the adjacent houses became taverns in name, but in truth were houses of lewd resort; and the former occupiers of them, useful manufacturers and industrious artificers, were driven to seek elsewhere for residence.

A new theatre of the same name (Goodman's Field) was built in Leman Street - which, according to the Universal Spectator (12 April 1732) was formerly inhabited by Silk-Throwsters, Riband-weavers, etc, who employed the industrious poor; immediately upon setting up this Playhouse, the rents were raised, and there is nowe a Bunch of Grapes hanging at almost every door, besides an adjacent banjio or two. It was funded by subscribers, and designed by Edward Shepherd (who also designed the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden). It opened on 2 October 1732 with a performance of Henry IV Part I. Four years later they put on the political satire A Vision of the Golden Rump (possibly also by Fielding), critical of Robert Walpole and the Whig government. This triggered the Licensing Act of 1737, which notoriously established censorship of public performances, banning any play that criticised the government or the Crown. The theatre was forced to close. Giffard rented Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre for a time but managed, through skilful political machinations, to reopen Goodman's Fields in 1740. The Winter's Tale was produced there in 1741 for the first time in over a century.

The same year the actor-manager David Garrick made his successful début as Richard III [playbill left, and William Hogarth's 1745 picture of him in this rôle]. As Benjamin Victor wrote, Coaches and chariots with coronets soon surrounded that remote playhouse (History of the Theatres of London and Dublin 1761). The final production, The Beggar's Opera [right], was in 1742. Four years later it was pulled down; a further building on the site briefly showed other forms of entertainment, but was converted into a warehouse and burned down in 1809 [see Frederick T. Wood, 'Goodman’s Fields Theatre' in The Modern Language Review, Vol. 25, No. 4 (Oct. 1930), pp. 443-456, and Watson Nicholson, The Struggle for a Free Stage in London (1966) chapter 2]. There were other theatres in the area in the 19th century: the Royalty Theatre in Well Street, and Wilton's Music Hall in Grace's Alley, and see below for another theatre in Leman Street.

Jewish influences

John Strype, whose 1720 Survey of London updated Stow, describes the area as chiefly inhabited by thriving Jews. From 1748 there was a Portuguese Jews hospital in Leman Street - it moved to Mile End Old Town in 1792.

According to tradition (the details are challenged) the celebrated tenor John Braham - for whom Braham Street was named in 1922 - was born in the 1770s in Leman Street, as Johan Abraham, son of a German maker of hair-rollers. Orphaned as a child, he was taken up by Leoni, and before his voice broke sang as Cupid at the Royalty Theatre, Wellclose Square. His career lasted over sixty years; his Jewishness, and also a marital scandal, loom large in contemporary accounts [painting by John Opie RA].

Joseph Nightingale's London and Middlesex (1815) shows that the Jewish (mainly Sephardi) influx had continued: A little to the east of the Minories are Goodman's Fields, consisting of several handsome broad streets, the houses being large and convenient, with garden ground behind. Mansel, Prescot, Leman, and other considerable streets here, are mostly inhahited by rich Jews.

But while the area remained Jewish, in the coming decades it descended into extreme poverty, with ten or a dozen families sharing each house, and various welfare agencies were set up in the neighbourhood. In 1831 the Jews' Orphan Asylum (a boarding school for boys and girls) had been established after the death of Noah Assenheim and his wife, who had left their eight children in the care of Isaac Valentine, a humble purveyor of cucumbers and olives. A benefit concert for the children was held at the Surrey Theatre and a house in Leman Street was obtained; in 1846, a home for 40 orphans was built in North Tenter Street (here are the residents in the 1851 census), and was later enlarged to accommodate 61 children. [In 1877 it left the area having merged with the Jews' Hospital (Neve Tzedek), which had moved from Mile End to a green-field site in Norwood; after various expansions and name changes it became the Norwood Home for Jewish children in 1956 - here are some residents' memories - and is now simply Norwood, a trust providing specialist Jewish care. See here for another Jewish care institution which originated in the parish.]

On 24 April 1889 The Palace Journal reported:

.....We make a small excursion into Mansell Street, which is quiet. All about here, and in Great Ailie [sic] Street, Tenter Street, and their vicinities, the houses are old, large, of the very shabbiest-genteel aspect, and with a great appearance of being snobbishly ashamed of the odd trades to which many of their rooms are devoted. Shirt-making in buried basements, packing-case, or, perhaps, cardboard box-making, on the ground-floor; and glimpses of very dirty bald heads, bending over cobbling, or the sorting of "old clo'," through the cracked and rag-stuffed upper windows. Jewish names - Isaacs, Levy, Israel, Jacobs, Rubinsky, Moses, Aaron - wherever names appear, and frequent inscriptions in the homologous letters of Hebrew. Many of these inscriptions are on the windows of eating-houses, whose interior mysteries are hidden by muslin curtains; and we occasionally find a shop full of Hebrew books, and showing in its window remarkable little nick-nacks appertaining to synagogue worship, amid plaited tapers of various colours.

David Bomberg

In 1838 St Mark's Church had been built in the centre of this area, with St Mark's Street running from Great Alie Street to Prescot Street - see here for an account of its engagement with the local Jewish population. The artist David Garshen Bomberg (1890-1957), a member of the group of local Jewish artists and writers which later came to be known as the 'Whitechapel Boys' (see here for another member, Isaac Rosenberg), made this drawing [left] in chalk on paper of his sister Raie (1897- c1921), according to their younger sister in about 1910 when he was still living at the family home at 20 Tenter Buildings, St Mark's Street.

Bomberg was was born in Birmingham, the son of Abraham, a Polish leather-worker; they moved to the East End in 1885 (where he attended Castle Street School, unlike his siblings who went to the Jewish Free School), which opened for him the world of Jewish theatre and culture which inspired much of his early art. His mother Rebecca died in 1912 at the age of 48, when he was studying at the Slade; she had supported his career, including helping him set up a studio next door, and the loss hit him hard. It inspired two drawings of 1913 entitled 'Family Bereavement' (above) - and he moved away from home. (The first and third of these pictures are in the Tate Gallery.)

Prescot Street

The north side of Prescot Street (where a hotel is currently being built) has been the site of an archaeological project - see here for details, including video diaries and meterial about the significance of the site. In 1678 numerous Roman funeral urns and lachrymatories, with bars and silver money were found here, showing it to have been a Roman burial ground. It may have been linked with the sixth legion of the Roman army, for in 1787 a stone 15" x 12" x3" was found with the inscription:

Originally Great Prescott Street (after its builder), this was one of the earliest London streets to have numbered buildings (1708).

D M
FL AGICoLA. MIL.
LEG. VI. VICT. V. AN.
XLII. VI. D. X. ALBIA.
FAUSTINA. CoNIVGi
INCoNPARABILI
F C

No 21 (now the Abbey Bank Building) was the site of the London Infirmary for ‘sick and diseased manufacturers, seamen in the merchant service and their wives and families’ from 1741, moving in that year from Featherstone Street in Moorfields. The house was rented from Sir William Leman at 24 guineas a year; it expanded to five houses, and included a mortuary, a herb garret (for drying and storing medicinal herbs) and a cold bath (since its first physician was a devotee of therapeutic bathing). In 1747 it moved to its present site at Mount Field, Whitechapel Road as the London Hospital. The excellent Barts and The London website provides much more detail about this and other hospital sites. There is an fascinating museum at the former St Philip's Church, Newark Street behind the main hospital buildings. The Prescot Street site was then let to the Magdalen Hospital; when this in turn moved, it was used for various purposes, including the offices of the National Cigar Makers & Tobacco Workers Union. Damaged in the Blitz, the buildings stood derelict until the 1970s, when they were demolished to make way for the present structure. Two Grade II listed houses are shown on the right: No 23, from the 18th century, and No 30, from the early 19th century.

Nos 1 & 9 were developed in Art Deco style in the 1930-33 by the Co-operative Wholesale Society's architect L.G. Ekins, and used by the Co-op Bank; they are Grade 2 listed buildings. J.C. Blair's carving over the doorway of No 1 symbolises CWS principles - two individuals shaking hands beneath a hive of bees where the bees gain benefits from mutual co-operation. In 1999 No 1 was converted into 150 luxury flats (winning awards). In July 2008 some corporate directorates of Barts and the London moved into no 9 - bringing them full circle (see above). See below for the CWS headquarters in Leman Street.

No 15 is the Princess of Prussia public house, built around 1880. (Princess Anna Amalia (1723-87) was a gifted musician, whose sister married the Crown Prince of Sweden.) Next door, at No 16 was Whitechapel County Court, a 4-storey Italianate building of 1857-8 by Charles Reeves, pictured in 1938, and today as the Cafe Spice Namaste, with a noted Parsi chef from Goa.

For details of English Martyrs Roman Catholic Church, see here.

For a short period in the latter 19th century there was a synagogue in the street, and from 1857-80 the Jewish Widows' Home Asylum was at no 67 before moving to Hackney - see above and here for more details of Jewish welfare agencies in the area.

Pictured left is Prescot Street in 1935, looking eastwards.

Leman Street
'Leman' is an old term for a mistress or lover, which may or may not be the reason for the street's name! In 1831 a theatre was built in Leman [also shown on old maps as Lemon] Street, named the Garrick Theatre, or Garrick's Subscription; early proprietors were Edward Gomasal and William James Bennett. It burned down in 1846 and was rebuilt five years later as The Albert and Garrick Royal Amphitheatre; from 1856 until its closure in 1896 it was known as the Garrick Hall of Varieties.

Leman Street Police Station [pictured, left] was built on the site in 1891 - associated with the Ripper murders and the Cable Street riots, but no longer a local station - it is used for special operations.

Many of the police drank at the Brown Bear opposite, at no.139 [right], which had been rebuilt in 1830 and from 1848-66, when William Brand was the licensee, held a music hall licence, when it was was described as the scene of orgies and murderous assaults; but by 1908 London in the Sixties (with a Few Digressions), by 'One of the Old Brigade', says its rooms were filled to their utmost capacity with canaries sending up songs to heaven purer far than those of the long-ago sixties. From 1917-26 its landlord was Joseph Davis, an orthodox Jew born in Minsk in 1868, previously a boot and shoe maker, one of the founders of the Cannon Street Road synagogue and of Talmud Torah in Christian Street. The family previously lived in Langdale Street, off Cannon Street Road, where Jewish and Irish settlers had co-existed happily (this was to change by the 1930s). His son Morry (Morris Aaron, or Harold), also for a time a publican, was both President of the Federation of Synagogues from 1928-44 and Mayor of Stepney, Labour Leader of the Council and member of the London County Council - see chapter XI of this study, by Geoffrey Alderman, for more detail. Pictured right are two Grade II listed buildings, no 137 with a late 18th/early 19th century façade and no 141 with vestiges of an early 18th century façade.

However, in more recent years the Scarborough Arms (built in 1855), round the corner at 35 St Mark's Street, has been a preferred watering hole for the police [pictured, plus a 1960s Roman Catholic procession in Leman Street, with local police presence].

See here for the background to this 1850 'fireproof' sugar refinery [right].

The Eastern Dispensary was was set up in Great Alie Street in 1782 by a group of doctors (including the Quaker physician and anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Knowles, who died in 1786 from a fever caught from a patient), with the Duke of Wellington as President. It moved to new premises in Leman Street [now 19A] in 1858 [pictured right]. It closed in 1940 because of wartime difficulties, and in 1944 the building was leased to the Jewish Hospital Committee; the Charity Commission refused transfer to the London Hospital, so assets were transferred to the Marie Celeste Samaritan Society in 1952. Since 1998 the building has been a pub and dining room. A 1787 booklet about the Dispensary sold a few years ago for £1350!

In 1887 the Co-operative Wholesale Society [see above, Prescot Street] opened the grand headquarters of its London operations on the corner of Leman Street and Hooper Street, a seven-storey structure in brick, granite and Portland stone incorporating a sugar warehouse and a prominent clock tower, designed by J.F. Goodey of Colchester, a CWS committee member about whom little is known.

An earlier building on the site, including a tea warehouse and the delegates' meeting room, was seriously damaged by fire on 30 December 1885 (reported to the authorities by an unemployed man's wife, which earned her a sovereign). £28,000 was recovered in insurance, and quarterly meetings were held at Toynbee Hall, by permission of the Revd Samuel Barnett, until the new premises were constructed. More details about the building can be found in the 1913 Jubilee History of the CWS. Now a Grade II listed building, known as the Sugar House, 99 Leman Street, it has been converted into luxury apartments. Nearby, at 120, is a contemporary office development [right].

The large red-brick complex on the corner of Leman and Alie Streets was developed in the 1970s as a computer, interbank cheque clearing and IT development centre for National Westminster Bank, with an extension added in the 1990s. The 'campus' also included buildings at 75 and 135 Leman Street (the latter, Eastgate House, right), linked by a bridge; for a time it had its own pub, The Long Bar (originally signed as 'Management Services Division'). NatWest was taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2000 and the computer mainframes went elsewhere.

Demolition and re-development of the site began in 2006 to create Berkeley Homes' City Quarter, and is ongoing: here are visulations of the project. The painting of the demolition [above] is © Joanna Moore, 'The Town Mouse'. The site is one of Tower Hamlet's strategic allocations - here is the draft development plan (under the Local Development Framework) - CAB 051/112. Left is Leman Street in 1963.

south of Prescot Street, running alongside and underneath the railway: at one end is Barneys Seafood, the last remaining fish wholesaler with roots near Billingsgate Market, whose factory shop sells jellied eels and other traditional East End fare (lots of good recipes on their site). At the other is a Travelodge, and contemporary housing development, of which an example is pictured [right].

Alie Street & Braham Street

Variously shown on old maps as Ayliffe, Aylie and Alie Streets, often divided between 'Great' / 'Little' (west / east of Leman Street), little remains of its history, for instance as the location of several dissenting chapels (see here), though on the eastern side the German Lutheran Church and school remain. On the western side there is a terrace of houses, 30-44, most of them with ground-floor shop extensions out to the street [pictured left], and across the road, opposite the north end of St Mark's Street, is Half Moon Passage [pictured then and now], an alley between offices at nos.17-19 leading to Braham Street. The Half Moon Theatre Company began life in a former synagogue at no.27, before moving in 1979 to a former Methodist chapel on the Mile End Road (now closed, though their work with young people continues). See here for 'The Hutch' - the Jewish Working Men's Club and Lads' Institute, and headquarters of the Jewish Lads' and Girls' Brigades.

The group of buildings from 21-29 [left] show how the street has changed. The White Swan public house, at no.21, is still here - now with an extension into no.23. The small building at no.25 was Miss Lily Gray's wholesale grocer's shop (also at 19 Prescot Street) until she went bankrupt in 1938. Later it became Mrs Millie Ginsberg's Dining Rooms - 'Tea Always Ready', read the sign. By 1981 it was occupied by Khan and Sons [right]. Nos. 23-25 were demolished and replaced by a 4-storey office building, with 5-storey flats (nos.29-47) to their right.

Here are some further contrasts. Above: pictures from 1934 and 1949; scenes of dereliction in the 1980s (including Shaffer Ltd. at no.33 and 'British Smoked Salmon'); and the corner of Alie and Leman Streets in 1977 and today (the Zepelin Shelter).
Right: flats at 14-20, and at the end of the road the office blocks on the opposite corners - no.1, and 55 Mansell Street (including RBS).

On the east side of the street, beyond the German chapel, planning permission was given to Barratt's in 2007 for a 27-storey tower block (235 flats plus retail units) - their tallest East London project to date - and an adjacent 7-storey commercial block on the site of former factory at nos.61-75, with completion originally envisaged by 2012. Pictured is the derelict site, and visualisations of the future.

And finally....
...in the north-west corner of the parish is the Hoop and Grapes at 47 Aldgate High Street (nearly opposite Aldgate tube station). Allegedly the oldest licensed house in the City, parts of it were built in 1593, over much older cellars. Originally called The Castle, then the Angel & Crown, then Christopher Hills, it took its present name (referring to the sale of both beer and wine) in the 1920s. It is one of three timber-framed buildings (the one on the right was refaced in the 18th century) to survive the Fire of London, which stopped 50 yards away. It has been much-restored since this 1950s picture. More details and images here.