Every house holds traces of its former occupants. Some hold more than others. 19 Princelet Street, one of the earliest surviving buildings in London’s Spitalfields, is one such place.
To step through its front door, into an entrance hall with walls stained lichen-green, is to be met with the impression of an archaeological unearthing. Three centuries of lives, families and community are visible in its architectural details. Their stories — of migration, industry and survival — are now being brought to light.
Like many of the houses acquired by the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust (which bought this one in the early 1980s), 19 Princelet Street was first inhabited by Huguenots — Calvinist Protestants fleeing persecution in France.
The Ogiers, a family of silk merchants, took possession not long after the house was constructed in 1719. This early Georgian layer of history is still visible in pine panelling, Doric cornicing and sash windows.
This extraordinary addition was built in 1870 by the Loyal United Friends Friendly Society, a group of Polish Jewish immigrants who had been leasing Number 19. These Ashkenazi Jews anticipated the large numbers of eastern European migrants joining them in east London after 1881, when the worst of tsarist Russia’s pogroms began. Within a few years, Princelet Street was somewhere between 75 and 95 per cent Jewish occupancy, according to George E Arkell’s 1899 map of “Jewish East London”.
By the time the Spitalfields Trust intervened to acquire 19 Princelet Street from the synagogue’s trustees, the shul had been non-operational for more than 15 years. The East End’s Jewish population had mostly moved on, while a new community of Bangladeshi immigrants had moved into the area.
Having made urgent repairs to the building, which was suffering from a leaking roof, rising damp and an unstable facade, the Spitalfields Trust hoped to see 19 Princelet Street become a place to explore and reflect on stories of migration, past and present. “But we lacked the resources to run such a project ourselves,” explains architectural historian Dan Cruickshank, who, as co-founder of the trust, had spent some of the late 1970s squatting the area’s historic buildings to save them from the developer’s wrecking ball. It therefore gave a hundred-year lease to a charity operated by trustees representing Huguenot, Jewish and Bangladeshi interests. Over the years, however, the project faltered.
I’m being given a tour of 19 Princelet Street by Cruickshank, current chair of the trust, and former chair Barra Little — like Cruickshank, a Spitalfields resident. A Galway-born lawyer who grew up in the US and first moved to this pocket of east London in the early 2000s, Little has spent the best part of a decade negotiating on the trust’s behalf to reacquire the lease and run the building in line with the original vision for it — which includes being open to the public on a regular basis.
“The trust finally regained the charitable undertaking last Christmas,” Little explains. “We had a Ukrainian family staying with us round the corner, and I was so excited to get the keys, so I said, let’s all go there — so the first people to come through the door were Ukrainian refugees.”
The word “refugee” (réfugié) was coined in the 17th century to refer specifically to Huguenots fleeing France after the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes rescinded their religious and civil liberties. Many of them came to Britain and settled in Spitalfields — attracted by a ready supply of properties built during a boom after the Great Fire, and a nascent silk-weaving industry that the textile-savvy Huguenots could tap into and develop.
In a back corner of the synagogue, Little points out a wardrobe recently given to the trust by a descendant of a refugee Huguenot. On it, a brass plaque reads: “In this armoire Pierre Guillemard, Sieur de Mélamare, smuggled his son onboard ship when he fled from France at the time of the Huguenot persecutions in 1699.” Whether or not this story is apocryphal seems almost immaterial; it evokes the extremes to which refugees — then as now — have gone to find safe harbour.
The trust is all too conscious of the febrile climate in which it plans to open Number 19. “We’re taking on a huge responsibility, at a challenging time,” Little says. “There are Palestinian flags at one end of the street and we have guardianship of a synagogue at the other end. It requires a certain amount of bravery to do it, and to do it properly and sensitively, but that’s kind of the point.”
He hopes that, in telling a Huguenot story or a Jewish story, “it should allow people to see the parallel to a Bengali story or any number of other stories; far from being reductive, it should be enriching.”
The recent far-right riots in Britain have made such conversations urgent. The Spitalfields Trust is developing connections with institutions such as the Migration Museum, established a decade ago to fill what was felt to be a long-standing gap in Britain’s cultural landscape. Currently based in Lewisham, the museum is raising funds for a permanent home in the City of London, not far from Spitalfields.
On the first floor, Huguenot and Jewish layers of occupancy rub shoulders more visibly. Overlooking the street with its run of handsome facades, what would have been the Ogiers’ drawing room — all Georgian panelling and window seats — backs on to the synagogue’s gallery, which absorbed the old Huguenot dining room.
At the very top of the worn wooden staircase is a weaver’s loft, a characteristic feature of these old Spitalfields houses; many were added towards the end of the 18th century when the wealthy merchants had moved on and the buildings were occupied by multiple families. These large-windowed garrets often accommodated a weaving loom, and the top-floor front room of 19 Princelet St was no exception. Cruickshank lifts a loose floorboard to reveal a thick layer of sand, wood shavings and other debris — sound insulation, he explains, to deaden the noise of the loom.
It’s a curatorial challenge for the building’s guardians. “The sand is full of stories, artefacts, the skin of the occupiers — all stuff you can analyse; you can’t even hoover the place really without being aware that you could be destroying something valuable.”
Speaking to the BBC in the 1980s, the Spitalfields-raised social historian Raymond Kalman remembered his grandfather having a workshop in the weaver’s loft of the house they lived in. “He made hat linings, our next-door neighbour was a furrier, on the other side they did tailor’s trimmings.” (Kalman attended the Princelet Street synagogue with his family until, in September 1939, he was evacuated with the rest of his school, and “never came back”.)
Directly opposite 19 Princelet Street, number 22 has retained its faded business sign for the Modern Saree Centre, a nod to the Bangladeshi garment factories centred around nearby Brick Lane.
The grim reality behind the survival of these early Georgian buildings, which eluded Victorian makeovers, is one of desperate poverty. Nearly 50 years after Dickens was shocked by the conditions in which a whole family could work and live in a one-room weaver’s garret, the social reformer Charles Booth, in the 1898-99 edition of his colour-coded “poverty map” of London, gave 19 Princelet Street a grading of black, the very lowest.
Out of this backdrop the story of the top floor’s last occupant emerges. When the Spitalfields Trust acquired the building, it found the former weaver’s room locked, apparently entombed for years. Photographs from the time show a room overwhelmed with life’s ephemera. Books and detailed notes revealed an interest in subjects as varied as Arabic, Kabbalah and Irish drinking songs.
The room, it transpired, had been lived in for around 40 years by a reclusive Jewish man named David Rodinsky, at first with his mother and sister and latterly alone. It gave the impression — a pair of boots, jackets in the wardrobe, calendar frozen at January 1963 — of a life interrupted.
The artist and social historian Rachel Lichtenstein, whose Polish grandparents had lived above their watchmaking shop at 32 Princelet Street in the 1930s, first encountered the housen and synagogue in 1990. She spent the next nine years sifting through Rodinsky’s possessions for clues as to what had happened to him, gleaning scraps of information and half-memories from people who had come across him. Rodinsky’s Room, a resulting book written with Iain Sinclair, was published in 1999.
Lichtenstein, now a consultant curator and historian for 19 Princelet Street, is working with members of the trust as well as Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives to bring to light other stories, and to help digitise archive material — including Rodinsky’s possessions.
“One of the things I find so moving about that building,” she says, “is it is a record of a disappeared landscape, in multiple ways — of different communities, different ways of life; I’m looking forward to delving deeper.”
Rodinsky’s Room was, Lichtenstein says, “this amazing catalyst for people around the world to get in touch with me with their memories of the area and their own family stories.” These included details of “poor weddings” held at 19 Princelet Street, in which eight to 10 couples, unable individually to afford the rabbi’s fee, could get married simultaneously. Festivities would then take place in the synagogue’s subterranean hall (which was also where, in 1936, anti-fascists planned their resistance to the police-backed Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts, in what would become known as the Battle of Cable Street).
“That’s just one really nice story of a community coming together,” Lichtenstein says of the weddings. “But we’re now on the verge of these stories slipping out of living memory; if there are people out there who have any archive material, photographs or memories related to 19 Princelet Street, we would love to hear from them.”
thespitalfieldstrust.com (from August 31)
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