Ming Street
In the early modern period Ming Street was a byway
called Back Lane, on the south side of Pennyfields. In
1802 it was cut at its west end by Commercial (West
India Dock) Road. It became known as King Street
c1820. (ref. 35) King Street passed north of the Blue Posts public house until 1827–8, when it was rerouted to the south to
make a direct crossing to Garford Street, allowing locals
to avoid paying tolls on Commercial Road. The old
branch, which survived until 1963–4, became King Street
West, and King Street itself was renamed Ming Street
in 1938, presumably in acknowledgement of the Chinese
community. (ref. 36)
The north side of the street was developed in the early
nineteenth century. By 1810 there were two small courts
of cottages, five in Union Court (later Ulmar Place) and
eight in Prospect Place, and ten years later there were
also several two-storey houses along the street. Another
small court of three cottages, Eagle Place, was built in
the 1830s. With such piecemeal growth, the street frontage was more or less fully built up by mid-century.
Nearby to the east there was a builder's workshop and
yard, occupied by Carden & Hack from c1840 to c1868.
This appears subsequently to have become a depot for
Pickford & Company. In the second half of the century
houses along the north side of King Street were rebuilt,
extended and converted as workshops and warehouses,
many with maritime links. There were ship-brass-founders, ship-joiners, ship-chandlers, ropemakers, sailmakers, riggers and a shell merchant. Early in the
twentieth century the courts were cleared and commercial
use of the north side of the street spread. (ref. 37)
The site of Nos 12–13 King Street, previously a shipchandler's workshop, was redeveloped in 1914–15 as a
small cinema, the Ideal Picture Palace. The architects
were Andrews & Peascod, and the builder J. Bussey of
Stratford. The cinema was a single-storey hall seating
860 on a site 58ft 6in. by 83ft. It was used for variety
acts and was extended in 1928–9. The Ideal Picture
Palace was closed after bomb damage in 1940, and in the
1950s was used as a garage. (ref. 38) Another large garage was
built at Nos 3–6 Ming Street in 1939 for P. X. Limited.
The north side of Ming Street was cleared in the mid1960s for the erection of public housing. (ref. 39)
The south side of Ming Street has never been substantially developed, except at its eastern end. A large
site adjoining Hanbury Place was used by the Pennyfieldsbased builders, Thomas Morris, John Howkins, William
Barker and William Constable, as a 'garden' from 1808
until their bankruptcy in 1818. It was perhaps a yard
convenient for work carried out by them at the West
India Docks. (ref. 40) This site passed to another local firm of
builders, James Gates and William Horne, and was
acquired on lease in 1820 for the erection of a gas works
for lighting Poplar, an early venture of its kind. John and
George Barlow, London iron merchants, commenced
work speculatively, then in 1821 formed the Poplar Gas
Light Company, one of a number of gas companies which
they promoted. (ref. 41) The company acquired the freehold in
1836. The Barlows erected a gasometer with a tank and
columns of cast-iron, as stipulated by the West India
Dock Company, which was nervous of a fire risk so close
to its warehouses. The gas works, which were T-shaped,
were built 'upon a most liberal scale' at a cost of nearly
£16,000. (ref. 42) . Newby Place and Bow Lane were lit in 1822,
All Saints' churchyard in 1823, Robin Hood Lane in
1824 and the East India Dock Road in 1826. (ref. 43) The
company erected a second works at Millwall in 1841,
serving the Isle of Dogs.
Greatly increased demand, largely from shipbuilding
and manufacturing in Blackwall and Orchard Place,
proved too much for the King Street works to meet. In
1846, despite proposals for expanding the works and
laying larger mains, the company lost its contract to
supply the parish with gas. The contract was awarded to
the Commercial Gas Company, based in Stepney, which
took over the Poplar Gas Light Company in 1850. One
night in May that year, as an experiment, Poplar had its
first gas from the Stepney works. Mains were soon laid
from Stepney to serve the Garford Street area and
improve the Poplar supply, and in 1852 the King Street
works were closed and largely dismantled. Robert Warton,
a Finchley surveyor, bought the ground to build houses
on, but nothing came of his scheme, for which he blamed
the high price of building materials. (ref. 44) The site was
subsequently let to John Finney, engineer and millwright,
who redeveloped it as the Poplar Iron Works in 1853–4.
The buildings, some perhaps survivors from the gas
works, were arranged around three sides of a large yard,
entered from the street by a carriageway in a broad twostorey house, with workshops and stable ranges behind.
The site (No. 27 King Street) ceased to be an ironfoundry c1900. The buildings were altered in 1918 for F.
McNeill & Company, felt-roofing manufacturers, here
until the late 1930s. In 1947 the premises became Ajax
Works for Grosvenor Utilities Limited, plastic moulders,
and B. B. Kent Limited, vitreous enamellers and roadsign
makers. The buildings were again altered and north-lit
workshops and warehouses were added at the south end
of the site. In 1972 the site was acquired by the Greater
London Council from its freeholder, at great expense,
and all the buildings were cleared in 1973. (ref. 45)
A branch post office (No. 28 King Street) was erected
just to the west of the Poplar Iron Works in 1869–70.
This was a brick building with a classical stone façade.
Pilasters framed tall windows over which there was a key
pattern frieze and an open balustraded parapet. The
entrance had a heavily moulded projecting hood. The
building was extended in 1887, but ceased to be used as
a post office from about 1915. It passed through a variety
of uses, the last of which, in the 1960s, was as premises
for the West India Dock Sack & Bag Company. (ref. 46)
Hanbury Place and Hanbury Buildings
Hanbury Place (demolished).
This was a small court
with its entrance between Poplar High Street and King
Street. Latterly, it accommodated a private block of
artisans' dwellings that became a notorious and wellpublicized slum. No architectural significance attaches to
the area, but the multiplicity of property interests in this
sordid spot deserves chronicling.
Until 1880 the site of the court was part of the manor
of Poplar. In 1809 it was held as copyhold by Thomas
Morris, one of the principals of a building firm,
Howkins & Company, situated nearby in Pennyfields. (ref. 47)
In 1808 Morris had acquired a larger piece of copyhold
garden ground adjacent westward from a Charles
Hanbury, and Morris's application of the vendor's name
to Hanbury Court suggests that this larger site too had
previously been Hanbury's. Morris made the court in
1809–10 and built a terrace on its eastern side which
consisted of six very small houses, Nos 1–6 Hanbury
Place, with frontages of less than 13ft. They were first
occupied early in 1810. At the same time Morris sold
the houses and court to an auctioneer at Ratcliff, John
Sherrott, whose heirs sold them in 1812 to a coal merchant
in Whitechapel for £650. In 1818 Morris's firm became
bankrupt and in 1820 the garden ground west of Hanbury
Place became the site of the Poplar Gas Light Company's
works (see above). (ref. 48) It seems unlikely that the loss of
'amenity' following the arrival of the gas works would
have reduced the value of a property such as Hanbury
Place, but when the coal merchant sold the court and its
houses to a grocer at Shoreditch in 1822 it was at the
greatly reduced price of £310. (ref. 49) In 1835 James Gates,
the builder who, with his partner William Horne, had
formerly held the garden ground to the west, (ref. 50) bought
Hanbury Place, again at a greatly sunken price, for £200. (ref. 51)
In 1841 two of the six little houses were in divided
occupation and there were lodgers in another: the occupants averaged five to a house, although one house
contained nine. The ten male adults comprised three
'mariners', two watermen, a caulker and four labourers. (ref. 52)
The 1861 census shows greatly increased overcrowding.
The four occupied houses averaged eight or nine occupants each. The ten males over 14 years of age comprised
five labourers, a horsekeeper, a gardener, a 'shell polisher',
a shop-boy and a shipwright: one of the women worked,
as a charwoman. (ref. 53)
When Gates died, his heirs and trustees, who included
the curate of All Saints', Poplar, sold the houses in 1870
to Queen Anne's Bounty, which promptly sold them, for
£210, to the architect Banister Fletcher, an authority on
the technical, surveying, side of the business. (ref. 54) In 1871
he published a book of practical suggestions for the
improvement of the houses of the 'industrial classes',
based on his own experience of designing such buildings.
Included among his examples were some showing the
adaptation of tiny terrace houses of 12ft frontage as flats,
'yielding an improved rental'. (ref. 55) If Fletcher redeveloped
the site here it was not on the radical lines suggested in
his book. He probably improved the houses, (ref. 56) and then
sold them in 1877 to a cab proprietor in Whitechapel for
£500. (ref. 57)
The cab proprietor enfranchised the houses from manorial tenure for £210 in 1880, (ref. 58) and immediately sold
them to an undertaker in Shoreditch for £1,110. The
price shows that, even allowing for the enfranchisement
and some improvement, the potential of the site was now
thought to be rising: a local building society had advanced
£800 of the purchase money on mortgage. (ref. 59) The demand
for bottom-of-the-market weekly tenancies was evidently
great, for the 1881 census found the houses still overcrowded, averaging nine inhabitants each, and with eleven
at No. 6. The work of the 18 males over 13 years of age
seems (like that in 1841) more river-related than in 1861:
ten were dock-, ship-, or stevedore's labourers or 'ship
workers' and one a lighterman: two were labourers, two
were shoe blacks, and there was a blacksmith, an errand
boy and an 'agent'. More women worked — a laundress,
two servants, two matchbox-makers, a fancy-box-maker
and a worker in a lead factory. Another change was that
four of the nine 'heads' of families were Irish. (ref. 60)
In 1884 the undertaker sold the houses for £1,000 to
an architect and surveyor in the City, Joseph Clever.
Probably he too envisaged development: he came to an
abortive arrangement for an 80-year lease to a 'land agent'
at New Cross, but in fact made the lease, for a premium
of £450, to a City solicitor, W. H. Pettiver (who also
paid £100 to the land agent). Clever then sold out,
conveying the freehold to Pettiver for £1,080 in January
1885, (ref. 61) and it was he, ostensibly at least, who took the
lead in recasting the site to take greater advantage of the
letting potential.
Hanbury Buildings (demolished).
By April 1885 Pettiver
had engaged an architect, Thomas Lawrie, then of Southampton Street, who 12 or 13 years earlier had designed
a few houses in Kensington but was not otherwise
prominent. (ref. 62) He applied in that month to the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) to replace the houses
with a block of artisans' dwellings consisting of five
storeys, each containing 14 rooms. (ref. 63) The application was
turned down, but in July Lawrie was inviting tenders for
a closely similar project. The successful builder was
W. H. Holland of Pembroke Square, Kensington, who
tendered at £3,048, and the quantity surveyor was H. P.
Foster. (ref. 64) Work began in the autumn and was completed
in 1887. (ref. 65)
Hanbury Buildings had little of Kensington about it.
Grimly plain, it rose some 48ft (ref. 66) and extended down the
east side of the narrow court with a short return range
at the southern end (Plate 18b). The west side of the
court was closed by a wall separating it from the ironworks. (ref. 67) The fall of the land and the proximity of the
eastern boundary meant that the ground-floor flats were
'situate in a deep well'. (ref. 68) The carcase of the block was of
brick with wooden floors, and the staircase, passages,
landings and roof were of concrete. (ref. 69) In the main range
the upper floors opened to iron-railed galleries, the
topmost gallery roofed (at least by 1939) with corrugated
iron. (ref. 70) Each floor had seven two-roomed flats, said to be
of uniform type, with the rooms leading out of each
other. No water was laid to the flats, only to one cold
tap in a common wash-place on each floor, and on each
floor the three waterclosets were also common to the
seven flats. (ref. 71)
In March 1886 Pettiver mortgaged the freehold for
£1,200 to a solicitor's widow in Balham, and granted an
80-year lease at £70 per annum to a surveyor, Henry
Lucas. He in turn mortgaged this for £2,000 to an
estate agent in the Haymarket, Robert Coulson. Pettiver,
Lawrie, Lucas and Coulson - lawyer, architect, surveyor,
and estate agent - were closely connected: Pettiver and
Lucas were neighbours at Anerley and by 1887 Pettiver,
Lawrie and Coulson shared the same business address
in the Haymarket. (ref. 72) The surveyor Lucas had a real
involvement, Pettiver granting him his long lease in
consideration of his outlay on the building. (ref. 73) In 1889
Lucas made absolute his mortgage of this leasehold
interest to Coulson (for £12 in addition to the £2,000
Coulson had lent him). (ref. 74)
After March 1886 the freehold ownership thus gave
only a title to £70 per annum until 1965 and a reversionary interest thereafter (which never in fact came to
fruition). By 1890 the title of the solicitor's widow in
Balham had evidently become absolute and she sold it
for £1,700 to officers at the Custom House, (ref. 75) for their
benevolent or pension fund, and this fund retained it
until the demolition of Hanbury Place in the 1950s.
On his death in 1890 Coulson left the leasehold
interest to a well-connected retired clergyman living in
Paddington, the Reverend Chisnall Hamerton, and from
the latter's widow it passed to her solicitor in trust for
her married daughter and daughter-in-law. This leasehold
interest terminated in 1942 when the remaining 23-year
term was sold back to the freeholders for £50. (ref. 76) It can
never have been a very valuable possession: from 1893 to
1914 it yielded £45 per annum after the ground rent was
paid, as in the former year the Hamertons had made a
21-year sub-lease at £115 per annum (incorporating all
the usual provisions for triennial painting of the exterior
and the prohibition of trading in the building). (ref. 77) This
lease was to a Bow firm of builders-cum-estate agents
called Taylor, whose interest in the property continued
after the First World War. (ref. 78) Even this was probably not
the most immediate stage of ownership above the actual
tenants. From at least 1900 to 1930 the name of the
'owners' recorded by the valuation officer, usually in
association with Taylors, was Warradein - presumably
the tobacconists of that name occupying the shabby little
shop by the mouth of Hanbury Place at No. 2 Poplar
High Street. (ref. 79) Beneath all were the weekly tenants. In
about 1915 the gross annual rental derived from them
was some £365 less rates, minimal 'upkeep', any costs of
rent collection and whatever rent the head lessees exacted
after the expiry of the sub-lease at £115 per annum in
1914. At that time the Inland Revenue's valuation officer
found Hanbury Buildings, despite the formal provisions
in the lease of 1893, a 'very poor class of property'. (ref. 80) It
already had a bad name with the local clergy, the vicar
of St Stephen's, East India Dock Road, thinking it 'a
perfect Hole . . . I should like to put a cannon ball
through it'. (ref. 81)
The weekly rents were increased in the 1920s from 5s
9d to 6s 6d and would have yielded some £592 gross
yearly to the immediate 'owner' if all the flats were
tenanted. (ref. 82) About 1932, yet another estate agent came on
the scene when Alexander Maclow, who ran a one-man
business in the City, bought a sub-leasehold tenure for
an unknown sum. (ref. 83) By 1936 complaints at the state of
the Buildings, where 153 people lived, were being voiced
by local clergy, publicly and to the Housing Committee
of the London County Council. (ref. 84) The Council's Medical
Officer of Health found much needing to be done and
thought some of the dark ground-floor rooms should be
closed. The sanitary arrangements were a possible danger
to health, and the occupants were overcrowded. He
noticed that 'superficial dilapidation' was 'very evident at
first sight', but thought the carcase, internal walls, ceilings
and floors 'substantially sound'. He recommended against
demolition and clearance, probably deterred by the
requirement to prove each separate dwelling uninhabitable and the difficulty of rehousing from tightly
built sites such as this. (ref. 85) Poplar Borough Council invited
Maclow to carry out repairs, (ref. 86) but with no apparent
result, and in the following year closed some of the bugridden rooms as unfit for human habitation, extending
its condemnation, unlike the LCC's Medical Officer of
Health, to the upper floors. (ref. 87)
In 1936 the Poplar Tenants' Defence League had been
established, with clerical backing, to awaken the tenants
of such blocks to their rights under the law. Early in
1939 the occupants of Hanbury Buildings, prompted by
a 'social worker', instigated one of the 'rent strikes' which
drew attention to discontent at housing conditions in the
East End. (ref. 88) An architect's report to the League gave a
less favourable view of the building's fabric than had the
LCC's Medical Officer of Health. It condemned the
construction of the concrete roof, which bore directly on
steel joists open to the rooms below, as inimical to heat
insulation and conducive to cracking, and found the brick
carcase penetrable by damp, causing some floors to
collapse. (ref. 89)
The tenants demanded a reduction of the weekly rents,
which in some cases had been increased to 9s a week. (ref. 90)
They also demanded measures to cure the pervasive
damp and to stop the overflow of drainage, and the
provision in each flat of a tap, sink, food cupboard and
new fireplace where needed (some had collapsed). The
waterclosets, separated by corrugated-iron sheets, were
'disgustingly insanitary', not so much 'from want of
scrubbing but really because things have got so worn that
all the cleaning in the world would do no good'. The
social worker had photographs taken of the Buildings
that secured a commission (though abortive) from Picture
Post.. (ref. 91) The London County Council and Poplar Borough
Council were both approached by the League. The
former's Medical Officer of Health now recommended
action under Clearance Area legislation, prompted partly
by recent interpretations of the Housing Act of 1936
facilitating action by local authorities in such instances.
In June 1939 the LCC and Poplar Borough Council
conferred together, led by two future members of the
post-war Labour Cabinet - Lewis Silkin, then chairman
of the LCC Housing Committee, and Charles Key,
Deputy Mayor of Poplar and headmaster of Dingle Lane
School adjoining Hanbury Buildings. The Borough was
unable to provide the necessary rehousing from its overstrained resources, and the LCC Housing Committee
said that the LCC would probably undertake the clearance
and rehousing itself. (ref. 92) Nothing, however, could be done
before war broke out in September.
In November Maclow brought an action against his
tenants in Bow County Court. Although he showed he
had in fact at some time spent £600 or more on the
building, the Court, clearly sympathetic to the tenants,
found that he had overcharged for rent beyond the sums
withheld, and also found against him for costs. (ref. 93)
Hanbury Buildings were demolished between 1950 and
1955. Their site was bought for £310 from the Custom
Annuity and Benevolent Fund Incorporated by the
London County Council in 1955 and taken into the Will
Crooks housing estate in Dingle Lane. (ref. 94)
Danish Church (demolished)
The small Danish church, also on the south side of King
Street, was built in 1873. It provided seamen with a place
for Lutheran worship, yet despite its foreign orientation,
its genesis was very local, being built by Atherton &
Latta to designs by John Warrington Morris. (ref. 95) The
church was 'reconstructed' in 1906 by David Thomas of
Finsbury Street, builder. (ref. 96) After damage during the
Second World War, the church was redecorated 'in bright
colours' by the architectural firm (of Danish origin)
Caröe & Partners, and rededicated in 1948. (ref. 97) It was
replaced in 1959 by a church in Commercial Road (ref. 98) and
demolished in or soon after 1971. (ref. 99)
The main body of the church, in stock and polychromatic brick laid in Flemish bond, was a simple
rectangle under a slated roof bearing a jaunty little bellturret in four materials at the apex of its gable-end facing
the street (Plate 18c). At that end a porch on the east
and a large vestry on the west presented their own gableends to the street, with a lean-to narthex between them,
all being slate-roofed. The simple, crudely detailed, early
Gothic forms were reminiscent of a small country railway
station. (ref. 100)
The interior was very plain, with plastered walls and
braced wooden rafters rising from corbels to support the
steeply pitched ceiling. (ref. 101) At the south end a two-centred,
straight-sided arch opened to a shallow sanctuary. Within
and on either side of this were four wooden figures of
Moses, St John the Baptist, St Peter and St Paul, some
4–5ft high, from the Danish Church in Wellclose Square.
At least two, and perhaps all four, of these were carved
by Caius Gabriel Cibber in 1696–7. (ref. 102) (These figures are
now at the Danish church at St Katharine's, Regent's
Park.) (ref. 103) The oil painting over the altar had been the
altarpiece at Wellclose Square. (ref. 104)
The west end of the south side of King Street remained
vacant land in the hands of the East and West India
Dock Company until 1882, when it was compulsorily
acquired by the Midland Railway Company and made a
coal depot with sidings and an office just north of the
fire station on West India Dock Road (see below). The
area remained a coal-yard until it was taken for the Poplar
Link Road. (ref. 105)