Select Committee on Crossrail Bill Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 11140 - 11159)

  11140. Mr Harris: Mr Chairman, as you have from Mr Mould, I am here to speak on behalf of the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust. We were founded in 1977 to preserve the historic buildings in Spitalfields, and I am going to leave with the Committee two publications—we produced this on our tenth anniversary, The Saving of Spitalfields. It comes with a warning: should you have time to read this book you will never meddle with Spitalfields. I am also leaving you something we produced ten years on, which is our latest publication, which concerns Spitalfields and other places.

  11141. On their first visit to Spitalfields many people are surprised to discover that minutes from the City boundary exists the densest core of early 18th century houses in London. The story of how those houses get there starts with the Great Fire of London in 1666. 13,000 households were lost to fire, thousands were made homeless and they camped on the Moorfields and Spitalfields that surrounded the northeast corner of the City through a bitterly cold winter. The King, Charles II, who gave money to the dispossessed, visited them there. The King had spent time in Holland where he had been interested in building—it is likely that the first sash building was brought to England by King Charles II. It was clear to him that the City had burnt down due to overcrowding and bad building design, and it is likely that on enquiring who owned the fields he was visiting he would discover that as his ancestor, Henry VIII, had seized the priory to whom the fields had belonged he—and it might interest you to know that Henry VIII re-roofed your Westminster Hall here with lead that he took from our priory roof, but I am not sure this is the Committee for that disagreement!

  11142. King Charles had the City's surveyor, a certain Christopher Wren, value his holdings on those fields and gave consent for a market. So Spitalfields as one of the first planned London suburbs was born.

  11143. The particular buildings that I am dealing with today are the 18th century houses at risk from settlement, should the proposed tunnelling take place under them. I will start with Princelet Street. The first eight houses on Princelet Street, west of Brick Lane, were sent in 1705-05 by Joseph Truman. His father had moved his brewery from the City of London following the fire in 1666. He built in on Brick Lane where there was a plentiful supply of fresh water from an artesian well which still exists today. The houses on Princelet Street that were built are the earliest domestic housing in Spitalfields; they retain much of their original layout and interiors, which is a remarkable survival due to a dramatic economic downturn within 40 years of their being build. Some, such as number 25 Princelet Street has its pair on Hanbury Street. By building this way builders kept their costs low and it is likely that houses build this way were build faster in 1704 than we can build them today. I do not know of the survival of such a pair of houses like this anywhere else in London. Much is known about the early occupants of these houses. John Baker, the owner of 25 Princelet Street, in 1745 offered to raise 75 of his weavers to support the King in resisting the young pretender, Bonnie Prince Charlie. Two lawyers from Lincoln's Inn, Charles Wood and Simon Mitchell, between 1716 and 1719 developed the rest of Princelet Street.

  11144. But these are no ordinary houses. It is the settlement of them by people from many different backgrounds, representing every important Diaspora to have affected this country that makes them exceptional. To briefly condense the past 400 years, in 1685 the revocation of the Edict of Nantes saw thousands of protestants, known to as Huguenots, flee religious persecution in France. Approximately 50,000 settled in London, half of those in Spitalfields. Principally silk weavers and goldsmiths, they revolutionised the decorative arts in London. They were joined in the 1820s by Irish weavers facing starvation at home, and they in turn were joined in the 1880s by eastern European Jews fleeing the pogroms of Tsar Alexander the Second. Their arrival coincided with the invention of the Singer sewing machine, thus enabling Jewish tailors to offer the poor the chance to afford new clothes for the first time. Still significant land owners in Spitalfields, they have been joined by a significant Bangladeshi community settling in numbers after the civil war in Pakistan that created the state of Bangladesh. If you add to this mix the Maltese, the Greeks, the Scots, the Welsh, the West Indians, the Somalians, the Zairian community who still worship in French in a local chapel. We have the most diverse community in London. We speak 75 different languages in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, 42 of them in the tiny Spitalfields ward.

  11145. Historically we have always got along. We were criticised by Parliament in the early 18th century because our French speaking parish servants spoke no English.

  11146. Mr Liddell-Grainger: Mr Harris—

  11147. Mr Harris: Yes, I am nearly finished with the history.

  11148. Mr Liddell-Grainger: If you can because I cannot affect the 17th century.

  11149. Mr Harris: I hope you will understand how this is important to these buildings. It is exactly the same in the 19th century when we spoke Yiddish and it has been a criticism that has been levelled at us ever since. We have been attacked by racists in the 1970s and even bombed by them in the 1990s but we have remained an undivided community and it is this story represented in these houses that I believe makes them of national significance.

  11150. Sitting outside this Committee room last Thursday I overheard my eminent friends saying what objectors to the Bill needed to consider is how London will have changed in ten years' time and how it will need Crossrail. I would ask the Committee to consider how race relations will have changed in this country in ten years' time and how important it will be to have a focus for that then.

  11151. America has its Museum of Immigration on Ellis Island; England has its on Princelet Street.

  11152. In 1947 England's coalfields were nationalised and in the late 1940s and the 1950s the National Coal Board mined under a house known as Erddig in North Wales, a late 17th century stately home, at a time when post war sentiment did not value such buildings. Now one of the jewels of the National Trust and an important museum of social history, we look in amazement at the crude props and bracing that were inserted by the Coal Board to prevent its collapse. The house had fallen five feet on one side and three feet on the other, breaking its back and making the roof leads, instead of sloping to direct water away from the gutters, now funnel water towards the centre of the building, where it poured through the state rooms.

  11153. To my astonishment a fax dropped on to my desk on Wednesday 14 June 2006, proposing exactly the same treatment at 19 Princelet Street, and I quote: "The technical advise (from Alan Baxter Associates) to the Promoter is that he should increase the building sensitivity rank for this sensitive building from 2 to 3, and undertake further assessment to determine whether and if so what protected measures would be required to ensure the proper protection of the building during the Crossrail works. We envisage that this would be by means of structural strengthening in the way of insertion of further propping and possibly some bracing and/or ties, if necessary." As the representative of the freeholders of number 19 and Chairman of Tower Hamlets Conservation Area Advisory Group, I can assure you that such a strategy is not acceptable, either to the freeholders, to Tower Hamlets conservation officers or to English Heritage.

  11154. What we are dealing with here are timber-framed buildings with brick elevations to front and rear. Were you to put in a planning application tomorrow to build any of the 18th century houses in Spitalfields it would be turned down? Structural engineers do not believe that they are sufficiently rigid. Many, such as 9 and 11 Princelet Street, have shared chimney stacks which have moved at very different rates to the rest of their buildings, creating a serpentine effect, upright at the base and at the top but S-shaped through the middle four floors, which is not visible from the street. Similarly Christchurch, a building we will be hearing about in a moment, now recognised as one of the finest baroque churches in Europe, has a spire that settles at a different rate to the rest of the church. Initial discussions with Crossrail led us to believe that there would be even settlement under these buildings. English Heritage was told of a possible two-millimetre settlement for Christchurch and so did not object. We now learn that settlement is anticipated at 26 millimetres with two lots of settlement at two different times.

  11155. In 2002 the London Borough of Tower Hamlets conservation officers refused permission for cable companies to use JCB diggers to dig trenches in Princelet Street, arguing that many buildings would be damaged by the vibration so caused. We cannot insert bracing into all these houses; such an idea is monstrous. They are listed buildings, many of which are likely to be upgraded in a review currently under way by English Heritage.

  11156. So it seems that we urgently need to weigh the benefits of this route against the probable damage to these important buildings.

  11157. Crossrail are not the first to attempt to traverse Spitalfields. The last ill-advised railway incursion into Spitalfields was in 1842 by the Great Eastern Railway Company. I would like to quote from the Eastern Counties Railway Board minutes of 6 September 1942: "Estimated expense was greatly exceeded because of the unexpected varying and extraordinary increase of the depth in foundations of nearly all piers and abutments, consequent upon passing through crowded building property, intersected with sewers, old ditches and numerous cesspools." Which leads me to the problem of underground water in Spitalfields, which I understand to be the most dangerous medium to tunnelling. There are two important local sources of water. On 8 August 1279 the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's confirmed a grant from the Bishop of London to the Hospital—that is the priory of St. Mary Spital—of a fountain, i.e. a spring, called Snekockeswelle, in his field called Lolesworth, with liberty to enclose it and bring the water underground almost to the south corner of the hospital. The site of Lolesworth, which was possibly an ancient standing stone, is in the kitchen of number 4 Princelet Street. A profusion of water courses appear to radiate away from this site. Some to the north feed into the second most important water system in Spitalfields, the wells supplying the Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, before continuing northwest where they meet up with the spring at St. John's Holywell, now marked by Holywell Row. It would have been this water system which caused Stevens Totton of 6 Spital Square to complain in 1805 that, "Every person in Spital Square is greatly inconvenienced by the springs in the liberty, in so much that in his late father's house there the water from these springs used to be three or four feet deep in the cellars, and the servants used to be obliged to punt themselves along in a washtub from the cellar stairs to the beer barrels to draw the beer daily.

  11158. Mr Liddell-Grainger: Mr Harris, would you come to what you want, please?

  11159. Mr Harris: In June 2000, 800-odd years after the first records of springs in Spitalfields, I was called to the basement of a house in Princelet Street by an incredulous builder to witness water flowing profusely through a basement wall. I wrote to Alan Baxter & Associates about this problem on 19 July 2004 and received no reply. On 18 October 2004 I voiced the same concerns in Portcullils House and was told that Crossrail considered the watercourses were close to the surface and of no concern to the tunnelling operation. Like the superficial investigations into the sensitivity of the buildings I have no confidence in this assumption. Like the Coal Board of the 1950s, desperate for a solution to the energy shortages, it seems that Crossrail have found a soft target in Spitalfields. But now that the Pedley Street shaft has been abandoned there is no reason to tunnel in Spitalfields at all and risk so much.


 
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