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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