Whilst thinking about the pros and cons of the development of Norton Folgate, I noticed that the small group of Victorian almshouses in Puma Court, just off Commercial Road, is called Norton Folgate Almshouses.   As the inscription reveals, they replace an earlier group of almshouses built in 1728, but demolished to create ‘The New Street’ – presumably the north half of Commercial Street laid out by James Pennethorne in the 1850s to connect the docks to Great Eastern Street:-

The new almshouses were designed by T.E. Knightley and opened in 1860:-

I went to see Miranda Argyle’s very nice small exhibition upstairs in Chris Dyson’s drawing room at 11, Princelet Street.   I should probably have photographed the work, but it is quite delicate, made up in many cases of stitching on linen, intermingled with dark and atmospheric photographs.   Instead, I took photographs out of the window at the back:-

At the lower end of the Hackney Road where it meets Shoreditch, there is what I thought was a deserted pub, but turns out to be a striptease joint, called Ye Olde Axe, which looks slightly as if it belongs in the Wild West with its turret and pub sign swinging in the wind, but has good terracotta lettering and very fine capitals:-

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I have been meaning to do a blog about Wells & Company, the old commercial ironmongers opposite St. Leonard, Shoreditch.   It was opened in 1877 for Edward Wells & Company, which sold stoves, gutters, pipes and decorative ironwork to the building trades.   The building, designed by Fowler & Hill, is part-Gothic, part- Moorish, with a surviving mosaic inscription, ‘Wells & Company Commercial Iron Works’, in spite of the fact that it ceased trading in 1895 and became a bank:-

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I have been drawn, without particularly intending to, into the controversy surrounding the development of Norton Folgate, an ancient liberty immediately north of the City, where a group of old houses on what was once Ermine Street have been gradually bought up by the City for ruthless commercial development.   Rather than the City developing the properties themselves through their architecture and planning department, they are doing it in conjunction with British Land.   What is unusual is that the houses are nearly adjacent to a street of old industrial warehouses, relics of the industrial and trading roots at the fringes of the City.   One street away is Elder Street, one of the most important historic streets in Spitalfields.   An alternative plan for the development of the neighbourhood has been drawn up by Burrell Foley Fischer which respects its original mixed character.   The plans drawn up by British Land were rejected by Tower Hamlets, but have now been passed by Boris Johnson over the heads of local planning.   It’s a battleground between two forms of development, one monolithic and corporate and the other low rise and conservationist.   The paradox is that the latter is almost certainly better at preserving the long-term prosperity and energy of the City as an engine of economic growth.