Two roads are all that remain Two tiny roads, East Mount Street and Mount Terrace, whose names have long lost any meaning for locals, are the only remnants of the infamous Whitechapel Mount. History Got a story to tell? If you have a tale about East End history, write to John Rennie or email him at johnrennie@gmail.com www.eastlondonhistory.com BY JOHN RENNIE THE 1795 map of Whitechapel offers tantalising glimpses of a medieval Middlesex about to disappear forever beneath the bricks and cobbles of the fast-expanding London. The City was fast breaking its boundaries –Aldgate and that remaining portion of the old Roman wall had been dismantled just 30 years before, and now London was spilling out to consume the market gardens and hamlets that had clustered around its walls for a millennium and a half. Many of the names of the roads around the White Chapel Road are familiar, though the exact name has yet to come into its modern spelling. Old Montague Street is there, though it’s just Montague Street at the turn of the 19th century. And New Road cuts across the map as The New Road it then was. But between each thoroughfare, not tenements, factories or workshops; instead smallholdings and grazing land. Fealdgate Street, to take the contemporary spelling, was exactly that, giving on to farmland. But perhaps the most visible sign of the new and more civilised ‘East End’ was the new London Hospital, rising on the south side of Whitechapel Road, opposite the marvellously named Ducking Pond Lane. And there on the map, beside the hospital, is one of the mysteries of old Whitechapel. For centuries, this part of Middlesex was known as the Mile End Waste, a stretch of countryside extending from here to what would be developed as Mile End New Town. There were few buildings and it was dominated by a curious hill, quite obviously not a natural feature. Most documentary evidence puts the mount at around 30 or 40 feet high. An entry in the Illustrated London News is captioned as follows: “Whitechapel Mount in 1801. It was levelled to the ground in 1808.” Later in the 19th century, a London magazine reports that, back in the 1700s, “Francis Forcer some years before he died purchased a freehold piece of waste ground, forming part of what was called Mile End Green, and including the rise of earth lately well known as Whitechapel Mount.” But… what was it? The earliest mention of the mount comes in the writings of the historian John Stow, in his mighty Survey of London at the end of the 16th century. He writes of Jack Cade’s march on London in 1450, as the Sussex revolutionaries tried to force change on the government of Henry VI, Cade’s men formed “the encampment of commons at the Mount near Mile End”. It appears again during accounts of the Civil War period in the 1640s, as Roundhead London was fortified against a Royalist The changing landscapes of medieval London town attack (Charles I having fled his capital). The mount was incorporated into a system of 24 forts and batteries, flanked by a ditch and ringing London (a much smaller city then of course); the new ‘fort’ was extended with two flanking ‘horns’ and “may have had a gunpowder battery dug into the earth”. A 2004 archaeological survey of the area, investigating the possibility that it was the site of a Saxon or Roman burial ground, described it as “the site of an old civil war fort”. We already know that the mount was in place by the time Jack Cade and his failed rebellion (he would be quartered and his dismembered corpse dragged through the streets of London) arrived in 1450… but how much older could it be? The shape of the hill suggests it might originally have been a Norman motte and bailey castle (William the Conqueror brought the new raised style of fort with him when he arrived in 1066). Clifford’s Tower in York is built on such a mound, as well as the keep of Windsor Castle – both stone fortifications replacing the earlier wooden stockade of the Norman time. It might even have been an earthwork from ancient Britain, much like Maiden Castle in Dorset. There were tantalising clues. Roman and Saxon burial grounds have been found around the eastern outer walls of London – the tidy Romans especially endeavoured to bury their dead outside the City walls. A Saxon necklace of blue glass beads had been found at the site of the mount… could this be the burial ground of an ancient fort? Whatever its history, come the 18th century, the mount was about to confront the future in brutal fashion. Plans had been underway for a new London Hospital for many years. The institution was originally founded in 1740 but the trustees were soon looking for a large patch of land, close to the City, on which to erect a purpose-built infirmary. Negotiations were entered into for a piece of land “situated near that part of Tower Hill commonly known as the Ditch Side”, but these fell through, as did those for a site on the north side of Whitechapel High Street. Sites were then advertised for, and in June 1748, Robert Mainwaring, an architect and member of the committee, was asked to look for a suitable piece of ground. He reported “that the only thing he had met with suitable for the occasion is situated near Whitechapel Road, commonly known by the description of the Mount Field and Whitechapel Mount”. In 1753, the new building rose on the Mount Field. Contemporary drawings show the building we now know, not as a grand edifice amid the bustle of Whitechapel Road, but as an isolated building in countryside. By the end of the century, the trustees of the hospital were looking for a burial ground (and also, possibly, to grabbing more land for future development). Sir Edward Blizzard, acting for the hospital, secured the lease for the mount, and in the next few years it was razed. That 2004 survey, drilling down into the earth around the old mount site, found no bodies, though the basements of nearby buildings yielded ash and spoil amid the clay… evidence, perhaps, of the displacement of the old hill. The only remnants today? The clue, yet again, is in the street names. In particular two tiny roads whose names have long lost any meaning for locals. East Mount Street, a tiny thoroughfare (and latterly just a service road) runs down the eastern side of that original London Hospital building. The garishly painted Urban Bar (once the London Hospital Tavern) sits on the corner. Even more compellingly, on the western side of the hospital, running off New Road, is Mount Terrace, which lies on the site of the Mount itself, and itself mostly demolished during the 1970s. Stand on the corner of the Terrace and you will notice that the land here rises a metre or so above the surrounding streets – all that’s left of the Whitechapel Mount. Top: Whitechapel Mount in 1801. It was levelled to the ground in 1808. Above left: A map showing the hospital and the mount. Above right: The Jack Cade engraving 1 – 7 SEPTEMBER 2014 N E W S F R O M TOWER HAMLETS COUNCIL AND YOUR COMMUNITY 13
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