Surveying East London

The next two volumes of the monumental Survey of London, focusing on Whitechapel, will be published this summer. Reflecting on a long history of engagement with London’s East End and the innovative community research conducted for the Whitechapel project, Peter Guillery, its Principal Investigator at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, explains how recent developments reflect the Survey of London’s romantic-socialist roots. The Survey of London: Whitechapel is published for the Bartlett by the Paul Mellon Centre.

The Survey of London is a unique series of books, each volume giving a detailed historical analysis of the streets and buildings of a particular area of the city. With archival images, architectural drawings, maps, and written and oral accounts of how London’s built environment has developed, the books present authoritative histories. At the same time, the Survey’s origins – almost 130 years ago – lay in an attempt to represent alternative and anti-hegemonic points of view regarding London’s development. The most recent pair of volumes, Survey of London: Whitechapel, aims to revive that original ethos by integrating community-based research to bridge ‘official history’ and ‘unofficial history’, to use terms coined by the historian Raphael Samuel.

The Survey began in East London in the 1890s, founded by Charles Robert Ashbee, an Arts and Crafts architect, designer and co-operativist entrepreneur. Following John Ruskin and William Morris, Ashbee had a romantic-socialist commitment to the advancement of equality through shared understandings of a common built environment. From 1886, when he left university, Ashbee lived at Toynbee Hall, a ‘Settlement of University men’ that had recently been established in Whitechapel, bringing Christian Socialist ideals to educational and social work in an impoverished quarter.

While at Toynbee Hall, Ashbee set up the Guild and School of Handicraft, a co-operative of local working men, to produce metalwork and furniture, moving in 1891 to workshops on the Mile End Road. The first monograph by what was initially known as the Committee for the Survey of the Memorials of Greater London, researched and written by Ashbee, was undertaken in 1894. It was devoted to Trinity Hospital, a group of late seventeenth-century almshouses also on the Mile End Road just east of Whitechapel. The hospital was threatened with demolition and the publication was part of a campaign for its preservation. Subtitled ‘An Object Lesson in National History’, it interwove architectural and social history with highly varied illustrations. There were careful architectural drawings, which have remained a hallmark of the Survey, such as an engraved view that emphasised context, including neighbouring terraces (often deemed ‘slums’) and pavement costermongers; along with sketches of social life, such as of retired sea captains playing draughts. Emphasis on people and the life of the institution reflected Ashbee’s view of Trinity Hospital as an expression of charity and communality, in contrast to the financial forces that he saw dominating his time. The campaign and the publication in 1896 helped prevent demolition of the hospital – one of London’s first conservation victories. Trinity Hospital is still there today, lately threatened by the shadow of a 28-storey tower.

To advance the Survey’s work, Ashbee initiated a London-wide register of buildings of interest to bring together photographs, drawings and historical notes. It was not only the loss of London’s everyday historic fabric that distressed him, but also its degeneration into a commodity, without meaning for ordinary people. He saw old buildings through a philosophy of social enlightenment; they had the potential to educate and thus to enhance the lives of Londoners, like libraries or museums. Ashbee understood that surveying is partisan, not neutral. It is an act of bearing witness, or providing evidence, and may not have immediate utility. One of its virtues is that the results can be laid down for posterity. With his emphasis on the social value of architecture, Ashbee continued to focus on the East End. The first Survey volume dedicated to an area or parish was an account of Bromley-by-Bow, published in 1900, and three more East London monographs followed before Ashbee departed in 1907.

By 1900, the Survey had already benefitted from the auspices of the London County Council (LCC), the first London-wide municipal authority, formed in 1889 and controlled by the Progressive party. In 1910, the Council undertook to research and write every second Survey volume, and conferred a kind of informal official status on them. The LCC’s patronage was a legacy of its Progressive administration’s determination to raise historical consciousness as a counter to the interests of private property. Its municipal political philosophy, principally articulated by George Laurence Gomme, who, incidentally, was a leading folklorist, emphasised the historical origins of what might now be termed the commons.

The LCC kept the series going, and in the early 1950s made the whole project professional, imposing a change of focus under a new editor, Francis Sheppard. It had been realised that the devastation of London by enemy action was being compounded by developers. The first fruit of a re-engagement with destruction and development was volume 27 in the series, published in 1957, addressing the Spitalfields area. Sheppard brought greater urban historical rigour to the Survey, and recording under his leadership extended to nineteenth- and even twentieth-century buildings.

In 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government abolished the LCC’s once-again progressive successor, the Greater London Council. The Survey was transferred to carry on from the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, which, despite its name, was actually another bastion of counter-discourses, a haven for vernacularists. The Survey returned to East London from 1986 to 1994 for two volumes (43 and 44) on Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs, newly branded Docklands, documenting industrial sheds and council housing.

Institutional upheavals continued, first through a merger in 1999 into English Heritage, the national body for oversight of the historic environment. Then in 2013, after the Government cut 35 per cent of English Heritage’s budget, the Survey fortunately found a home in the Bartlett School of Architecture. Based in a university for the first time, Survey staff took on teaching responsibilities. However, given the Survey’s long commitment to public history, there was a determination – and encouragement – to be in but not of academia. The Survey soon headed back to East London, to Whitechapel, another district under development pressure, pushing out from both the City of London and, at the eastern end, a Crossrail (Elizabeth Line) station.

Whitechapel has a long and fascinating history, notably of immigration, with strong architectural expressions. Working with UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the Survey secured a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant that funded the creation in 2016 of an innovative map-based website for the Whitechapel project, to enable public participation. Entitled ‘Survey of London Histories of Whitechapel’ (http://surveyoflondon.org), this website broke new methodological ground through public engagement. By 2021, it had more than 600 enormously varied contributions.

The website map interactively represents several hundred buildings, each given at minimum a basic description and a photograph, with historic map layers underneath. Tabs allow visitors to see and contribute different sorts of additional content: research, descriptions, memories, notes, images, audio and video. Commissioned works included a suite of photographs of people in private domestic spaces, a film about Bengali restaurants, and drawings of outdoor life in a market, park and playground. Oral history is a component, with more than fifty interviews.

Trinity Hospital, bird’s-eye view from the south, from C. R. Ashbee, The Trinity Hospital in Mile End, 1896. Image courtesy of the Survey of London.

The Survey collaborated with a range of local institutions including schools, Tower Hamlets Borough Council, the Whitechapel Gallery, Wilton’s Music Hall and the East London Mosque (London’s largest mosque by attendance). Ashbee might not have imagined such partnerships, though co-production or citizen history does seem in keeping with his ideals. Whitechapel is in many respects contested ground. Processes that are lumped together as gentrification mean that locally the politics of history is alive and kicking.

There are numberless new tall residential towers, in which nugatory percentages of the apartments are even nominally ‘affordable’. Opposite Toynbee Hall, a new block called Kensington Apartments is topographically misleading, seemingly intended to attract overseas investors with wanton disregard for particularity of place.

32Major historic sites have been given a full traditional treatment, such as the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, a remarkable place where the manufacturing of bells continued from the 1740s up to its closure in 2017 (followed, controversially, by a plan to convert it into a bell-themed boutique hotel). This is a well-known site of major historic importance, but the Survey’s account was the first history of the foundry’s buildings principally based on primary documentary research. There are also interviews with the master bell founder who closed the foundry and his manager, who opposed closure.

The plural ‘Histories’ in the website project’s title reflects a desire to avoid a hierarchy between professionally researched content and other contributors’ submissions; to integrate scholarly work with community and individual narratives without worrying about overlap or even contradiction. At the same time, the website fostered an online environment that secured many independently researched contributions, including material from a number of expert amateur historians. Architects made images available, and family historians, current residents of Whitechapel and diasporic descendants submitted research, sometimes pseudonymously.

Influencing change through this kind of research and educational practice is harder now than it was in Ashbee’s day. Romantic-socialist roots notwithstanding, there can be no illusions about the Survey’s ability to bend the capitalist forces shaping London. That said, bearing witness is an important task. Through its latest volumes on Whitechapel, the Survey has striven to retrieve an aspect of Ashbee’s founding ethos – that of the craft workshop – to widen the definition of who is responsible for the authorship of narratives about London, and bring those histories to a broader audience.

Rehan Jamil, View to the City of London across the roof terrace of Mosque Tower, Whitechapel Road, 2016, photograph. Photograph courtesy of the Survey of London.