Swallow Gardens

[Stephen Thomas]

Recently Stewart Evans kindly posted some rare contemporary drawings of Swallow Gardens aka Little Prescott Street which was a walkway beneath a railway arch running between Chamber Street and Royal Mint Street and the site of the murder of Frances Coles. Here are the pictures.



Intrigued by these I went down there to see what the site looked like now.

Photos to follow.

[George Hutchinson]

You DID get the right arch, Stephen? Tell me you did!

PHILIP

[Stephen Thomas]

It's a pity that more people don't go south of Whitechapel High Street to check out the other sites. Chamber Street is actually very close to Tower Hill Underground Station and would be an excellent start or end to a Ripper tour. And Pinchin Street and Berner Street are close by. Here is one of the arches on Royal Mint Street then and now......



Here's the Swallow Gardens arch now, set back from the road presumably to accomodate extra railway lines above (note the light coloured reinforced concrete support). The pillars shown either side of the arch on the 1891 pictures can be seen here....



And here we see the round metal support and the fancy brickwork shown on the old illustrations.....


I'd be grateful if anyone could post more contemporary illustrations and also the proof that this particular arch is definitely the entrance to Swallow Gardens.

[Stephen Thomas]

You DID get the right arch, Stephen? Tell me you did!

Hi Philip

O ye of little faith..........

[George Hutchinson]

Oh, I have faith in you, Mr Thomas.

You have the right arch. Absolutely, unequivicably. As did John Gordon Whitby.

One further pointer, besides all the location work that Rob did a couple of years back, is that there was a building on top of the arch on the Royal Mint Street side in one of the illustrations. That building was also in Whitby's 1961 shot from that side and his Chamber Street shot shows the arch as it currently looks. The whole Royal Mint Street side is very different now because the DLR emerges at that spot heading East.

Anyone using the DLR from Tower Gateway or Bank, the point where you emerge into the open air is actually the Swallow Gardens arch if you look to the left.

PHILIP

[Bulldog]

Hi Stephen,

The pictures you took from Chamber Street are indeed Swallow Gardens. Your picture from Royal Mint Street, however, is not Swallow Gardens, it's the Abels Buildings.

Rob Clack and I exchanged a series of posts on this subject a few weeks ago. If you look at message #591 on the thread "East End Photographs and Drawings" you'll see Rob's answer including "then and now pictures" proving that the site is actually the Abels Buildings.

Great photos nonetheless. Thanks for posting them. They are a lot better than the ones I took.

Bulldog

[George Hutchinson]

I better quickly add I had assumed Stephen knew that the shot looking up an alleyway was done with the knowledge it was Abel's Buildings, not least because of the extra 50 yards he'd have to walk to get there along the parallel road!

PHILIP

[anna]

Hi all,

Has anyone else noticed how much nicer the names of street's and buildings were then.

Why is it nowadays,that everything seems to have been named after someone?Are we so insecure,that we need to be constantly patting ourselves on the back?

The nicest names I have around me,are on an estate of private houses with the roads named after famous poets!

ANNA.

[John Bennett]

Hi all,

Has anyone else noticed how much nicer the names of street's and buildings were then.

Why is it nowadays,that everything seems to have been named after someone?

ANNA.

Having said that, many older streets in the area are named after people:

Heneage, Osborn, Thrawl, Flower and Dean, Adler, Fashion (it's a corruption of Fossan), Hanbury, Fournier, Buxton, Strype, Wilkes, Brushfield, Wheler, Old Montague, Toynbee, Brady, Fulbourne, Vallance, Alie (Ayliff), Peck's Yd

And pubs:

Black Lion Yd, Green Dragon Yd, Mitre Sq/St, Angel Alley, Bell Lane, Grey Eagle St, Kings Arms Court, Vine Court..

[anna]

Hi John,


sorry about that.....


Try harder next time.......I promise!!!


ANNA.

[George Hutchinson]

Not totally true about nicer old names, Anna.

In Guildford we have a small stepped alleyway called Rosemary Alley. It's original name was Pisspot Alley. So there.

PHILIP

[Bulldog]

Philip,

I bet that there's an interesting story about how it acquired that name.

Bulldog

[anna]

Thanks Philip.

Brilliant answer!

ANNA.x

[George Hutchinson]

It was an open running sewer down to the River Wey, Bulldog. The Victorians changed the name. You know what they were like.

Anna - I know.

PHILIP

[Robert]

I don't know if this Lloyd's sketch has been posted before.

Re street names of poets and writers, there should be a Bunyan Toepath, a Saint-Exupery Rise, a Milton Alley (so called because it's a blind alley) and of course an
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