House that’s a snapshot of changing London
THE house where the Somali refugee family live was built in 1840, three years after Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, and in the same year that she married Prince Albert.
The area it is in, Clerkenwell, used to be part of London’s industrial heartland and at the time had a reputation far less salubrious than it does today. Charles Dickens knew the place well: he lived in nearby Bloomsbury and frequented a bank here.
In Oliver Twist, published in monthly instalments between 1837 and 1839, he described the title character’s first encounter with Clerkenwell: ‘A dirtier or more wretched place he had never seen... the air was impregnated with filthy odours. The sole places that seemed to prosper, amid the general blight of the place, were the public houses.’
The Somali family’s house has been home to a cast of characters whose circumstances and jobs provide a fascinating insight into London life, from Victorian times onwards.
Census records show that it was, as many were in those days, divided into tenements. Two or more families would live in the building at the same time, each crammed into a couple of rooms.
The first residents in 1841 were James Emery, 25, a draper, his wife Amelia, 20, and their two daughters. Sharing the property were Thomas Annett, a gold cutter, and his wife Ann, and Charles Allberry, 20, an appraiser (someone who sets a value on property), his wife Mary, and their baby son Charles.
By 1851, Charles Allberry had become a solicitor’s managing clerk and a daughter, Louisa, had been added to the family. But he was still sharing the property, now with Edward Gordon, 21, who worked for a jeweller, an engraver named Charles King, and Elizabeth Rainbow, 18, a servant.
A succession of families followed until, in 1881, Frederick Scott, 76, a watchmaker, his wife Ann, 52, and their daughter Margerite, an ostrich feather curler, moved in with their grandson. (Ostrich feathers were a fashionable ornament for women’s evening wear.)
By 1901, it was home to Albert Hubbart, a ‘fancy basket maker’, and his wife and two children, who shared the property with Christopher Fogarty, a mineral water bottler.
In 1939 it was still in multiple occupancy, with its residents including Frederick Lake, a tennis racket stringer, Mary Sherlock, a bacon packer, and Victor Knight, a chauffeur.
After the Second World War there were complaints about the ‘slummy’ state of properties in the street and by the Seventies, businesses in the area were folding.
In 1975, many of the properties were sold to the London Borough of Islington.
Today, Dickens’s bank is a luxurious Grade II-listed private residence, boasting seven bedrooms over four storeys, a grand curved staircase, marble chimney pieces and Corinthian columns. When advertised for sale in 2014, it was given a guide price of £8 million.