The location was transitory because my grandparents were in Hanbury Street in the 1911 census and had moved to Stepney Green by the Twenties but it gave me a feeling of “belonging” and a passion for discovering everything I could about Spitalfields, endlessly walking the streets and wishing he was still around to point out memorable places. I can see the type of property into which a Jewish immigrant family would have crammed in 1914, the year he was born, but not the actual buildings. I have managed to harvest a couple old photos tagged as the Ford Street Jewish ghetto market and one showing the junction with old Steward Street. The modern stub is, in fact, the remains of Steward Street. He left London in the Thirties and even before that Fort Street, which you see on the map snaking west and south from the end of Spital Square, had been cleared for the “new” market extension. I later discovered that even that was a red herring. It proved a puzzle, as this was a small stub off Artillery Lane. His birth was listed as 7 Fort Street, so when I moved to London I went hunting.
#703 e steward street full
It was not until long after he died more than 50 years ago I obtained his full birth certificate and discovered he was not joking. When I asked my father where he was born he always vaguely said “behind Bishopsgate Station”. Shepherd’s Place arch, 1820, leading to Tenter St – photographed 1909 Norton Folgate Court House, Folgate St, photographed in 1909 Spital Sq, only St Botolph’s Hall on the right survives todayĬhurch Passage, Spital Sq, 1733, photographed in 1909 – only the market buildings survive.įormer King Edward Institution, 1864, Deal Stġ0 & 11 Norton Folgate, 1810 – photographed in 1909 So look back at these elegiac photos of what was lost in Spitalfields before your time, reconcile yourself to the loss of the past and brace yourself for the future that is arriving. Meanwhile, Commercial St was cut through Spitalfields from Aldgate to Shoreditch to transport traffic more swiftly from the docks, wreaking destruction through densely inhabited streets in the mid-nineteenth century. And it was a process that was repeated when the line was extended down to Liverpool St. Only a feint pencil sketch of the tower records the Priory of St Mary which stood upon the site of Spital Sq until Henry VIII ‘dissolved’ it and turned the land into his artillery ground. Constructing the Eastern Counties Railway in the eighteen-thirties destroyed hundreds of homes and those residents who were displaced moved into Shoreditch, creating the overcrowded neighbourhood which became known as the Old Nichol. Yet contemplating the history of loss in Spitalfields sets even these events within a sobering perspective. On the eastern side of Spitalfields, the nineteenth century terraces of Mile End New Town were erased in ‘slum clearances’ and replaced with blocks of social housing while, to the north, the vast Bishopsgate Goodsyard was burned to the ground in a fire that lasted for days in 1964. Spital Sq was an eighteenth century square linking Bishopsgate with the market that was destroyed within living memory, existing now only as a phantom presence in these murky old photographs and in the fond remembrance of senior East Enders.
Yet these photographs reveal another Spitalfields that only a few remember, this is lost Spitalfields. In Spitalfields, the experience has been especially poignant in recent years with the redevelopment of the Fruit & Vegetable Market, the Fruit & Wool Exchange and Norton Folgate. Your sense of loss grows until eventually your memory of the London you remember becomes more vivid than the London you see before you and you become a stranger in the place that you know best.
As the years pass, this city bound with your formative experience changes, bearing less and less resemblance to the place you discovered. Everyone loves the London they first knew, whether as the place they grew up or the city they arrived in.
Looking towards Spitalfields from Aldgate East
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