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Cannon Street Road        and Ponler Street


The oddly-named Cannon Street Road (often confused postally with Cannon Street in the City, where the railway station is) runs north from The Highway to the Commercial Road, and beyond (now as New Street) to Whitechapel Road. Before the parish of St Paul Dock Street was added to St George-in-the-East, it ran more or less through the middle of the parish, with the main entrance to the church at its southern end. Like the rest of the parish, the street has seen many changes.

19th century
The height of the parish's prosperity was in the 1810-20's. The Revd Joseph Nightingale in London and Middlesex (1815) described Cannon Street [Road - as it became in 1859] as a double line of good houses. Only a few original houses remain [near the church, 26-42 and 46-52 are locally-listed]. Among references in the journals of the day to its middle class residents:
 At the Guildhall Library are papers relating to those insured with the Sun Fire Office, among which are
plus many others for courts and alleys off Cannon Street Road.

In the middle years of the century, at 7 Clark's Terrace, off Cannon Street Road, lived Edward Augustus Cory MD FSA MRCS who wrote a textbook The Physical and Medical Management of Children: adapted for general perusal which went through several editions (eg the enlarged 5th edition of 1844, J. Draper). He was well-known in the area, and a regular writer to the medical journals of the time; HERE are some of his letters, which show him to be enlightened in his approach - on the treatment of 'hysteria', malignant cholera, medicines for children, midwifery issues, and the delivery of twins - and also quick to defend his reputation. He died (at Banstead) on 8 July 1854. His son Frederick Charles Cory MD MRCS followed in his father's footsteps: he was admitted as a Doctor of Medicine in 1853, and became a Fellow of the Obstetrical Society of London (serving on its Council 1867-69); living at 8 Nassau Place, Commercial Road, he was briefly churchwarden at St George-in-the-East from 1861-62, and susbscribed to the Scripture Readers' journal.

See here for details how the London & Blackwall Railway bisected the street, with a station briefly located here (1842-48, until it moved further east); the railway arches were used - as they are to this day - for a variety of worshops and small businesses. As the character of the area changed, many public houses appeared along the street, including the following (with their 1859 licensees named in brackets):

*  In the  early 1880s William Osborne was the licensee [pictured here in 1882 with his four youngest children Charlotte, Anne, James and Clara]. He prospered, buying houses in Bow, and enjoyed counting out gold sovereigns. His next son Robert - there were two further boys (one of whom emigrated to the USA) and a girl - was married in Bow, and seeking to escape the confines and dirt of the East End took his family to Blackwood in South Wales, where he became involved in Jerusalem Baptist chapel and the temperance movement. We're grateful to Faith Ford for this picture and detailed family information; more details of this, and their church in Hereford, here.

Jewish and Irish residents were increasingly moving into the street. As one example among many, at no.40 Michael Shuter was born in 1850 to Polish parents; he emigrated to the USA, where he became a clothing manufacturer and traveller, dying in Brooklyn in 1906.

See here for the story of the Congregational Chapel, here for its take-over as an Anglican place of worship, and here for Raine's School across the road (the building still bears the name at second-floor level).

At no.75 from 1865-69 there was a Turkish baths. This seems to have been an unlucky site: the previous tenant, fruiterer James Hurley, was declared bankrupt in 1865, as was a later tenant, Gover & Co, leather sellers, in 1881.

20th Century

Here is a description of life in various parts of the parish in 1911; left are two photographs of Cannon Street Road - then heavily Irish - from about the same time. This 1955 view [right] looks south down Cannon Street Road from the railway bridge, next to which is the entrance to the church today.

26 Cannon Street Road - a case study
In the mid-19th century the Ballard family occupied the house (and also no.14): they were printers, and William (b.1837) became the head of the household. From 1887 to c1975 it was the manufactory of  H Glover & Sons, Mineral Water Manufacturers, with a large workshop with glazed top-lighting to the rear, which still survives; they made and sold cordials and squash, as did others in the area. Horace William Glover was also the licensee of the Crown & Dolphin (see above) in 1921. Family members remember visiting the workshop in the 1970s. The shop frontage, now a locally-listed site, survives [pictured right]. A firm of architects was based here in the 1990s, and a registered medical practitioner in more recent years.

Ponler Street
Formerly William Street, it was renamed in the mid-19th century, probably for the Ponler family. Formerly they were seafarers: Captain John Ponler sailed the Queen West Indiaman at the start of the 19th century, and wrote from the Barbadoes [sic] on 29 March 1806 to Lawrence Bruce, at the Jamaica Coffee House in London, With respect to my patent fore-sail, I had it bent daring the bad weather at our first sailing, and it certainly answers every purpose that the patentee intended it; for at different times during the bad weather, I sent the watch forward to reef the fore-sail, which could be done in three or four minutes, without starting tack or sheet. Latterly they were timber merchants, operating at 228 Cable Street (where the father and son partnership - both also named John - was dissolved in 1875). Although family connections were mainly with St Paul Shadwell, one of the Johns was churchwarden at St George-in-the-East in 1863, and a Warden of the Worshipful Company of Leathersellers in 1866.

For a while in the mid-1850s Joseph Platts and his wife and 8 children lived at 2 William Street (and later at Clarence Place, Stepney Green). Born in 1815, from 1837 he was engineer of Steamboat Company of the Black Sea and then Chief Consulting Engineer to the Russian Imperial Admiralty at St Petersburg, a fluent Russian speaker, and twice recipient of the Gold Medal with Riband of the Order of St Anne & Vladimir. The family left Odessa at the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1855. Letters here relate to his claim for compensation for the destruction of the steam-powered flour mill which he and his father-in-law John Tandy ran at Kertch. Eventually he was offered £500 compensation 'without prejudice', for the loss of mill and his services as an interpreter.  He returned to Russia, dying there in 1859 (buried at Smolensk Cemetery in St Petersburg).

In recent years the street has been entirely rebuilt; it includes housing by Hunt Thompson Associates which won a North East Thames Architectural Society award in 1986. The Bangladeshi Youth Movement (BYM) has its offices in the street, and organises a variety of local activities.

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