Capability statement: Historic building recording and interpretation
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Clients: Leaside Regeneration Ltd
Author: Andrew Westman
MoLAS continued to record and analyse Bromley Hall during the early part of 2004 (see also report last year). The greater part of this is a red-brick Queen Anne house, with an elegant doorcase and sash windows, and a broad hipped tiled roof. This structure is itself the result of a remodelling in about 1700 of an older building, the corners of which are marked by narrow solid octagonal turrets. Internally, oak joists and a finely carved doorframe have been tree-ring dated to between 1482 and 1495. The original building was probably built for a rich courtier under Henry VII. MoLAS is analysing and recording the building during its refurbishment by Leaside Regeneration Ltd, and has excavated inside the house so the ground floor can be rebuilt and services relaid. A small cellar, found to extend westwards beyond the house may have belonged to an earlier building. Traces of an external doorway at first-floor level indicate that other buildings formerly adjoined the tower-house, presumably containing service quarters. Moulded and painted timbers reused in later rearrangement of the floors may have come from decorated ceilings. Originally a timber spiral staircase rose partly inside a half-hexagonal stair turret projecting from the centre of the north side of the house. When, in c 1700, this was dismantled and replaced by a staircase in straight flight, the empty turret was sealed up, and remains a void from top to bottom of the house. The earliest documented occupant, in 1509, appears to have been Sir John Blount, the father of Elizabeth Blount, Henry VIII's mistress and mother of his acknowledged illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, born in 1519.
Bromley Hall was remodelled c 1700 to serve probably as an overseer's house at the centre of a calico-printing works. Described as a ‘gentleman's seat’ at the beginning of the 19th century, by the end it was surrounded by the docks, industry and slum housing of the East End. From 1889 it housed nursing missions, and the Royal College of St Katharine added a ground-floor extension in 1928, in sympathetic brick. Damaged in 1940, when the docks were bombed during the Second World War, the house was repaired in 1951, and attached to a garage and, later, to a carpet warehouse. It is statutorily listed grade II*.
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Clients: Antler Property C I Ltd
Author: Andrew Westman
‘Vallambrosa’ is the name of a farmhouse in the south-west of Jersey. Built c 1880, this was a replacement for, and effectively hid from view, the original farmhouse, which was a much older building. The latter, only recently noticed and appreciated, was recorded by MoLAS for Antler Homes (Jersey) Ltd, before being converted to modern residences. The three-bay, two-storey, granite-built farmhouse was in traditional form, with its main long front to the south facing down a hill slope. At the east end a ground-floor room housed cows and calves, while above was the farmer's best room, with a fine stone-hooded fireplace in the gable-end wall, and an iron cross-bar in a small window beside it, originally unglazed; hay was pitched up into the roof space above that. Simple mouldings in the granite dressings around the windows and doors in the south front, including accoladed lintels, and other details of form and appearance, reflected French vernacular influence and suggested a date of construction around 1600. The original stairs would probably have been in a tourelle or round turret projecting from the north side, at the end of a cross-passage to the main entrance in the south front. Around 1700 the building was extended to the west and a new front door and internal wooden staircase were provided in the extension, with larger windows, while the stair tourelle was demolished and the former cross-passage made into a stable with a flat lintel over the former front door. Until 1949 the building housed up to five cows and three calves; the farmer recalled as a boy milking the cows at dawn every day before taking them out to pasture, and stalling them inside every evening. A garage was built against the north side, and since then the building had been used to store spare lorry parts and engines, and to house seasonal tomato-pickers.
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Clients: Trustees of Jamme Masjid Ltd
Author: Andrew Westman
MoLAS assessed the architectural and historic interest of a mosque, listed grade II*, formerly a synagogue and originally a church, in order to assist the mosque trustees, their architect and the local planning authority in considering the effect of possible alterations on the fabric and setting of the building. Constructed as a French Huguenot church in 1743, this red-brick building also contains vaulted cellars, which in other churches would have been used for burials but here were used for commercial storage. A schoolhouse built directly adjoining the church, to the west in Brick Lane, was from the first (and still is) an integral part of the site. The original vestry house, adjoining the church to the south in Fournier Street, no longer belongs to the site. In 1809 the buildings were leased to the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews, in 1819 the lease was reassigned to a Methodist congregation, and in 1869 the interior was lavishly refurbished. By the end of the 19th century the buildings were occupied by a Jewish school and the Machzeike Hadass Great Synagogue, when the interior of the former church was slightly altered accordingly and classrooms were added in the roof space. In 1976 the buildings became a mosque, school and community centre for local people of Bengali origin, continuing their function of accommodating the needs of successive groups of immigrants to London.
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