225 Green Street Bethnal Green

225 Green Street is where our Great Grandfather Henry George Hooper lived with his family and ran a butcher's shop from 1877 until he died in the London Hospital in 1893.  This page tells the story of the house.

Location

The map below shows the location of  225  Green Street on the corner of Sidney Street, and some other landmarks that occur in the story.  On the opposite corner of Sidney Street was number 223, a beer house called the Lord John Russell. 

Early Days 1815 - 1830

In the 1790s Bethnal Green was still a country area with open fields and country estates. From about that time onwards the estates sold off building plots for development. The area around Green Street was developed from the 1800s and became known as Globe Town. The map below dates from 1825 and the location of 225 is circled in red.. The land on which Globe Town was built was originally part of the estate belonging to Bishop Bonners Hall which is in the top corner of the map.

These two announcements tell us quite a lot.  The lease on the houses started in Midsummer 1815, and it seems probable that it was the first lease following building completion. So we can be fairly confident the house was built around 1815. The occupant of number 80 is probably Mr Hay. 

The houses are described simply as two freehold houses, no mention of any shops or businesses.  Number 80 consisted of three rooms downstairs, including a kitchen at the back, two rooms upstairs, and a back yard with a side gate. We know that number 79 became a beer house, The Lord John Russell, and that the front room in number 80 became a shop.

That first lease would have expired in 1827, and we found another newspaper announcement in the Morning Advertiser in 1827 which supports that:

It looks as if someone is running a coal business from number 80, possibly Mr  Hay who was the occupier in 1824. The area is described as being crowded, meaning that it has been further developed. Bethnal Green ultimately became an urban area of housing, shops, pubs, schools and small factories, with Green Street a major thoroughfare with most of its buildings containing shops and businesses. 

1830 - 1875

The first occupant that we know anything about for certain is John Geeves. He lived in the house with his family from about 1834 until his death in 1874, about forty years. He lived there for longer than anybody else. He came from Enfield, and married Mary Meacham in  Stepney in 1830. He was employed as a silk weaver for the first twenty years he lived there.  He was one of thousands of silk weavers, an industry which originated in Spitalfields with the Huguenots in the 1690s and became so successful that it spread to surrounding districts, notably  Bethnal Green. By 1800 there were more silk weavers in Bethnal Green than in any other parish. Some of John Geeves' children followed him into the silk weaving industry as soon as they were old enough to work. It was very common for children as young as six or seven to be working in the silk weaving industry.

By the 1860's the silk weaving industry was in decline and John opened a greengrocer's shop. He might have had the greengrocer's shop before that while he was still working as a silk weaver, but it doesn't appear as such in trade directories of the period. It was in this period that the house numbering changed - number 80 was renumbered 225, as part of dividing the road into even numbers on the south side and odd numbers on the north.

John died in 1874.

Butcher's Shop 1875 - 1910

Number 225 traded as a butcher's shop from 1875 for a period of about 35 years. There were three successive butchers, the first being our great grandfather Henry George Hooper. He moved into Green Street in 1875 after he married Ellen Stent. Initially they lived in number 217 but soon moved to number 225. It was bigger and the side entrance to the back yard would have been much more suitable for his butcher's shop. All their children, including our grandfather George Hooper, were born here. The family moved out after Henry George died in 1893.

The second butcher was Thomas Shaddick. He took over in 1894 and ran it for ten years. 

The third butcher was Albert Atkins who took over in 1904. He was quite successful because he ran a second  butcher's  shop in Green Street, further down at number 169. In 1910 there was a fire which severely damaged the property:

This left the building in a poor condition. A surveyor's report said:  "flank wall badly bulged, front very badly bulged, pointing bad". Whether or not the building was repaired we don't know, but it seems to have been continuously occupied.

(An interesting coincidence is that Albert Atkins family was living in Surrey in 1939, a few doors away from the Stockdale family where Ann's Dad was living. )

Booth's Poverty Survey

We'll pause the narrative here, because we've reached the period when Charles Booth recorded living conditions in London in his Inquiry into the Life and Labour of the People in London, undertaken between 1886 and 1903. Charles Booth was a businessman and philanthropist who wanted to improve the living conditions of the poor. His surveys produced maps of London showing different levels of poverty and wealth using a colour code where pink/red represent a good standard of living, and blue to black represent poor standards. Booth's map of the Bethnal Green area is reproduced below, with 225 Green Street marked with a yellow arrow. We can see that the area immediately surrounding number 225 is predominately blue meaning poor to very poor, and is clearly the poorest area on the map.

1910 - 1920

This photograph of Green Street was taken in 1912. The location is about 100 metres west of number 225, a couple of minutes walk. The street scene around number  225 would probably have looked very similar to this. The pub on the left hand side is The Weavers Arms on the corner of Warley Street. On the opposite side of the road the open area with no buildings and a tall chain link fence is the playground of Bonner Street school. These locations are shown on the map at the top. 

The bus in the middle of the picture is a number 8 bound for Willesden. The number 8 bus route through here only started on 20th June 1912, so the picture must have been taken after that date. Most of the people look fairly well to do which is surprising considering the reputation of the area. Things were soon to change: the First World War was only two years away.

Albert Atkins the butcher left around 1913, and a man called James Ferris took over the house and shop running a fruiterer. Three of his sons were called up to serve in the First World War, two in the army and one in the navy. All three survived the war.

1920 - 1942

James Ferris continued to run his fruiterers business through to the late 1920s.

In 1925 Ernest Harley traded as a wireless components dealer from 225 for a couple of years at the same time as  James Ferris was still running the fruiterers. Ernest probably had the upstairs, or the back rooms. He had served in the Royal Flying Corps during the war as a wireless technician with number 34 squadron in France. In those early days wireless was used in the aircraft for reporting the locations where artillery shells fell to assist the gunners in hitting their targets. Ernest's experience had left him well placed to set up his wireless shop just at the time that wireless sets were being introduced to homes.

In 1930 Mrs Millie Raven ran a haberdasher.

In 1940 Mrs Ray Taylor ran a Ladies Haidresser. She seems to have stayed for only a couple of years and after that there is no evidence in the electoral roll that it was ever occupied again.

Green Street had its name changed in 1941 to Roman Road. The picture below has captured both names. This co-op was on the other side of Green Street on the corner of Warley Street. There is a pointer to its location on the map near the top.

Redevelopment

By 1955 Bethnal Green had a population of around 54,000, half what it was in the 1930s. The population declined after slum clearance in the 1930s and the bombing during the London Blitz. Lack of housing was a severe problem.

In 1957 the Bethnal Green Council declared a 17 acre site on the north side of Roman Road , including number 225, a ‘clearance area’. This became the site for the Cranbrook Estate, named after the road that once ran through the area.

The Cranbrook Estate was opened in 1964. Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey and Berthold Lubetkin were the architects. Lubetkin was a Russian émigré architect who pioneered modernist design in Britain in the 1930s. The Cranbrook Estate is considered one of the most important examples of post-war housing design in the area., combining high rise with low rise bungalows and green spaces.

The photograph below shows the estate when it was completed.  The arrows indicate the positions of where number 225 stood, and Bonner Street School, whose playground we saw in the 1912 photograph.

And finally this is a view of Roman Road today looking directly across to where number 225 was. Everyone that uses this crossing is walking straight towards where the Hooper family lived.