Shortly before Streatley Buildings was demolished (see story below), its neighbour on Swanfield Street, St Philip’s Church, was also pulled down, along with its rather terrifying vicarage (a home from home for Norman Bates and his mom).

There are a few eyewitness accounts of St Philip’s dating from the time when the Old Nichol stood directly opposite. One of Charles Booth’s researchers for the Life and Labour of the People in London survey wrote: “At St Philip’s nearby, a gloomy church, there were about 30 people [worshipping] in the morning, no clergy were visible. The schoolchildren occupied a set of pews in the centre. The main peculiarity was the way in which inside and outside the church, rice and little discs of coloured paper were scattered, witness to the weddings of yesterday and to a lack of sweeping up afterwards.”

During the 1880s and 1890s, Reverend Robert Loveridge of St Philip’s worked hard to try to alleviate some of the worst suffering of the people of the Nichol – of the children in particular. Forty per cent of the slum’s population were under the age of sixteen, and Reverend Loveridge’s vast Day School and Sunday School attracted around 2,200 pupils; his “Little Dots” kindergarten catered for the very youngest. He was assisted by a curate, a lay reader, a nurse, two “birth women” (ie midwives), plus forty voluntary workers. At the St Philip’s Mothers’ Meetings and needlework club, women were paid 2d an hour and kept the items they made. His Temperance Society (the teetotallers) had 130 members. (One of Reverend Loveridge’s descendants has been in touch with me, and I shall be posting his story and pictures later this summer.)

The same Booth survey worker was shown around the St Philip’s Day School and was not impressed: “a poor building. The children for the most part looked fat and adequately fed, but seem very poorly clad, especially among the boys. The teachers seem a very poor-looking lot and I should think the sooner the whole thing is swept away and the children gathered into a Board School the better.” That is exactly what happened, with the Nichol’s two massive Board Schools taking over almost all the local educational work by the end of the century ( with the exception of the Sunday Schools).

The photos below show the tearing down of St Philip’s in the late 1960s; Streatley Buildings are also visible, on the far left of the picture below, at bottom left. These photographs and the Victorian illustration are from the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archives, 277 Bancroft Road, E1 4DQ, tel: 020 7364 1290. localhistory@towerhamlets.gov.uk