The Winds of Change by Simone Panayi

North Street is an ancient road which like East street, has played a remarkable role in the history of Barking and before the railway arrived it was the main street in the town. We have previously reviewed the history of the Workhouse and Northbury House (Fulke’s Manor), distinctive buildings once situated on the east side of North Street, close to London Road. There are several other significant stories to tell about this street which ran from the Broadway intersection with Church Path, passing the Abbey (and later its ruins) in the direction of Uphall and Ilford.

At its northern end is Northbury (formerly North Street) School built in 1895. This golden brick building has withstood two world wars, including a Gotha Plane attack in the First World War, when a bomb landed in the boys’ playground during a raid, which caused casualties in Barking and East Ham.

South of the Victorian school, Queen’s Road and Victoria Gardens is another of the few historic buildings which remain on North Street – The Friends Meeting House.

This was built in 1908 on the site of Tait’s Place, a Tudor mansion purchased by the Quakers in 1673, as a meeting place (an original paneled room remains inside).

Tait's Place (above) was opposite the orchard that the Society of Friends bought a year earlier, which became the Quaker Burial Ground. This is the final resting place of several remarkable Quakers including Elizabeth Fry, the famous prison reformer, once on the £5 note. The Quakers, as they were known, were some of the earliest opponents of the slave trade from Africa to the colonies and argued for the abolition of slavery. Their belief that, ‘God’s light is in everyone’, also enabled women, like Fry, to preach on an equal footing with men… Many Barking Quakers received punishment for their beliefs, including their refusal to pay tithes to the parish church, at the House Correction further down North Street (on the west side almost opposite George Street). Some locals wonder if this is where Fry first protested the treatment of prisoners…

North Street, historically housed a strange mix of prosperous homes, places for the poor and punished, and public houses, including King Harry at number 20, The White Hind and The Good Intent, which have all disappeared. The Red Lion was established by 1609, a famous folk singer Paul Simon performed in the building of 1899, during the 1960s, and it is now residential homes. The Jolly Fisherman which opened its doors in the Victorian period and continued to remind locals of earlier cheerful residents recently closed, and only the ancient Bull Inn, opposite the Curfew Tower, last rebuilt in 1925 and recently remodelled, is likely to re-open to customers.

The northern end of North Street was traditionally more respectable, this is where Braintree House once stood, opposite Union Terrace (see Frogley’s map below). It may have been named by the Willet’s family in the 1880s who came from Braintree. John Willett, market gardener, pawnbroker, and later known for his drapers next to the Curfew Tower, lived there with his wife Sophia, his daughter Sophia, her husband Henry Linsdell, three children and two servants.

Roden Lodge was another grand home at 100 North Street. By the late nineteenth century it was home to the Hewetts – Barking fishing fleet owners, who lived there into the mid twentieth century. This house was removed for the widening of the relief road, in the late twentieth century.

Joseph Leftley a ‘car-man’ and his wife Isabel, lived in North Street in 1881, with their children. Joseph’s grandfather and his two brothers reportedly left their farm in Suffolk in the 1790s to seek their fortune... Isabel, still lived at 86, North Street at the age of 65, where she had managed her husband’s haulage company for 30 years. Other members of the Leftley family lived in North Street including a Baker, living there in the 1930s. During that period ‘Leftley Brothers Ltd’, founded in 1933, built the ‘ever popular’ Longbridge Road Estate, and provided land for the building of a Baptist Church. Another well-known Barking family that lived in North Street was the Glenny family, Thomas Glenny, aged 35, lived there in 1841 with his wife Harriet, at the time he was described as an agriculturist but later the family became more famous as land agents and brewers…

Meanwhile Mr Winch started a furniture business in North Street in 1899, selling his stock to local people, mostly on credit.

He is shown in the photograph, from 1925, wearing a waistcoat and leaning on a Sterling Mangle. Around that time he retired from the business on the grounds of ill health, although he actually lived until 1960, reaching a ripe old age… Tim Moore’s grandfather, was an agent for Stirling Mangles in the early twentieth century, and whilst calling at the store, discovered that Mr. Winch was selling his business - Mark Moore, his wife and his sister in law, who had a successful furniture shop in Commercial Road, Poplar, took this opportunity to purchase Winch’s store in North Street. Due to the money owed by the customers, they discovered that the business was actually a good bargain! Stanley Moore - Mark’s son and Tim’s father, was persuaded to leave his position as a clerk at the Midland Bank to manage the new shop.

Retired Barking Magistrate, Tim, recalls that, ‘the girl pictured in the light-coloured dress is Nellie (Mr. Winch’s niece) she married the young man to the right of the horse, Fred Standing, who continued working for the Moore family until his death in the 1960s’.

Fred appears in another photograph with the Winch’s horse and cart, on Bennington Avenue, which was at the junction with North Street. The horse and carts pictured, ‘delivered furniture etc. and called on customers to collect their weekly payments of 6d or 1/- each week’. There were two carts and two horses stabled in North Street at that time. Tim’s father said that one of the horses was, ‘rather bad tempered’, although it was in the interest of modernisation not a moody horse that Mr. Moore upgraded to the store’s first motor van, shown here, in 1929.

Later he recognised the prospects of a new shopping development, by Edward Glenny, in Ripple Road, on land once owned by the vicar of Barking. They moved there in 1932, where Winch’s furniture store traded until 1999.

Over the years a cold wind of change has blown down North Street, sweeping away grand old buildings, such as the workhouse of 1788, ancient homes like Roden Lodge and Faulke’s manor and various quaint pubs, but this Spring a balmy breeze, by way of the Punjab, brings a beautiful new building to the corner of North Street and Gurdwara Way. Carved from Indian marble, including engravings of Elizabeth Fry and both Barking and Sikh Heritage, the new Singh Sabha celebrates 50 years since they moved into the Friends Meeting House, North Street. I recently spoke to Alderman Inder Singh Jamu about the history of the Sikh Community in Barking, and he mentioned that in seeking employment in post-colonial Britain many Asian workers were offered jobs at William Warne’s Rubber Factory – where they imported rubber from India and perhaps for that reason were more welcoming to Asian workers. The borough archives have some lovely old photos from this period at Warne’s factory in Barking.

The Barking Heritage Project would like to send our best wishes to the Gurdwara on the occasion of the Sikh community’s fiftieth anniversary in Barking!

With special thanks to Mr. Tim Moore and the local archives for the photographs and images shown here and Lesley Gould for her research into North Street residents in the Victorian era. A version of this story recently appeared in the Barking & Dagenham Post.