CHAPTER XXIII - Leamouth Road and Orchard Place
The area of eastern Blackwall formerly known as Orchard
House was for over 150 years one of the most isolated
and least accessible parts of Poplar. It lies at the eastern
extremity of the parish where the confluence of the
Thames and the meandering River Lea (here called
Bow Creek) produces two peninsulas with a thumb-andforefinger-like configuration. The construction of the East
India Docks in 1803–6 cut this area off from the rest of
Poplar, and made it difficult of access by road. While not
inhibiting the industrial development of the district, this
encouraged the growth of a poor but self-contained
community of whose existence the outside world seemed
largely oblivious. 'London's "Lost" Village', as it was
called in 1931, had no public transport links with the
rest of Poplar, and any would-be visitors were faced with
a long walk down the 'forbidding-looking thoroughfare
bearing the picturesque name of Leamouth Road, flanked
on both sides by the high stark walls of the adjacent
dock premises' (Plate 111). (ref. 1) The community here was
destroyed in the 1930s, when most of the houses were
pulled down under slum clearance orders and their
inhabitants moved elsewhere. Local industries, on the
other hand, did not move out, and although these have
reduced in number, the area is still essentially an industrial or business district, now dominated by the large
modern refinery in Orchard Place (Plate 112a).
Early History: Estates and Land Holdings
By the end of the eighteenth century two freehold estates
or land holdings, known as Orchard House and Goodluck
Hope, accounted for most of the area described in this
chapter (fig. 247), and their histories are given below.
The only other property holdings of any significant size
at this date were parts of two larger estates, one belonging
to the proprietors of Blackwall Yard and the other to the
landowner Robert Peers. Both were formerly part of
Poplar East Marsh, and both were purchased by the East
India Dock Company for the making of the East India
Docks.
Orchard House Estate
The Orchard House property, or Pemell Estate as it was
known in the nineteenth century, was the larger of the
two main land holdings, with some 20 acres. (ref. 2) It comprised
the whole of the east-pointing peninsula formed by the
confluence of the Lea and the Thames, and extended
westwards to include areas later swallowed up by successive enlargements of the East India Dock basin.
Also known from its location as Leamouth (or
'Laymouth'), the estate took its name from the Orchard
House, a moated property comprising a house and a large
orchard, which formerly occupied much of the eastern
peninsula. The moated orchard was in existence by at
least the late sixteenth century. It is clearly shown on a
map of c1573, which also places the house on the east
side of the orchard (Plate 145a). (ref. 3) Later maps, such as
Gascoyne's of 1703 (fig. 1), show the house at the western
end of the orchard, and it was presumably rebuilt on this
site during the seventeenth century. Although the orchard
disappeared sometime between 1746 and 1769, the surrounding moat survived into the early nineteenth century,
but without apparently leaving any permanent mark on
the topography. (ref. 4)
In 1666 the estate was bought by Ann Webber of
Blackwall, a widow. It was then said to have been the
inheritance of John Hammond, deceased, and formerly
in the occupation of Ann Sutton, widow. Having contracted to buy the property, Ann Webber, whom a
creditor later described as 'altogether illiterate and not
understanding anything of such affairs', found herself 'in
a great straite for money', and she had to borrow the
greater part of the purchase price. For this she turned to
a 'familiar friend of hers, one Pickering a known beggar',
who had made love to her and had agreed to marry her.
Clearly no ordinary beggar, William Pickering was a
member of the Merchant Taylors' Company, and had
sufficient means to lend Mrs Webber £270, secured on
a mortgage of the estate. Although the two never married,
they seem to have kept up an association, with fatal
consequences for Pickering, for on one occasion when
visiting Mrs Webber's 'tippling house in Stepney' he was
'gotten full of drink and . . . drowned in a ditch'.
Mrs Webber subsequently defaulted on her mortgage
repayments and in the mid-1690s Pickering's administrator, Thomas Carpenter of Stepney, gentleman, gained
possession of the Orchard House property. (ref. 5)
It seems likely that Mrs Webber's 'tippling house' in
Stepney was in fact the Orchard House, which was
occupied as a public house from at least the early
eighteenth century and remained a licensed premises
until the 1860s. (ref. 6) No illustration of the building is known,
but a ground-floor plan of 1773 shows a double-fronted
house with four rooms on the ground floor, and a
central hall with a staircase compartment behind. Various
ancillary buildings to the north and east included a
'Drinking house', a bakehouse, a stable and a cowhouse.
In front of the premises there was a skittle ground, while
some way to the south-east was a detached summer house
or long room overlooking the Thames, later called a tearoom. (ref. 7) The old Orchard House was demolished in the
early 1870s, after a survey had reported that it was 'in
such an utterly tumble down condition that there is no
alteration except to pull it down', and its site was turned
into a boat-yard. (ref. 8)
Figure 247:
Orchard House and Leamouth area in 1803. Later roads are indicated by stippling
After passing into the hands of Thomas Carpenter in
1695, the Orchard House estate remained in the possession of the Carpenter family until 1743, when Thomas's heirs sold it for £735 to John Wright of St James's
Westminster, coachmaker, and his wife. The next owner
was James Corson of Deptford, a linen draper, who
bought it at auction in 1766 for £1,300. Two years later
Corson let the estate on a 99-year lease, thereby creating
a separate leasehold interest in the property which existed
until 1867. After Corson's death the freehold passed to
his widow and then to his daughter Elizabeth Ross, who
in 1798 married William Pemell of Deptford, esquire. In
1815 Elizabeth Pemell's son, Peter, sold the entire estate
for £5,500 to the East India Dock Company, which
wanted to enlarge the East India Dock Basin. (ref. 9)
The first of the leasehold proprietors of the Orchard
House estate, under the lease granted by James Corson
in 1768, was a local timber merchant, Thomas Weston,
who held the property for less than six months. After
another brief tenancy the lease was purchased in August
1769 by John Staples, a merchant of Mansell Street,
Goodman's Fields, but before the end of the year he had
sub-let much of the estate to Benjamin Kemp, a local
cooper. Excluded from this lease was a Thames-side
plot - now covered by Orchard Wharf - which Staples
reserved for his own use as a shipbreaking yard. Kemp's
occupation lasted until 1773. (ref. 10) During this time he erected
a cooperage immediately to the south of the Orchard
House, (ref. 11) and in 1771–2 he sub-let a sizeable swathe of
land on the west side of the estate, adjoining the Blackwall
Yard property, to Moses Franks, a City merchant.
Though split into two halves by the roadway leading to
Orchard House, the land leased by Franks had frontages
to both the Thames and the Lea. In 1784 Franks's leases
were purchased by another City merchant, James Mather,
who used the ground to build an establishment for
blubber boiling and whale oil extraction (see below). The
East India Dock Company bought these leases from
Mather's heirs in 1804.
Meanwhile the head lease of the Orchard House estate
had changed hands several times. In 1795 it was bought
for £1,657 by John Perry, the shipbuilder and proprietor
of Blackwall Yard, who in 1798 assigned a half share in
the lease to the Rotherhithe shipbuilders, John Wells and
William Wells the younger. This was the first of several
assignments of shares in the lease which culminated in
John Wells becoming the sole owner in 1809. (ref. 12) Shortly
afterwards Wells began letting the estate for development,
though, of course, he had to exclude those parts which
were already in the hands of sub-lessees under existing
leases. Wells promoted the construction of two new roads,
leading northwards and eastwards from the Orchard
House, and the land on both sides of these roads he
divided into plots of various sizes, all with river frontages,
which he let mainly for industrial or commercial use. (ref. 13)
The leases granted by Wells between 1811 and 1813
established a pattern of property holdings in the area
which is still discernible today, although none of the
plots leased by Wells retains its original integrity.
In 1817 Wells assigned the lease to Money Wigram,
the Blackwall Yard shipbuilder, and Charles Richardson,
esquire, of Limehouse. This was not, however, a straightforward transaction. Only a third interest in the lease
belonged to Wigram and Richardson, the remaining two
thirds being held in trust by them for Wigram's partner,
the shipbuilder George Green, and for James Walker, the
engineer and surveyor. (ref. 14)
The reversion of the Pemell Estate finally passed into
the hands of the East and West India Dock Company,
the freeholders, in 1867, when the head lease granted in
1768 expired. It was hoped that this event, long anticipated by the Dock Company (which had ordered a survey
and valuation of the property in 1865), would provide an
opportunity to dispose of the whole estate for 'some great
undertaking'. For a number of years, therefore, the
company had been refusing reversionary leases to the
sitting tenants, and after 1867 would grant only shortterm leases, of seven years or less, even though this
meant that the property was difficult to let. Another
survey was ordered in 1870 and it revealed, not surprisingly in view of the prevailing uncertainty, that much
of the estate was in a poor and deteriorating condition.
The directors still clung to their vision of letting the
whole for a single enterprise, but when none was forthcoming they had to admit defeat and embark upon a
policy of leasing and selling individual sites which led in
time to the complete dismemberment of the estate. (ref. 15)
Goodluck Hope - The (Fitz) Wigram Estate
The second largest land holding in the area at the
beginning of the nineteenth century comprised most
of the north-pointing thumb-like promontory embraced
within the last loop of the River Lea before its confluence
with the Thames. Formerly part of the demesne of the
manor of Stepney, this peninsula of some nine acres was
known in the fourteenth century as Godelockhope or
Godluckhope, and more recently as Goodluck Hope. By
1440 it was divided into two holdings, one of which was
described as a hope of reeds with a fishery, and the other
as a farm with grazing on the wall in the East Marsh. (ref. 16)
The manorial survey of 1652 describes it as a piece of
marsh or meadow then in the occupation of Widow
Sutton (presumably Ann Sutton, the occupant of Orchard
House). At this date some land on the west side of the
peninsula was still copyhold. (ref. 17) Goodluck Hope appears
to have become independent of the manor by the end of
the seventeenth century, and over the next hundred years
it passed through several changes of ownership. (ref. 18) In
1800 the purchaser was Richard Govey of Poplar and
Blackwall, variously described as cooper and gentleman. (ref. 19)
By 1804 much of the area was in the occupation of the
East India merchant (Sir) Robert Wigram, bart (1743–
1830), one of the proprietors of Blackwall Yard and a
director of the East India Dock Company, who purchased
the freehold from Govey in 1810. (ref. 20)
Wigram subsequently extended his property holdings
in the district by purchasing four separate pieces of the
Orchard House estate from the East India Dock
Company; one of these pieces was contiguous to his
Goodluck Hope property. (ref. 21) Later sales reduced the size
of the Wigram estate, parts of which continued in the
ownership of the FitzWigram family (Wigram's
descendants) until well into the twentieth century.
The area remained largely undeveloped until the nineteenth century, and the only earlier building there of any
consequence was a mysterious house called Hanbury or
Handelbury Hall, about which little is known. Situated
near to the boundary with the Orchard House property,
it was probably erected in the first half of the eighteenth
century, and is doubtless the 'Handlebey Hall' shown on
Rocque's map of 1746, even though the cartographer
managed to place it on the Essex side of the Lea. (ref. 22) For
a few years in the 1770s it was occupied by the cooper
Benjamin Kemp. (ref. 23) The house had been demolished by
1804. (ref. 24)
Roads
Before the construction of the East India Docks in 1803–6,
the Orchard House area was linked to the old centre
of Poplar by a road leading eastwards out of Poplar High
Street, which dates back to at least the second half of the
sixteenth century. (ref. 25) When the building of the docks
severed this connection it was replaced by a new northsouth road joining Orchard House to the East India Dock
Road. This new road was laid out by the East India Dock
Company on the ground between the docks and the River
Lea. It was at first known as the road to Orchard House (ref. 26)
and later Orchard Street, being renamed Leamouth Road
in 1914. For much of its length it was formerly enclosed
between high brick walls. Its route has been changed
more than once, to accommodate successive enlargements
to the East India Dock Basin, and in the last few years
it has been substantially widened.
The eastern arm of Orchard Place and the southern
end of the northern arm were formed in 1811–12 to
facilitate John Wells's letting of much of the Orchard
House estate for development. (ref. 27) The new eastern road
superseded an earlier road laid out further to the south
on top of the old marsh wall. (ref. 28) This older road had been
constructed a decade before to provide access to the
Trinity House Buoy Wharf at the confluence of the
Thames and the Lea. Originally known as the new road
to Trinity Buoy Wharf, the 1812 road was later known,
probably informally, as Trinity Road. (ref. 29) In the late 1860s
it was called Orchard Street by the Ordnance Survey,
but in the directories is listed as Orchard Place, though
this name was not officially adopted until 1891. The
northern arm of Orchard Place originally stopped at the
boundary between the Orchard House estate and the
FitzWigram estate (Goodluck Hope), but was extended
northwards to the glass works in the mid-1830s. It was
further extended in the 1870s, after the glassworks closed,
when the site was divided up for development.
Leamouth Road and the northern arm of Orchard
Place were formerly connected by Lea Passage, a convenient short cut for pedestrians and light traffic (see fig.
248). Laid out by the East India Dock Company in 1817,
Lea Passage originally hugged the banks of the Lea for
most of its length, but it was re-routed away from the
river in the mid-1870s, when Leamouth Road was moved
northwards to allow for enlargement of the East India
Docks Basin. Lea Passage was closed altogether in 1969,
when its site was absorbed into the adjoining wharf.
Industrial Development
The remoteness of the district did not hinder its industrial
development. Indeed, for some industries, whose processes produced noxious smells and fumes, it could be an
important consideration in choosing a location. Another
advantage was the area's easy accessibility by water, which
compensated for the lack of good road links. Both of
these factors played a part in the siting of the Gas Light &
Coke Company's tar refining distillery in the district in
1818–19 (see page 669).
Although most development took place in the nineteenth century, the area has an industrial history which
extends back to at least the mid-seventeenth century,
when the copperas works was established on the west
bank of the River Lea (see page 661). In the eighteenth
century the banks of both the Lea and Thames were
used for shipbuilding and shipbreaking, but Blackwall
Yard was the only important shipbuilding concern in the
area until the mid-1790s, when William Wallis established
his yard hereabouts. Two other very different industrial
enterprises found a niche here in the latter part of the
eighteenth century: one was coopering and the other
blubber boiling. The latter did not long survive the turn
of the century, but the coopering trade continued in the
district until about 1870.
Coopering was established here by the early 1770s,
when the sub-lessee of much of the Orchard House
property, Benjamin Kemp, himself a cooper, erected a
cooperage immediately to the south of the Orchard
House. (ref. 30) This consisted of three ranges of buildings
disposed around three sides of a quadrangle, the south
side being left open. (ref. 31) Another local cooper, Richard
Govey, built a cooperage at the southern end of the
Goodluck Hope peninsula shortly after purchasing the
property in 1800, (ref. 32) but the largest of these concerns was
that belonging to Kemp's son-in-law, the cooper Robert
Gordon. (ref. 33) Established by 1796,
(ref. 34) Gordon's premises were
laid out around a quadrangle on a Lea-side site to the
north of the Orchard House now partially covered by
Castle Wharf and Hercules Wharf (see fig. 247). Gordon's
original premises were demolished when the site was
taken over by the shipbuilders Ditchburn & Mare in the
1840s, although they retained the name 'The Cooperage'
(see fig. 259), but in the later 1860s the site was again in
the hands of a cooper, Edwin Dickenson. Robert Gordon
and his heirs had meanwhile taken over the adjoining
site to the north. where they maintained a modest business
until the early 1870s. (ref. 35)
Figure 248:
Orchard Place and Leamouth Road area. Plan based on the Ordnance Survey of 1867–9
Figure 249:
Orchard Place and Leamouth Road area. Plan based on the Ordnance Survey of 1969–74
The boiling and processing of whale blubber began
here in the early 1780s. After being landed from the
Greenland ships the blubber had to be boiled and 'trained'
to extract the oil, which was used in soap-making,
woollen cloth manufacture, and in lamps. This so-called
'Greenland Trade' was at its height in the 1780s, and
London was the most important departure point for
British whaling ships, many of them leaving from the
Wells family's Greenland Dock in Rotherhithe. The
principal entrepreneur here was James Mather, a City
merchant, who in 1784 acquired a sub-lease of a substantial swathe of the Orchard House land on which to
carry out the business. (ref. 36) (fn. a) Mather's property, which was
on the west side of the estate next to Blackwall Yard,
had frontages to both the Thames and the Lea, though
it was split in two by the road to Orchard House (see
fig. 247). On the southern part of this site, next to the
Thames, Mather erected a boiling house containing huge
coppers in which the blubber was boiled and trained,
and warehouses for storing the oil and the valuable
whalebone, which was used to make knife handles, sieves,
brushes, ornamental window-blinds, trellises and guards
for shop-windows, chair seats and garden fences. (ref. 38) After
the opening of the Brunswick Dock in 1790, Mather
leased part of the east quay and some adjoining land
behind the quay giving him direct access to the dock
from his own premises. Under the terms of the lease,
which was for 74 years from 1792, Mather could 'Land
Casks containing Blubber or Materials from which oil is
or may be extracted from Shipping lying in the said
Brunswick Dock'. The rent for the quay was only £5
per annum, but Mather had also to pay a toll of one
shilling per ton on the blubber landed, and to ensure
that this was correctly calculated he had to provide the
proprietor of the dock, John Perry, with a 'full account'
of all the oil trained, boiled or extracted from the
blubber. (ref. 39)
After Mather's death in 1796 the business was continued by his three sons until about 1803, when the
works were rendered 'useless' by the East India Dock
Company's purchase of the Brunswick Dock for its new
docks. By this date London had ceased to be an important
centre for the whaling trade, which moved north to the
ports of Hull and Whitby. In 1803–4 the Mathers disposed of all their premises to the East India Dock
Company. (ref. 40) The few inhabitants of the area were doubtless relieved to see the end of a thoroughly noxious trade,
whose stench must have permeated every corner of the
district.
The first half of the nineteenth century saw a great
expansion of industry in the area. The river sites were
initially attractive to shipbuilders like Gladstone, Snook &
Company, the Samuda brothers, R. & H. Green, and
Ditchburn & Mare, although they were often quite
restricted and offered relatively little scope for expansion
when business increased. The Samudas had set up their
yard on the eastern side of Goodluck Hope in the 1840s,
but were so hemmed in that in order to expand they had
to re-locate to Cubitt Town. Mare & Company
(successors to Ditchburn & Mare) overcame the same
problem by expanding on to the marshes on the Essex
side of the Lea, while maintaining a ferry link with their
premises on the north side of Orchard Place (see fig.
259). The largest single concern in the area, however,
was not a shipbuilding yard but the great glass works of
the Thames Plate Glass Company, which occupied the
north end of the Goodluck Hope (fig. 256). Opened in
1835, it was probably the largest employer of labour in
the district, though being a very specialized activity many
of its workers were migrants from the older glass-making
centres in the north of England. Other smaller concerns
ranged from a Roman cement works (whose basic raw
material was delivered to the site by barge), to tar and
turpentine distilleries and a marine engine manufactory,
conveniently located beside the Thames, where ships
requiring new engines or refitting could moor alongside.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the most
far-reaching industrial change was brought about by the
closure of the plate-glass works in 1874 and the subsequent colonization of the site by other industries.
Among the first to establish premises there were a firm
of seed crushers, a railway steel axle-box company, a sack
and bag company, and a firm of sugar refiners. But
from the first the dominant presence was the Blackwall
Galvanized Iron Company, which, as a branch of the giant
steel combine Richard Thomas & Baldwins, survived here
until the 1960s. From its initial three sites the firm
expanded until it was at least as large if not larger than
the glass works which preceded it. Elsewhere in Orchard
Place large-scale shipbuilding was on the decline, and
although the Thames Iron Works & Ship Building
Company (successors to Mare & Company) retained a
foothold there until the end of the century, the firm had
long given up building ships on the Middlesex side of
the Lea. The tradition of shipbuilding lived on, however,
in a number of small yards turning out boats and barges.
Except on the glass-works site, manufacturing industry
was declining. Thus, when the marine engine works at
Orchard Wharf went out of business in the 1870s, the
premises were taken over by a firm of wharfingers.
Similarly, the old cooperages beside the Lea were replaced
by ranges of warehouses, stores and workshops for a
shipping line. On the old cement works site a new iron
foundry lasted for less than three years in the early 1870s,
being succeeded by an asphalt works which survived for
almost a century.
Today manufacturing industry in the area is largely
confined to the Goodluck Hope peninsula, where Messrs
Acatos & Hutcheson's vegetable-oil refinery maintains
the tradition of a large manufacturing concern established
on this very site by the Thames Plate Glass Company in
the 1830s, and continued here by the Blackwall Galvanized Iron Company and its successors.
House Building and other Non-Industrial Developments
Although the Orchard House itself became the focus of
a small settlement in the eighteenth century, virtually no
houses were built in the area before the nineteenth
century, when the combined effects of industrialization
and isolation led to the construction of several pockets
of small, mainly working-class, houses. The sites for these
developments were mostly on Sir Robert FitzWigram's
freehold estate, which could offer builders the long leases
they required. These were not available on the Orchard
House estate in the 1840s (when most of the houses were
built) because the head lease of the property expired in
1867.
The first of the nineteenth-century housing developments, and the only one of any size on the Orchard
House estate, was Leamouth Place. Opening off the west
side of Orchard Place, this was a cul-de-sac of 19 brick
cottages erected in the late 1820s by the shipbuilder
Richard Green. (ref. 41) There had been an intention to build
on this site in 1812, when William Bough of Limehouse,
the contractor who erected the buoy stores at Trinity
House wharf, agreed to spend at least £800 on developing
land on both sides of the new northern arm of Orchard
Place, which was still described as an 'intended road',
but nothing came of this scheme. (ref. 42) Laid out in two rows
along the north and south sides of Leamouth Place,
Green's houses were two-storey cottages, with long front
gardens and yards at the back. Most contained four rooms
and a wash-house. The easternmost cottage on the north
side was larger, having four rooms on the first floor, and
a shop, parlour, kitchen and bakehouse on the ground
floor. (ref. 43) Some land at the rear of the houses on the north
side was later used to build a schoolroom, which was in
existence by 1865. In 1881, when only the north side
remained - the south side, and Leamouth Place itself,
having been absorbed into the recently realigned Leamouth Road and extended East India Docks - five of the
ten cottages were occupied by dock constables and their
families. (ref. 44) These houses were demolished in the 1930s,
when the site was let to a haulage contractor, becoming
part of Bridge Wharf. (ref. 45)
The largest concentration of houses and shops in the
district was on the west side of Orchard Place between
Leamouth Place and the premises of the Thames Plate
Glass works (Plate 112c). The development here, on land
belonging to the FitzWigram estate, took place mainly in
the 1840s. It began, characteristically, with the construction in 1839 of a public house (the Crown) by the
local builder Thomas Lambert. (ref. 46) Although a speculative
venture, undertaken by builders and other tradesmen in
return for long leases granted by Sir Robert FitzWigram,
it seems likely that the intended customers were the
employees of the adjoining glassworks, which was then
undergoing a period of expansion. Indeed, the census
returns show that many of these houses were inhabited
by glass workers and their families (see page 665). (ref. 47)
Three short culs-de-sac were laid out between Orchard
Place and the River Lea: Salter's Buildings, West Street
(later Boat Street) and Duke Street (later Fryatt Street).
Salter's Buildings - first known as Edward Street - was
named after the developer, James Salter of Judd Street,
Brunswick Square, builder, who took a 61-year lease of
the site in 1845, and erected 25 houses there before
becoming a victim of the great recession in the building
industry in 1847. (ref. 48) Salter's houses, for which the Chelsea
Building Society provided a loan, were ranged along the
frontages to Orchard Place and the River Lea, and on
both sides of the new street. The riverside terraces were
called Creekside (Plate 112b; fig. 250). On the adjoining
site to the south, John Lester, a local bricklayer, built 12
houses, ranged along the north side of West Street and
along the return fronts to Orchard Place and Creekside,
while another local builder and surveyor, Thomas
Harding of Brunswick Terrace, Poplar, was responsible
for the four houses on the south side of West Street. (ref. 49)
Harding also built another four houses nearby known as
Wright's Terrace, whose site, on the north-west side
of Lea Passage, was leased to him in 1849. (ref. 50) These
developments were all extremely modest, the majority of
the houses being cheaply built brick cottages of the twoup two-down variety. Harding's houses were slightly
superior in having washrooms in back extensions. (ref. 51)
Between Duke Street and Lea Passage the development
was of a more mixed character. On the south side of
Duke Street the corner plot with Orchard Place was
leased by Turner & Company, the tar and turpentine
distillers, who erected a warehouse there. This was later
converted into a board school, and after the school moved
to a new building in the 1890s the premises were used
as a mission hall. (ref. 52) The ground westwards of the warehouse was let in 1846 to the licensee of the adjoining
Crown public house, George Ayres, who built two dwelling houses, a stable and coach-house, and a cowshed
there. (ref. 53)
Figure 250:
Sketch of part of the Bow Creek frontage on the west side of the Goodluck Hope peninsula in the 1880s, from Creekside (left) to Wright's Terrace. Demolished
Another short range of houses and shops was erected
along the Orchard Place frontage between Lea Passage
and Leamouth Place. This site, too, belonged to the
FitzWigram estate, having been purchased by Sir Robert
Wigram in 1815. (ref. 54) The southernmost premises of this
group (No. 1 Orchard Place) was later occupied as a
beer shop and public house under the name the Steam
Packet. (ref. 55)
None of the houses or buildings mentioned here still
survives, the majority having been demolished by the
LCC in the later 1930s under slum clearance orders.
Another group of houses to disappear under a slum
clearance order in the 1930s occupied an island site
opposite the Orchard House. This, too, was a detached
portion of the FitzWigram estate, which had been
acquired by Sir Robert Wigram in 1815. It was developed
in the mid-1840s with a row of five houses (Nos 46–50
Orchard Place) and the Trinity Arms, a large public
house with its own adjoining garden. The Trinity Arms
was erected under a lease of 1847 to the brewers Sir
Henry Meux and Henry Smith. (ref. 56) One of the five houses
was occupied as coffee rooms from the 1870s. (ref. 57) By the
1930s the public house had been unsuitably converted
into tenement dwellings. (ref. 58) The site of these houses now
lies mostly within the curtilage of Orchard Wharf. Close
by, on land belonging to the Pemell Estate, was Ann's
Place, a group of five houses built in the 1840s. These
were four-room houses with wash-houses and small back
yards. In 1870, after being repaired by the East and
West India Dock Company, they were described as
'comfortable, well looked after, [and] occupied by respectable people'. (ref. 59) They were pulled down c1913.
Social Character
Few commentators on Orchard Place have used the word
'respectable' to describe any of its inhabitants. Writing
mostly in the late nineteenth century or after, they all
agree that this was a deprived area, inhabited by rough,
very poor people, living in overcrowded conditions
'amidst the noise and odours of factories'. (ref. 60) Largely 'cut
off from outside influences' by the 'peninsula character'
of the area and the absence of any public transport, this
was a closed and closely knit community, inward-looking
and inbred, or as the LCC Education Officer politely
put it, 'many families have the same rather uncommon
names'. (ref. 61) Local amenities were restricted to a few basic
shops, mostly clustered on the west side of Orchard
Place, north and south of Leamouth Passage (Plate 112c),
a school, and several public houses. There was no church,
but by the early 1870s the local school was being used
for religious services. (ref. 62) The Booth enquiry predictably
deplored the presence of four public houses, and the fact
that both men and women indulged, a practice attributed
to the absence of any other form of entertainment. The
manager of the local galvanized-iron works believed that
the firm's football and cricket clubs had been of some
value in 'giving the man an excuse to pass the public
house without turning in'. (ref. 63) Though not mentioned by
Booth, a sober alternative to the public house was available
in the form of coffee rooms, which make their first
appearance in Orchard Place in the 1870s.
The negative image of the district, which was described
in The Religious Life of London (1904) as one of the 'black
spots' of the East End, owes much to Booth's severely
judgemental views of the district and its inhabitants. (ref. 64) Of
the 50 or so families who lived in the small streets of
houses opening off the west side of Orchard Place, only
ten appeared to merit the description 'respectable', the
rest being characterized as 'rough, poor, piratical and
predatory'. The 'many bootless children, unwhitened
steps, [and] no flowers in the front window etc etc' was
evidence enough for Booth's investigators that these
streets were amongst the 'poorest and roughest'. Overcrowding here was particularly bad, though the statement
that '5 houses alone send 57 children to school' seems
barely credible: possibly they were wrongly informed
about this, as they were about the identity of the ground
landlord. One of the causes of overcrowding was very
early marriages, 'often at 16 or 17 and generally for very
pressing reasons'. The 'rough' character of the inhabitants
was said to have deterred local firms, such as Turner,
Blewitt & Company, the oil merchants, and the Thames
Iron Works, from employing local people, and most
earned their living unloading barges and doing odd jobs,
such as cleaning the boilers of small steamboats. (ref. 65)
One of those who contributed to Booth's enquiry said
that 'the law as ordinarily understood hardly runs in
Orchard Place and a policeman is very rarely seen'. The
police themselves confirmed that they seldom visited the
neighbourhood because it was 'a long way for us to
come', but they claimed '[we] don't have much trouble
here, people look rough but don't make much noise'. (ref. 66) An
extraordinary and uncompromisingly harsh assessment of
the inhabitants was given by a local clergyman, Father
Lawless of the Presbytery in Upper North Street, who
so far forgot his vocation as to call them 'hardly human'
and 'incarnate mushrooms', adding that 'God must have
made a mistake in creating them'. (ref. 67)
An important change in the character of the area
occurred in the mid- to late 1930s as a consequence of
the LCC's policy of slum clearance. The LCC had
identified Orchard Place as 'one of the worst slums in
London', (ref. 68) and most of the existing houses there were
demolished. As the majority of families were found new
accommodation away from Orchard Place, the district
was virtually depopulated; some 300 people moved out
of the area in 1936. (ref. 69) This naturally bore very heavily on
the local shop-keepers and small business people, who
saw their livelihoods disappear almost overnight when
their premises were demolished. Although the LCC paid
compensation and offered help with relocation, anyone
with a river-based trade or business was particularly hard
hit. One such case was that of the boatman and fisherman
who lived at No. 1 Creekside and earned part of his
living by catching shrimps, which he sold at his premises
on Saturdays. The LCC offered help with finding an
alternative mooring site, but conceded that he would
have to move out of London altogether, perhaps as far
as Southend. (ref. 70)