I was walking down Stepney Green this morning past the slightly dour working class dwellings at the south end beyond the manor house when I realised what fine ironwork and stucco detailing they have. They were built in 1895 by Solomon Joseph for the Four per cent Industrial Dwellings Company, founded in 1885 by Nathan Rothschild after an enquiry by the United Synagogue into ‘spiritual destitution’. It provided ‘the industrial classes with commodious and healthy Dwellings at a minimum rent’. Each of the flats had two rooms only and a shared wc and kitchen, together with a communal club, reading room and baths. The original tenants were mostly Jewish artisans and there was a large synagogue next door, now converted into flats:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Can never walk down this street without thinking of the anarchist Rudolf Rocker who lived there and whose life and times were more than ably chronicled by Bill Fishmann. Bill was very nice to me when I was young, walking me round an area that was so familiar to me, since I lived there, but whose history I was woefully ignorant of!