West India Dock Road
Most of the West India Dock Road lies outside the parish
of All Saints. The sections within it are now largely part
of the Birchfield Estate. The road was laid out in 1802
as part of the Commercial Road, linking the West India
Docks to the City of London. (ref. 106) The dock company's
engineer, Ralph Walker, was responsible for making the
section of road from the docks to Limehouse. (ref. 107) There
was a toll gate just south of Pennyfields, succeeded by a
toll house in the road near the junction with King Street.
The toll house, which remained in use until 1871, was a
single-storey room with round-headed windows and a
heavily dentilled cornice. (ref. 108)
The north-east side of West India Dock Road, between
Birchfield Street and Ming Street, was developed in the
early nineteenth century. The section north of Pennyfields
was called Dean's buildings (later Nos 45–55). A large
part of this group was an iron-foundry (No. 55) occupied
by a succession of firms manufacturing ships' fire-hearths.
From c1929 to the late 1950s these premises, rebuilt in
1937, were held by the British Scaling & Painting
Company as works and stores for their trade in removing
and preventing corrosion on marine boilers and ships.
Nos 47 and 49 West India Dock Road were made a
workshop in 1875–6 to become part of William Byron
Bawn & Company's Byron Tank Works, most of which
fronted Castor Street. Wrought-iron tanks and cisterns
were made here until c1940. (ref. 109) These buildings were
cleared in the early 1960s for the erection of Elderfield
House in the Birchfield Estate.
The buildings along the section of West India Dock
Road south of Pennyfields (Nos 57–67) were known as
St Ann's Place in the early nineteenth century. No. 67
was an eighteenth-century house that had been built as
part of Back Lane (Ming Street). In the early nineteenth
century it was occupied by Theophilus Westhorp, a ships'
rigger. In the 1870s he or his son became a manufacturer
of patent machine-picked oakum and antiseptic marine
lint. In 1899 Westhorp's Limited moved to No. 59 West
India Dock Road, where they had erected an office,
showroom and multi-storey warehouse, which they occupied until c1940. This red-brick building had steel joists
and its glazed-brick ground-floor elevations had broad
windows under moulded four-centred arched heads. Nos
57–71 were cleared in the mid-1960s for part of the
Birchfield Estate. (ref. 110)
In the eighteenth century the Blue Posts Tavern stood
on the south side of Limehouse Causeway at its junction
with Pennyfields and Back Lane. Soon after the West
India Dock Road had been formed the establishment
moved to a new building on the north-east side of that
road, south of Back Lane. (ref. 111) The Blue Posts public house
(No. 73) was a three-storey brick building of three bays.
It was extended to the south-east (No. 75) in 1876 with
a two-storey block giving a long street frontage. The
Blue Posts, with the Railway Tavern and Jamaica Tavern,
was well placed to serve labourers and others passing to
and from the West India Docks. Charles W. Brown, son
of the famous Charlie Brown (see below), displayed half
of his father's curio collection at the Blue Posts in
the 1930s. It became the Buccaneer shortly before its
demolition in 1987–8. Nos 69 and 71 West India Dock
Road were two- and three-storey mid-nineteenth-century
houses and workshops, occupied by J. Downton &
Company, brass-founders and pumpmakers, until the
1920s. (ref. 112)
Fire Station (demolished).
The provision of a modern
fire station in Poplar was a priority of the Metropolitan
Fire Brigade. Soon after it was formed in 1865, Edward
Cresy, a principal assistant clerk at the Metropolitan
Board of Works, identified a suitable site adjoining the
Blackwall railway, on the east side of the West India
Dock Road. In 1866 an 80-year lease was negotiated with
the East and West India Dock Company, (ref. 113) and the
freehold was acquired in the 1880s. (ref. 114) Cresy acted as
secretary to the MBW's chairman Sir John Thwaites,
but he was also an architect and had been a surveyor
with the Metropolitan Commissioners of Sewers. When
the MBW took over fire-fighting services in the capital,
George Vulliamy, its superintending architect, recommended that Cresy should undertake the work of
finding sites and preparing designs for the new fire
stations. (ref. 115) Cresy's plans for the Poplar station were
produced in 1867 and the contract was awarded to
William Howard of Chandos Street. (ref. 116)
The building was completed in 1868 at a total cost of
£2,429 10s. (ref. 117) It was of brick and was three bays wide,
with a symmetrical street front (Plate 18d). The appliance
room was placed in the centre of the building, behind
double doors. Residential accommodation was provided
on the upper floors. (ref. 118)
The initial strength of the station was seven men, a
steam engine, a manual engine, two escapes and four
horses. (ref. 119) In 1900 an open-sided iron ladder-shed was
built in the yard to the south of the main building. (ref. 120)
The adoption of motorized fire engines by the London
Fire Brigade led to a reduction in the number of stations
required, for the speed and range of these new appliances
were greater than those of their horse-drawn counterparts
and so a station could cover a wider area. A report
produced in 1920 recommended the closure of 15 stations,
including Poplar. (ref. 121) The station was closed in that year
and the building was sold to the London Salvage Corps
for £3,000. (ref. 122) The Corps carried out improvements in
1921, but used the building only until 1928. (ref. 123)
The former fire station passed to T. F. Maltby Limited,
stevedores, for use as a store. This firm redeveloped the
site in 1959–60, erecting a simple two-storey flat-roofed
brick building as offices, stores and carpenters' shops.
This passed to Crome & Mitchell, nut merchants, c1970
and was demolished in 1987–8 for road improvements. (ref. 124)
West India Dock Railway Station (demolished).
This
stood on the east side of West India Dock Road as part
of the London and Blackwall Railway as built in 1839–
40 (see page 13). The station was a two-storey structure
with covered platforms at the upper level in a range
crossed by another to produce a cruciform-plan building
with elevations of a domestic character (fig. 31). The
Great Eastern Railway Company altered the station and
replaced the bridge over West India Dock Road with the
present girder bridge in 1896–9, re-using the six granite
columns in the centre of the road. The station closed
with the railway line in 1926 and was removed shortly
afterwards. (ref. 125)
The Railway Tavern, No. 116 West India Dock Road ('Charlie Brown's') (demolished).
A legendary dockland
public house, the Railway Tavern on the corner of
Garford Street originated c1840 as a modest beerhouse.
Plans for rebuilding on a grander scale were drawn up
in 1916 for Charrington & Company by Edward Carter
of Kingston-on-Thames and Arundel Street, Strand, but
were not carried out until 1919 owing to the First
World War. The builders were George Parker & Sons of
Peckham. The new building, which also occupied the
site of No. 114, comprised five storeys over a basement,
and was substantially built of brick with reinforcedconcrete floors. Crowned by a copper-covered cupola
above a broken and open segmental pediment, it had
some pretensions to Baroque style. Its chief points of
interest, however, were its interior furnishings, and its
first landlord, Charlie Brown, the 'uncrowned king of
Limehouse'. (ref. 126)
Charles Brown (1859–1932) was born near the Commercial Road. A baker's son, he ran away to sea, but,
disliking it, came back to the family shop and eventually
became a publican. He moved to the Railway about 1896,
but it may have been at his former public house, the
Duke of Cambridge in Whitechapel Road, that he began
to amass the collection of curios and objets d'art that
made the Railway famous. (ref. 127)
Contrary to popular belief, Brown's collection was not
the product of casual deals with sailor patrons on shore
leave, but was carefully built up through purchases from
dealers or via a number of overseas agents. Brown, the
origins of whose wealth are obscure, acted as unofficial
banker to many customers, and was often supportive of
their interests. He is said to have given away large sums
in aid of the 1912 dockers' strike, and he was made
honorary treasurer of the Stevedores' Union. (ref. 128)
The collection contained some large and valuable items,
among them two ivory-inlaid Florentine cabinets and an
800-year-old Chinese ebony cabinet. Much was Chinese,
and included Ming vases and a number of carved figures
and deities. These valuable pieces were mostly displayed
in private or semi-private rooms upstairs; the groundfloor saloon and dance-floor was somewhat different.
Here, under a ceiling hung with shark's teeth, tribal
weapons and other exotica, 'a small cosmopolis gathered
every night, and welcomed the landlord with the traditional acclaim, "Here come Charley Brown!"'. (ref. 129)
The Edwardian and 1920s fascination with the Limehouse Chinatown as a hotbed of gaming, white-slavery,
drug-taking and subversion — fuelled by popular writers
such as Thomas Burke and Sax Rohmer, and a few
sensational criminal cases — put Charlie Brown's at the
centre of the tourist's map of dockland. After the First
World War, charabanc-parties of sensation-seekers regularly descended on the pub. Famous visitors included
King Alphonso of Spain, the actress Anna May Wong,
and local politician George Lansbury. (ref. 130)
Brown died in 1932, leaving his collection half to his
daughter Ethel Chandler, who took over the running of
the Railway with her husband, and half to his son,
Charles W. Brown, landlord of the Blue Posts across the
road. For a few years both buildings displayed rival lamps
each proclaiming 'Charlie Brown's'. Mrs Chandler's
illness forced the closure of the Railway collection to the
public in 1936, and about two years later Charlie Brown,
junior, moved to a public house called the Roundabout, in
Woodford, where he continued to display his collection. (ref. 131)
The Roundabout was demolished in 1972, and the collection is no longer open to public view.
In later years the Railway continued to be frequented
by dockers, sailors, and assorted bohemians. Its famous
past was not forgotten, and in 1972 the name Charlie
Brown's was formally adopted. But its fortunes were then
reaching a low ebb. Extensive refurbishment was carried
out in the 1980s, but the site was required for the
Limehouse Link roadway and the building was demolished in November 1989. (ref. 132)
For the Birchfield Estate and the Saltwell Street Scheme,
see pages 90 and 94.
Figure 31:
The London and Blackwall Railway, a view published in 1840 showing West India Dock Station
and the viaduct over West India Dock Road