Precinct of Well Close

The Precinct of Well Close ~ Wellclose Square

The Tower Liberties

See here for the history of the areas that became part of the Liberties of the Tower of London. By Letters Patent of 1686, King James II included the areas of Minories, the Old Artillery Ground and Wellclose among the Tower Liberties, although the Tower held no land in the area. Pictured is a map of 1755 showing the areas involved (Wellclose Square, formerly known as Marine Square, is in the top right), and one from the late 19th century. The western edge of the Precinct of Wellclose was Well Street [now Ensign Street], its southern edge Neptune Street, and to the north was Graces Alley, later home to Wilton's Music Hall. See also Rosemary Lane [now Royal Mint Street].

What were the implications of this 'Liberty'? It meant that authority for the maintenance of law and order within the area lay with the Governor of the Tower, sitting with appointed magistrates. They dealt with all criminal charges, great and small, and those accused were committed to Newgate for safe custody. In civil matters, it served as a Court of Record and Request for the recovery of small debts (like a modern-day County Court), and had its own 'gaol of the Tower Royalty'. The original Court House, on the south side of the square [pictured c1910] was erected some time after 1687, and there are good records and pictures of the building before demolition. In its latter years it was used as a German club, and then became a paint works - the courtroom became a storeroom, and the staircase was painted in shiny cocoa brown.

The prison on the corner of Neptune [later Wellclose] Street was commonly known as the 'Sly House', because it was said that felons who entered it left by a subterranean passage to the Tower and the docks, from which the convict ship Success left. When it closed and the King's Arms public house took over the site, the landlord would open the cells, with their heavily-bolted doors, grilles, plank beds, fetters and straitjackets, to visitors. The reality may have been more prosaic: it was used mainly as for debtors who were tried at the local court.

Some of these fixtures have now been preserved at the Museum of London, including inscriptions scratched with pine cones on the wooden panels. Among them is one to Stockley, who invented the 'pitch plaster' which was clapped on victims' mouths to keep them silent; the optimistic verse The cupboard is empty, to our sorrow; let's hope it will be full to-morrow; and the pathetic plea Please to remember the poor debtors, 1758.

All this ceased to have any significance as new local government legislation took effect: from 1855 the area fell under the jurisdiction of the district of Whitechapel. But the traditional triennial Beating of the Bounds, on Ascension Day, continued until 1897 for the Liberty of Wellclose. The Lieutenant of the Tower came, accompanied by an escort of Tower warders, followed by officials and schoolboys wearing ribbons red, white and blue on their bosoms, and carrying willow wands. These boys were the sons of soldiers quartered at the Tower. Many parish churches, including St George's, used to beat the bounds, to mark out their territory - as this 1882 programme [left] shows. Here [right] is the Tower's own ceremony from 1910. The tradition still continues in Aldgate: a family from our church school, who live in the Tower of London, takes part in it.

Theatres [see also Goodman's Fields]

There was an earlier theatre in Well Street - the Royalty Theatre [pictures left] was built by subscription in 1786 and run by John 'Plausible' Palmer, but was not licensed. After the opening performances of As You Like It and the farce Miss in her Teens, the profits given to the new London Hospital, it closed until a licence for the hybrid musical entertainments permiited by law - interludes, pantomimes and other species of the irregular drama - was granted. Later it fell into the hands of various adventurers (Nightingale, London and Middlesex 1815). In 1820 it was bought by Peter Moore MP, but burned down in 1826. A replacement building, the Royal Brunswick, was erected in seven months, with a heavy iron roof. A few days after it opened in 1828, during a rehearsal of Guy Mannering, the roof fell in, crushing to death Mr Maurice, one of the proprietors, and twelve others [fourth picture].

An urban square

In a district where most building projects were piecemeal and chaotic, Wellclose Square (originally known as Marine Square) and the smaller Prince's Square to the east were the only planned developments of their time, and even here (as noted below) the houses were of various periods, and were constantly being modified, extended and rebuilt. Nicholas Barbon (c1640-98) was its principal developer. His full name was Nicholas If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barbon, given by his Puritan father Praisegod Barbon (Barebone), leather-seller, MP, fanatical anti-monarchist and general nuisance. Returning from Holland in the 1870s, Nicholas was a major speculator in the West End, leasing plots from the Crown in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, seeing an opportunity to provide houses for well-to-do merchants. He also acquired three sites in East London, paying £3,200 for the freehold of Wellclose Square (though he was slow in making payment). In 1682-3 he cleared the site and laid out a square with diagonal passageways at each corner, to insulate it from the noise and dirt of the surrounding area and maximise the frontages. (Of these passageways, only Grace's Alley on the NW corner remains, plus the now un-named cut-through on the SW, variously known in the 19th century as Harrrod's, Harad's, Harrald's and Hard's Court or Place; Ship Alley on the SE corner and North East Passage have disappeared. Shorter Street and Neptune Street connected the square respectively to Cable Street and The Highway.)

On the south side Barbon built two-storey houses with attics, with good-sized rooms and staircases with twisted balusters. In 1680 Barbon opened a fire insurance office at the Royal Exchange, and in 1683 one of the first schemes was set up in the Square, with a permanent engine housed on the north side. His convoluted commercial practices - assigning or mortgaging leases to others - are described in detail by Elizabeth McKellar inThe Birth of Modern London: the Development & Design of the City 1660-1720 (1999). Barbon's contemporary Roger North, a lawyer and biographer, commented his house in the morning [is] like a court, crowded with suitors for money. And he kept state, coming down at his own time like a magnifico, in deshabille, and so to discourse with them. And having very much work, they were loath to break finally, and upon a new job taken they would follow and worship him like an idol, for then there was fresh money.

The houses on the north side were later and larger. At number 26 was a house with Venetian windows, with a five-bay boarded house behind. Despite the Fire, houses were built or rebuilt in timber, and Roger Guillery in The Small House in Eighteenth Century London: A Social and Architectural History (2004) comments these were not modest houses, and they incorporated fashionable classical embellishments, like the ground floor Serliana.

A number of the houses were occupied by Scandinavian timber merchants. In the chapter on Wellclose Square in their informative book Wapping 1600-1800: A Social History of an Early Modern London Maritime Suburb (East London Historical Society 2009) Derek Morris and Ken Cozens list a number of local families, identified from insurance policies, court records and wills, including

the German-Norwegian brothers George and Ernst Wolff, whose firm began in 1767 at number 21 and extended to number 22 before moving to larger premises near the Minories and became Wolffs and Dorville, flourishing until the timber trade changed and it went bankrupt in 1812. Georg, who became a Methodist (he was one of John Wesley's executors), was also the Danish-Norwegian consul from 1787; he also had a house in Balham. Ernst produced a Danish-Norweigan dictionary, a ready reckoner for timber pricing, and a history of the Danish-Norwegian Church in the Square (see below)
the family of Captain Hugh Raymond (1674-1737), a shipbuilder, involved in the slave trade, and one of the Governors of the South Sea Company - when the bubble burst in 1720 a detailed inventory of his house in the Square was taken and he was liable for £34,000 (half his estate)
the German family of Peter Rhode [or Rhode], whose sons Caston and Major were sugar refiners.

The Danish Church was built in the centre of the Square in 1694 [on the site now occupied by St Paul's Whitechapel CE Primary School, next to which is now another primary school, Shapla, opened in 1987]. Daniel Defoe wrote in 1724 Well Close, now call'd Marine Square, was so remote from houses, that it used to be a very dangerous place to go over after it was dark, and many people have been robbed and abused in passing it; a well* standing in the middle, just where the Danish Church is now built, there the mischief was generally done (A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain).
*also known as Goodman's Fields Well

Here is part of Horwood's 1792 map of the area. In 1815 Nightingale described it as a pretty little neat square. But it was not all housing: a sugar refinery was built in the square in 1794, and by 1854 there were five. There were also hostels and other welfare organisations, including the Jewish Joel Emanuel Almshouse [a trust which continues to the present day, based in north London] and at no.32 the Hand in Hand Home for Aged and Decayed Tradesmen, founded in 1840 and previously based at 5 Duke's Place from 1843, and 22 Jewry Street from 1850 before moving to the Square in 1854, and again in 1878 to 23 Well Street, Hackney. This was one of a trio of organisations set up to protect members of the Jewish community, for whom care and respect for the elderly and needy is a core priority; the Poor Law system failed to meet their social, religious and dietary needs. The other two were the Widow's Home Asylum (founded 1843, and from 1857-1880 at 67 Great Prescott [now Prescot] Street - more here) and the Jewish Workhouse or Home (1871). The three later came together in Hackney and Stepney Green and merged in 1894, moving to Nightingale Lane in Wandsworth Common in 1907. (Now known as Nightingale, in 2001 it was the largest Jewish residential and nursing home in Europe. Ted 'Kid' Lewis, a local Jewish boxer, whose story is noted here, was a resident from 1966 until his death in 1970.) See here for a Jewish orphanage elsewhere in the parish which also became the basis of a present-day trust elsewhere.

At no.6 was the office of the St George-in-the-East Poor Law Guardians.

Famous residents
Down the years Wellclose Square had a number of notable residents, and became something of a haven for free-thinkers, before it fell into decline. Indeed, from 1744-62 it housed a small dissenting academy, in the home of Dr Samuel Morton Savage (1721-91). Students boarded with families, and the library and lectures were in the house. Morton taught classics and mathematics, and Dr David Jennings, the Principal, taught theology.

In the 19th century, several printing presses were established in the area, including those of Samuel Braund Clouter at 39 Wellclose Square / 1 Ship Alley in 1825, Henry Catmur at 14 Ship Alley in 1825, and Henry Abraham at 8 Wellclose Square in 1835. .

Other notable residents included:

Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) - more here
Sir Felix Feast, brewer, freeman and briefly Sheriff of London; here in the early years of the 18th century he brought up Richard Cooper (1700-64) [pictured right], orphaned in 1709, who moved to Edinburgh around 1727 and as an engraver with architectural interests became a significant figure in the Scottish enlightenment; he had also been associated with the Swedish artist George Englehart Schrõder (1684-1750), who drew Cooper's portrait before returning to Sweden in 1725 and may have had connections with the Swedish Church in Princes Square (for more details on all this, see Dr Joe Rock's site here). Sir Felix died intestate in 1724, provoking a Chancery case (5 April 1726) about provision for his widow, in regard to her marriage dowry (she died in 1755) and their children.
At the same address lived other brewers - Sir John Parsons (knighted 1687, owner of the Red Lion Brewery, Lord Mayor of London 1702-03 and MP for Reigate for nearly 30 years until his death in 1704 - the owner of Reigate Priory from 1681), and Henry Parsons - see An exact copy of the poll, At the chusing of Knights of the Shire for the County of Middlesex (1705).
Thomas Bowrey (1662-1713), sea captain and free merchant, probably from a Wapping family, who travelled and traded extensively in the East Indies between 1669-88; he then married his cousin Mary Gardiner, daughter of a Wapping apothecary and settled in Wellclose Square until their deaths (she outlived him by two years). He was a Younger Brother of Trinity House, and is particularly remembered for producing the first English-Malay dictionary in 1701 [his map of Malay-speaking areas right]. He also published travel writings, including a Geographical Account of the Countries round the Bay of Bengal 1669-1679, which includes this illustration [right] and an account of how on the Bay of Biscay he and his colleagues observed the effect of communal drug-taking (bhang, made from crushed cannabis pods mixed with milk) and each bought a pint to try for themselves:

It Soon tooke its Operation Upon most of us, but merrily, Save upon two of our Number, who I suppose feared it might doe them harme not beinge accustomed thereto. One of them Sat himselfe downe Upon the floore, and wept bitterly all the Afternoone, the Other terrified with feare did runne his head into a great Mortavan Jarre, and continue in that posture 4 hours or more; 4 or 5 of the number lay upon the Carpets (that were Spread in the roome) highly Complimentinge each Other in high termes, each man fancyinge himself noe lesse than an Emperour. One was quarrelsome and fought with one of the wooden Pillars of the Porch, until he had left himselfe little Skin upon the knuckles of his fingers. My Selfe and one more Sat sweating for the Space of 3 hours in Exceeding Measure ...

Bowrey's papers also included a Diary of a Six Week Tour in 1698 to Holland and Flanders, Also The Story of the Mary Galley (1704-1710), and an incomplete manuscript, in 'crabbed italic hand', Discription of the Coast of Affrica from the Cape of Good Hope, to the Red Sea, dated 1708 (which was found in an old chest in a Worcestershire manor house in 1913, parts of which are now in the Guildhall Library in London. These documents were published in the 1920s by the Hakluyt Society).

Dr Hayyim Samuel Jacob Falk (c1708-1782) [right] was a Kabbalistic rabbi and alchemist. Charged with sorcery in his native Westphalia, he fled to London and settled in Wellcose Square in 1742 where he lived until his death. The Jews of London called him the 'Baal Shem of London' because of his alleged miraculous or magical powers involving the divine Name. He kept a diary of dreams and the Kabbalistic names of angels, now held in the library of the United Synagogue in London.

Revd Dr Henry Mayo (1733-93), minister of the Independent Chapel in Nightingale Lane, Wapping, known as the 'literary anvil' - more details here. He is not to be confused with Dr Herbert Mayo, Rector of St George's during the same period.

Thomas Day (1748-89), author, politician and disciple of Rousseau, was born and lived at 32 Wellclose Square [pictured right, in a drawing from John Adock Famous London Houses and Literary Shrines of London (Dent 1912) - see also this photograph from 1920]. The house went with his father's job as 'Collector of the Customs Outward in the Port of London'. Day's 1773 poem The Dying Negro, written with John Bicknell, was an early inspiration to the anti-slavery campaign, and The Devoted Legions (1776) argued for the rights of the American colonists. He is most remembered for his children's book The History of Sandford and Merton (1783) which espouses Rousseau's ideals. [In the 1820s and 1830s it was the home of en engineer, John Hague (c1781-1857) who registered various patents, including for ssugar-blowing and hydraulic machinery, but was declared bankrupt in 1845, then living at Rotherhithe; it later housed a Jewish hostel - see above.] Until demolition, the house bore a blue plaque.

William Consett Wright (1790-1873) lived at no.50, the home and office of his father's coal lightering business, with a wharf at Ratcliff Cross; after attending various Dissenting academies, he was apprenticed to his father at the age of sixteen and was admitted to the Lightermen and Watermen's Company in 1813. He took over the business after his father's death in 1817; in the 1830s allegations of 'deviation' were made. In due course he took on a female relative as partner since he had no sons, until his retirement in 1860 (by which time he had moved to Upper Clapton) when Charrington's took over the firm. A Light in the West Indies 1810: Letters exchanged between William Consett Wright, 'A Gentleman of Respectability', and his Family during a Voyage to the Islands of St Thomas and Santo Domingo were transcribed in Caribbean Studies 6.4 and 7.1 (January and April 1967) - in one of which, posted to Hayti [sic], his mother asked him to bring back pine-apples or other fruit. He died in Richmond in 1873. [On 22 May 1840 Thomas Hilliard was convicted of stealing 120lbs of rope belonging to Wright, value £1, and was transported for seven years.]

The next residents of no.50 were scientists John Thomas Quekett [pictured], founder of the Royal Microscopical Society, and his brother (also a histologist and miscroscopist) Edwin John Quekett. They came to live next door to their brother William at no.51, who was the first Vicar of Christ Church Watney Street.

Dr Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791-1868) invented around 1829 the terrarium or 'Wardian case' [examples pictured left], a dry version of an aquarium, because his ferns were being poisoned by the London air.

Charles Eaton died in the Square in 1879. With William Smith he made lead-cast 'Billy and Charley' forgeries of antiquities, which dealers bought despite the fact that the lettering was a meaningless jumble.

Latter years

In The East End of London (1951), when many of the old houses were still standing, but much-damaged in the war, Millicent Rose wrote

Wellclose Square was never designed as a whole, and the individuals who lived there were continually ornamenting the fronts of their houses or even rebuilding them entirely. To this day it is like a sampler of our domestic building, from the south side houses which date, some of them, from the 1690s, to those on the north, where there is a tall, warmly coloured group of the mid-18th century, while the houses to east and west are many of them somewhat later. One on the west side shows the weather-boarded country style which was once so common all over the East End, and which fire and decrepitude have so consistently destroyed. It is a graceful and sophisticated example of the style, with a pretty Venetian window, but having been allowed to fall derelict during the war, it cannot survive much longer. In the north-west corner there is another interesting house, whose façade has been dressed up with delightful reliefs; this too is derelict. ..... In its heyday the square must have been a most agreeable place. The houses to the east were the largest, and with their gardens stretching behind them right to the back gardens of Prince's Square, and their big front windows looking onto the church with its bower of plane trees, they were considered the most desirable. .... Prince's Square with its Swedes' Church was in every respect a smaller, less fashionable Wellclose, and here there are other pleasant houses, the oldest of them dating back to the first laying-out of thse square in the 1720's. .... A close juxtaposition of handsome square and wretched slum was usual all over Georgian London, but nowhere more striking than in this riverside region. From three sides and from the four corners of Wellclose Square run seven little alleys that keep their original contours and are still built chiefly with rows of humble cottages. All led directly into what was, for three centuries, one of the noisiest, dirtiest, and most disreputable quarters in London. Turn into Shipal Passage, and twenty paces will bring you to the Ratcliff Highway.

Herbet Elliott Hamblen, in On Many Seas - the Life and Exploits of a Yankee Sailor (1896) describes a boarding house in Ship Alley [Shipal Passage] as a little dingy hole ... kept by a German lady, Almena by name. She was a partially reformed denizen of The Highway who had taken to herself a Norwegian sailor for a consort ... her right hand grasped a quart pewter pot of 'arf an' 'arf (p118). Israel Zangwill, in Ghetto Comedies (1907), tells the tale of a man and his family who found lodging in the cellar of 25 Ship Alley, the home of Baruch Zezanski: It was pitch black. They say there is a hell. This may or may not be, but more of a hell than the night we passed in this cellar one does not require. Every vile thing in the world seemed to have taken up its abode therein. We sat the whole night sweeping the vermin from us (The Model of Sorrows, p20). The Prussian Eagle tavern, in Ship Alley, was a meeting-place for Germans, with a well-used dance hall upstairs, with one of the various 4- or 6-piece German bands providing music. An 1872 article claimed that a notice at the entrance read All persons are requested, before entering the dancing saloon, to leave at the bar their pistols and knives, or any other weapon they may have about them. This may be a myth, but Melville McNaughton, later Assistant Commissioner at New Scotland Yard, recalled visiting as a young constable, when dancing was carried on by German ladies, and sailors of all nationalities, and the sight of a drawn knife or two was not infrequent.

Pictured are
1 houses in the Square (undated) · 2 a wooden cottage · 3 a view of September 1911 · 4 Ship Alley, between the square and The Highway · 5 the same view today · 6 Watch House, c1925 · 7 Wellclose Square 1944

Follow these links for accounts of the Square from 1911 and 1934. The story of the demolition of the remaining houses is told here. In a shed at the rear of no.37 an oak carved sacrament cupboard or aumbry, dating from the early 16th century, possibly French in origin, was found. In 2008, Tower Hamlets created a new conservation area centred on Wilton's Music Hall and Wellclose Square. Right is a still from 'Poppy', a 1975 episode of The Sweeney, showing St Paul's School in the background, and a view of the site between St Paul's School and The Highway where subterranean electrical cabling is under way. A local group is campaigning for a creative use of this site when this work is completed - watch this space.....