Trinity Green Almshouses Are Saved

Thanks in no small part to the large number of letters of objection, not least those written by you the readers of Spitalfields Life, Tower Hamlets Council refused Sainsbury’s proposal for a twenty-eight storey tower of luxury flats overshadowing Christopher Wren’s magnificent Grade I Trinity Green Almshouses in Whitechapel, last winter and this week – in an extraordinary development – Sainsbury’s announced they have abandoned the plan for the tower entirely. This unexpected and welcome declaration may be explained by the fact that Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, refused to use his executive powers to ‘call in’ the planning application and override local democracy, as his predecessor Boris Johnson did with the cases of the Spitalfields Fruit & Wool Exchange and Norton Folgate.

(Click this image to enlarge)

Trinity Green Almshouses in Mile End survive because some illustrious friends saved these distinguished and benign examples of social housing, which were built at the end of the seventeenth century under the supervision of Sir Christopher Wren.

CR Ashbee, founder of the Guild of Handicrafts at Essex House, was so dismayed to see the destruction of a palace in Bow which once belonged to James I, he launched a campaign in 1895 to rescue Trinity Green Almshouses when demolition and redevelopment were suggested upon the implausible premise that it would be too expensive to repair the drains.

With the vocal support of William Morris, Octavia Hill, Lord Leighton, Walter Besant and many others, Ashbee succeeded in his goal and Trinity Green became the first historic building in the East End to be saved for posterity. As part of his campaign, he published a handsome monograph, surveying and recording the building in detail, from which the drawings here are reproduced. This monograph became the origin of the Survey of London which continues to this day.