In Search Of Flower & Dean St

 

Celebrating the publication of Journal of a Man Unknown, I am publishing a series of pieces by Gillian Tindall. Today you can read about her quest for Flower & Dean St where the protagonist of her novel lodges with a family of Huguenot weavers back in the seventeenth century.

Click here to order a copy of ‘Journal of a Man Unknown’ for £10

This is the last call for the launch party at Hatchard’s Piccadilly this Wednesday 19th November 6-8pm. At 7pm, travel writer Colin Thubron will speak in appreciation of Gillian and actor Alan Cox will read from the novel. Drop me a line at spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to be added to the list.

 

Fishman’s Tobacconist, Flower & Dean St, seventies, by Ron McCormick

It is a disappointing fact that some dwellings are built to be poor, you can find examples all over Britain. But in parts of London, once desirable streets had poverty imposed upon them. The streets of Spitalfields, whose early Georgian houses are now expensive and desirable, were from the Victorian period until well after the Second World War under this shadow. It is only thanks to the energies and determined actions of a few in the sixties and seventies that a number of these streets have survived, but many have not and one of these is Flower and Dean St.

In Tudor times, Spitalfields was actually fields beyond the City wall, though by the late Elizabethan days a sprinkle of individual wealthy gentleman’s houses began to dot the roadside up to Shoreditch and, by the reign of Charles I, there were more of them – typical ribbon development. This ceased during the Civil War but once peace was established, even before the Cromwells were seen off and Charles II was restored, builders got busy again in this desirable-almost-rural setting.

In 1655 two brothers called Fossan, one of whom was a goldsmith, acquired an odd-shaped chunk of land not far from an ancient, muddy track to brick fields, now Brick Lane. Much of the ground was used for tenter fields, where woollen cloth woven locally was hung up to dry. Already the City clothing industry was impinging on the rural land. The Fossans leased the land for ninety-nine years to two builders, John Flower and Gowan Dean. Such was the system under which most of Greater London was created over the next two hundred years. There they built Fossan St, whose name a generation later came to be misunderstood as ‘Fashion St,’ and gave their own surnames to the street just south of it.

Fashion St still exists with the handsome early eighteenth century Christ Church, Spitalfields, and its graveyard just to the north, but its present buildings are of a later date. The original Flower & Dean St is gone as if it had never been. 

It must have been a pretty street and a respectable one for much of the next century, when it was mainly occupied by Huguenot silk-spinners. These were protestants who had come to England to find a more welcoming society than the Catholic France of Louis XIV. They arrived in far greater numbers in the 1680s when Louis tore up a legal agreement tolerating Protestantism and real persecution set in. Some arrived across the Channel in dangerously small boats, making their way into the Thames estuary and up the river by night. Nothing in the life of nations really changes.

These hard-working spinners and weavers flourished, and by the mid-eighteenth century many had established themselves in other businesses, entering prosperous British society. Those who remained began to do less well, imports of silk and cotton from India were damaging the home trade. By the middle of the century the houses in Flower & Dean St were being sub-divided into smaller lodgings. There were also questions about their stability, the  brickies employer by Flower & Dean were said to have used inadequate mortar. 

Fifty years later, the land east of Whitechapel was entirely built up with houses and these were extending further along the Mile End Rd. Within another generation, the hamlets set in countryside that was visible from the Tower of London would be turning inexorably into the great mass of the East End. To the prosperous residents of expanding West London, this might as well have been a foreign country.

In reality, of course, much of the East End was filled with decent hard-working people who themselves regarded such places as Flower & Dean St as dangerous slums. It was now where lodging houses offered a bed for a few pence a night and where, it was said, thieves felt at ease and prostitutes plied their trade, though it is unclear who would seek them out there.

Ford Maddox Brown, the painter, described it as ‘a haunt of vice… full of cut-throats’, and it was a place where policemen were said only to venture in pairs. But the street acquired a sudden and much more general fame when, in 1888, two women who lodged in there in different houses met their demise in the Whitechapel Murders. Enough was enough. With the not-entirely rational logic that has often been applied to places that get a bad reputation, it was decided the street should be pulled down. 

Just to add to the drama, during demolition in 1892, two skulls and some bones were found in a box under the yard. More murder victims, it was at once assumed. In reality, the examination of the bones seems to have been cursory and it is likely these relics were from a field-burial hundreds of years earlier.

What rose in the place of Flower & Dean St was Rothschild Buildings, a massive tenement block bestowed on the large newly-arrived population of Jewish people from Eastern Europe. The bestowers were the Rothschild banking family, and it was a classic example of ‘four percent philanthropy’ – a charitable cause, yet one which nevertheless brought in a modest but steady income.

Moral views change and the improvements of one era attract the disapproval of later times. By the seventies, many of the descendants of the original Jewish occupants of the Rothschild Buildings were established in more salubrious northern suburbs and Bangladeshis arrived to take their place. The Buildings were steeped in soot and the lack of bathrooms in the flats was considered unacceptable. They were pulled down leaving only the grandiose brick archway. Today, the site is a dug-out games pitch at the end of the short stub of Lolesworth Close off Commercial St.

Just to the south is Flower & Dean Walk, a modern low-rise pedestrianised development, looking oddly out of place amidst the complex of old alleys and new tower blocks, with the raucous salesmanship of Petticoat Lane a few minutes away. I went for a stroll down there recently on a snowy day. There was a thin mist floating above the whiteness and it seemed as if the monstrously tall constructions that have transformed the City were dissolving into the sky, as if they were disappearing while the older, traditional buildings remained. Would that it were so!

Rothschild Buildings by John Allin, painted in the seventies

This bollard in Lolesworth Close is all that remains of Flower & Dean St

Entrance to the former Rothschild Buildings

Flower & Dean Walk

Flower & Dean Walk

Flower & Dean Estate opened by HRH The Prince of Wales on 18th July 1984