East End rescue mission: the London treasures under threat as land prices rise

There’s a watchful eye on central London’s heritage — but as land price hikes ripple outwards, it is lesser- known treasures that are under threat, such as The Old Spotted Dog in Forest Gate, once probably Henry VIII’s hunting kennels, says Robert Bevan
Survival of the fittest: The Old Spotted Dog awaiting its fate today in Forest Gate
Daniel Hambury/Stella Pictures
Robert Bevan1 May 2014

With the night sky to the west glowing red from the flames engulfing the city, Daniel Defoe recorded refugees from the 1666 Great Fire of London gathered in encampments around The Old Spotted Dog pub in then rural Newham. Londoners had pitched tents there to escape the Great Plague, too. In the bar of the half-timbered pub Defoe spotted a dusty oil painting showing London’s Royal Exchange operating from the same pub in 1603, when plague had caused an earlier exodus of merchant princes.

The Forest Gate inn, parts of which may date from the late 15th century and are reputed to have been used by Henry VIII for kennelling his hunting dogs, is still there on a turn in Upton Lane, E7, lingering between blocks of flats and shabby Victorian terraces.

It is in a sorry state, shuttered up and with clay tiles sliding off its porch, weatherboard gables rotting, weeds growing luxuriantly in its gutters. A decade ago, after a tradition of hospitality stretching back 500 years, the pub was closed. Now the building is in the hands of a liquidator who has approached the council with proposals to turn the pub and its extensive beer garden into a residential development. The pub’s statue of Henry Vlll was found headless and discarded in a skip.

Worried locals have turned to blogging and Facebook to drum up support to save The Old Spotted Dog and turn it over to possible pub, café and community uses.

Where the heritage of the old East End was once under threat from neglect, say campaigners, now it is speculation that threatens its future. Newham’s mayor, Robin Wales, has boasted extravagantly of a “supernova of regeneration exploding over the borough”.

Forest Gate — once the border of Epping Forest, where Henry VIII loved to hunt

The pressure is greatest on the city fringe, where the City of London abuts some of London’s poorest boroughs — Tower Hamlets and Hackney. Stratospheric land values are rubbing up against council planning departments which are eager for growth but whose resources are sorely stretched.

A third of public-sector conservation and design specialists have lost their jobs since 2006, so quality is taking a back seat, just as developers are pushing hard into these areas. Some 55 new tall towers are proposed for Tower Hamlets — the largest figure for any London borough.

In response, the East End Preservation Society has entered the fray. It is the brainchild of TV historian Dan Cruickshank, the anonymous writer who calls himself “Gentle Author” and is behind the celebrated Spitalfields Life blog, and Will Palin, former director of Save Britain’s Heritage. All live locally.

Like The Old Spotted Dog campaigners, the trio has taken to social media to highlight cases, backing up their online profile-raising with public meetings, making objections to developments and preparing their own alternative proposals to threatened sites. A loose collective of supporters and activists has formed around them.

A recent victory has seen Tower Hamlets council withdraw its own plans to demolish and redevelop an attractive but dilapidated terrace on Vallance Road, Whitechapel. The society researched the history of the buildings, showing that the terrace incorporated a fragment of the former 3,000-seater Pavilion Theatre, once a centre for Yiddish drama. They appointed architect Jonathan Freegard to draw up a rival renovation scheme for the terrace that so impressed the council that it has stepped back from demolition for the moment.

“It caused a big buzz in the Twittersphere,” says Palin, who reveals that they have supporters from former East Enders now living as far away as the US and Australia. “It gives people hope that they can make a difference.”

Palin says campaigners are not anti- development. “We are all for regeneration, but what does that mean? East London needs careful healing to mend the fragmented streetscape instead of a further degrading of the historic environment. The balance [between retention and redevelopment] has tipped.”

He maintains that the Mayor’s development-driven agenda has its costs. At the same time, it is national government policy to slice through planning control “red tape” and impose funding cuts on councils. “There is a real sense of there being nobody here to help,” he says.

Such organisations are hoping to fill the widening power mismatch between deep-pocketed developers and local residents confused by the planning system. Planning Aid for London, a charity that could offer pro bono professional advice to community groups, has had its public funding slashed to near zero.

Among the vast proposals worrying the society are those around Aldgate and at the former Bishopsgate Goods Yard in Shoreditch, where a cluster of towers rising above 70 storeys has been mooted. One tower on Bethnal Green Road was built before the 2008 crash brought a pause — a ghastly 25-storey pile by architect Stock Woolstencroft that was shortlisted for Building Design magazine’s annual Carbuncle Cup for “ugliest new building”. A revised planning application for the entire goods yard is likely to be submitted very shortly. It has been called the “Manhattanisation of the East End”.

“There’s a major problem in east London,” says Palin. “We are going to end up in the situation of the Sixties and Seventies, asking, ‘How did we let that happen?’”

Historic pubs sitting on high-value sites have been especially vulnerable to demolition or redevelopment into flats but the society claimed a hand in another success when Hackney council unexpectedly refused consent for the demolition of the Marquis of Lansdowne pub, which was due to vanish under David Chipperfield’s proposed extension of the Geffrye Museum in Haggerston. After a fresh competition, the museum has just appointed architects Wright & Wright to draw up a new scheme for the site that will retain the former Victorian drinking hole.

But these are small wins and there is a lingering feeling among some East End councils that they need development at any price. They fail to see that the march eastwards of the property market now gives them leverage to demand higher quality schemes that integrate new buildings with those of the past.

Those concerned about the threats to the historic East End are not tweedy academics and nostalgics, as demonstrated by a packed-out meeting in Forest Gate last week of ordinary locals gathered to save The Old Spotted Dog, where they used to drink. As volunteers wielded giant teapots and handed out biscuits in the Durning Hall Community Centre, listeners heard that some progress has been made in efforts to save one of London’s oldest secular buildings. The Prince’s Regeneration Trust has agreed to help with drawing up viable alternative plans to give the Old Spotted Dog a future.

“People are saying enough is enough,” said campaign member Roy Wenborne. “We want a community, not everything knocked down for housing.”

Newham historian Lloyd Jeans reminded the gathering of the words of the borough architect Kenneth Lund, who in 1973 wrote of the borough’s heritage: “Old buildings form part of the memory of a community… They also provide an indication of the extent to which change has taken place and, in doing so, they give meaning to the present.”

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