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Wickhams (department store)

Defunct department stores of the United KingdomDepartment store buildings in the United KingdomReal estate holdoutShops in LondonUse British English from August 2015
Wickhams Department Store (6784618351)
Wickhams Department Store (6784618351)

Wickhams was a department store on the north side of the Mile End Road in London's East End, closing in the 1960s.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Wickhams (department store) (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Wickhams (department store)
Mile End Road, London Stepney

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 51.521077777778 ° E -0.051761111111111 °
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Address

The Gym

Mile End Road
E1 4UN London, Stepney
England, United Kingdom
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Wickhams Department Store (6784618351)
Wickhams Department Store (6784618351)
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Malplaquet House
Malplaquet House

Malplaquet House is a Grade II listed Georgian house at 137–139 Mile End Road, Stepney, London. The four-storey house was built as one of three in 1742 by Thomas Andrews; only two of the houses survive to the present day. A wealthy Jewish widow was the first occupier of the house, with the brewer Harry Charrington living there from 1794 to 1833 (Charrington Brewery had offices in the Mile End Road). Charrington greatly altered the house, and following his occupancy the house was subdivided, and shops built on the front garden.Malplaquet House is named after the Battle of Malplaquet, one of the main battles of the War of the Spanish Succession, which took place in France in 1709. However, it is not known whether this naming came from the Jewish widow of the London merchant, who made his living selling war salvage, or from a later resident, the military surgeon Edward Lee.During the rest of the 19th century, the house played host to a variety of small businesses including a bookmaker and a printer, before being occupied in 1910 by the Union of Stepney Ratepayers. The Stepney union remained in the house until 1975. During their occupation, Malplaquet House was further subdivided and additions made to its structure. Malplaquet House was damaged during the London Blitz, but repairs began in 1951 after a £100 donation from the War Damage Association. The architect Richard Seifert provided new shop fronts for the house.Malplaquet House was badly degraded by the 1990s, and the intervention of the Spitalfields Trust helped save it from potential demolition.In 1998, Tim Knox (former director of Sir John Soane's Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, now Director of the Royal Collection) and landscape gardener Todd Longstaffe-Gowan purchased the house from the Spitalfields Trust for £250,000. It had been uninhabited for over a century. Knox and Longstaffe-Gowan's collections of objets d'art and esoteric objects, obtained from Portobello Market, auctions and flea markets, expanded to fill Malplaquet House.In 2010, it was described by The Daily Telegraph as "possibly the most superbly restored, privately owned Georgian house in the country".The house is part of a group of Grade II listed buildings on the Mile End Road, listed as 133–139 Mile End Road. It has been listed Grade II on the National Heritage List for England since March 1978.

Frank Dobson Square
Frank Dobson Square

Frank Dobson Square is a public square in Whitechapel, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It commemorates the life and work of British artist and sculptor Frank Owen Dobson. The square was constructed by the London County Council in 1963, the year of Dobson’s death, at the junction of Cambridge Heath Road and Cephas Street. Dobson had been born in Clerkenwell. The centrepiece of the square was the ‘Woman and Fish’ fountain, a sculpture designed and completed by Dobson in 1951. The sculpture had been purchased for the borough by London County Council in 1963.The ‘Woman and Fish’ had provided drinking water until 1977, when the fountain was seriously damaged in an act of vandalism. In 1979, the sculpture was temporarily removed from the square for restoration, following further vandalism when the head of the statue was removed. In 1983, the statue was again vandalised and subject to further repairs. In 2002, the fountain was removed from the square altogether, following another act of vandalism which left it damaged beyond repair. The piece is now on the list of lost pieces of public art in London. In December 2006, the artist Antonio Lopez Reche was given a grant by the Tower Hamlets Council Art Department to reproduce the 'Woman and Fish' statue, following Dobson’s original design. However, unlike the original statue the reproduction was cast in bronze, patinated and contains no fountain. Today, Frank Dobson Square stands empty, Reche's 'Woman and Fish' having been installed in Millwall Park, Tower Hamlets.

Siege of Sidney Street
Siege of Sidney Street

The siege of Sidney Street of January 1911, also known as the Battle of Stepney, was a gunfight in the East End of London between a combined police and army force and two Latvian revolutionaries. The siege was the culmination of a series of events that began in December 1910, with an attempted jewellery robbery at Houndsditch in the City of London by a gang of Latvian immigrants which resulted in the murder of three policemen, the wounding of two others, and the death of George Gardstein, the leader of the Latvian gang. An investigation by the Metropolitan and City of London Police forces identified Gardstein's accomplices, most of whom were arrested within two weeks. The police were informed that the last two members of the gang were hiding at 100 Sidney Street in Stepney. The police evacuated local residents, and on the morning of 3 January a firefight broke out. Armed with inferior weapons, the police sought assistance from the army. The siege lasted for about six hours. Towards the end of the stand-off, the building caught fire; no single cause has been identified. One of the agitators in the building was shot before the fire spread. While the London Fire Brigade were damping down the ruins—in which they found the two bodies—the building collapsed, killing a fireman. The siege marked the first time the police had requested military assistance in London to deal with an armed stand-off. It was also the first siege in Britain to be caught on camera, as the events were filmed by Pathé News. Some of the footage included images of the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill. His presence caused a political row over the level of his operational involvement. At the trial in May 1911 of those arrested for the Houndsditch jewellery robbery, all but one of the accused were acquitted; the conviction was overturned on appeal. The events were fictionalised in film—in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) and The Siege of Sidney Street (1960)—and novels. On the centenary of the events two tower blocks in Sidney Street were named after Peter the Painter, one of the minor members of the gang who was probably not present at either Houndsditch or Sidney Street. The murdered policemen and the fireman who died are commemorated with memorial plaques.

London Borough of Tower Hamlets
London Borough of Tower Hamlets

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets is a London borough covering much of the traditional East End. It was formed in 1965 from the merger of the former metropolitan boroughs of Stepney, Poplar, and Bethnal Green. 'Tower Hamlets' was originally an alternative name for the historic Tower Division; the area of south-east Middlesex, focused on (but not limited to) the area of the modern borough, which owed military service to the Tower of London. The borough lies on the north bank of the River Thames immediately east of the City of London, and includes much of the redeveloped Docklands area. Some of the tallest buildings in London occupy the centre of the Isle of Dogs in the south of the borough. A part of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park is in Tower Hamlets. The 2019 mid-year population for the borough is estimated at 324,745. Asian/Asian British Bangladeshis at 32% form the largest ethnic group. The 2011 census showed Tower Hamlets to have the highest proportion of Muslims of any English local authority and that Muslims outnumbered Christians. The borough has more than forty mosques and Islamic centres, including the East London Mosque, one of Britain's largest. Brick Lane's restaurants, neighbouring street market and shops provide the largest range of Bengali cuisine, woodwork, carpets and clothes in Europe. The Lane is also a major centre of hipster subculture.In 2017 a joint study by Trust for London and New Policy Institute found Tower Hamlets to be the 2nd most deprived London borough (after Barking and Dagenham) based on an average calculated across a range of indicators; with high rates of poverty, child poverty, unemployment and pay inequality compared to other London boroughs. However, it has the lowest gap for educational outcomes at secondary level.The local authority is Tower Hamlets London Borough Council.

Globe Road & Devonshire Street railway station
Globe Road & Devonshire Street railway station

Globe Road & Devonshire Street was a railway station on the Great Eastern Main Line, 1 mile 54 chains (2.7 km) down the line from Liverpool Street. It was opened by the Great Eastern Railway on 1 July 1884 when the company quadrupled the double-track main line section, and it was situated close to the site of the former Devonshire Street terminus, which had closed in 1840. The station had two platforms which were served by the newly constructed line. The platforms were situated on a railway viaduct and the booking office was at street-level at the London-end in Globe Road. Passengers' comfort was provided in first and second-class waiting rooms, first and second-class ladies waiting rooms, a drinking fountain, and toilets. There was also a second booking office in Devonshire Street. There were two signal boxes sited near the station, at Globe Street Junction and Devonshire Street, when it opened, although the former box closed in 1894 with the Devonshire Street box taking over its duties.Competition from Stepney Green station on the Underground District line and wartime constraints (notably staff shortages) led to the closure of Globe Road & Devonshire Street station on 22 May 1916 and it never re-opened. At that time, many inner London stations were closed, including two nearby, Bishopsgate and Coborn Road; there are now no intermediate stations between Liverpool Street and Stratford. The station was demolished in May 1938. Nothing remains of it today. Devonshire Street after which the station was named was later incorporated into the northern part of Bancroft Road.