Hello and alright everyone!
It is the end of March 2022
and I’m back in London.
Erm,
mostly because in the UK
it was Mother’s Day last week.
But while I’m in the motherland, I thought, why not make a quick video.
So I’ve come to this building.
Now we’ve all seen those viral photos of so-called “nail houses” in China
(and if you haven’t, here’s one).
A nail house is where a single defiant homeowner
refuses to sell their home for development,
and the developers end up having to build around it.
But is this just a Chinese thing?
Has it ever happened in, for example, London?
Well today we’re visiting what was supposed to be one of the grandest buildings in capital,
but ended up being one of the silliest.
This is the old Wickham’s Department Store
on the Mile End Road in the East End.
When it opened in the 1920s,
it was intended to rival Harrod’s and Selfridges,
the great department stores of the West End,
but as you may have noticed
(from the fact that you’ve never heard of Wickhams Department Store)
it didn’t.
So what went wrong?
And why does it have that weird little white building in the middle of it?
Are those two things in any way connected?
Well the story begins back in 1892,
when all that was here was a small row of shops.
At that time,
the Wickham family are running a drapery business out of numbers 69-73,
while a man called Otto Spiegelhalter,
whose parents moved over from Germany when he was a kid,
is running a little watchmakers and jewellery store at number 75.
And there are various other shops on the row,
but those aren’t important to the story.
Anyway, business is going particularly well for the Wickhams,
and they want to expand.
So they enquire about buying number 75 from Mr Spiegelhalter.
He isn’t particularly looking to sell,
but they are offering really good money,
so he says "Ja, OK",
and the purchase goes through.
The Wickhams move into number 75,
knocking down the dividing wall,
and Mr Spiegelhalter simply moves three doors up into number 81,
which happened to be available at the time.
It all worked out rather nicely and everyone was happy.
But of course,
the story can’t end with everyone happy
- this is the East End after all.
So let’s skip forward a bit,
because if I know anything about this part of London,
it’s that you can always tune in about 3 decades later
and find that the same old characters have popped up
years after you thought they’d died off
and started the drama all over again.
And in the 1920s, that’s exactly what happened.
The Wickham family, having made even more money by now,
decided they needed to expand further.
And this time they were going really big:
they wanted to buy the whole row,
demolish everything,
and build a huge new department store.
And confident they had enough cash behind them
to simply buy out everyone else on the row,
they signed a contract with a construction company,
and put in an order for enough stone
to build a magnificent four-story building.
It was an imposing design full of neo-classical entablatures and faux-ionic columns,
or to translate into English,
it looked exactly like Selfridges.
But as an extra flourish, the Wickhams added a grand central tower,
partly because they thought it would look good,
but mostly because Harry Selfridge had wanted one on his shop
and never achieved it.
The message was clear:
Wickhams department store was destined to be the biggest thing in the east end.
There was just one problem.
One small jewellery-shop-shaped problem.
By now, Otto Spiegelhalter had long since died of old age,
but his offspring had inherited the business,
and to them it was more than just a shop;
it was home.
Some of them had literally been born and grown up there,
- Cor blimey guv'nor! -
it was all they’d ever known, and they just didn’t want to move.
The Wickhams kept coming back and increasing their offers,
but no matter how much cash they threw at them,
the Spiegelhalters simply refused to sell.
That was a bit of an issue for the Wickhams,
because they had already bought the rest of the land,
ordered all the construction materials,
and signed a big-budget contract with the builders.
It was at this point they knew they had messed up.
So they did what any sensible British person does when they mess up:
they pretended that was what they meant to happen,
and carried on anyway.
As a result,
the whole eastern wing had to be built on the other side of Spiegelhalters,
and separated from the rest of the building by a shop-sized gap,
completely ruining the symmetry of the original design,
and leaving the central tower forever slightly off-centre.
I think as the building went up,
both families were hoping that the other would eventually back down,
but neither of them ever did,
and in 1927,
the newly completed Wickhams department store opened its doors,
with the little jewellery shop still sitting proudly in the middle,
like a lost tooth in an expensive wedding cake.
And that’s how it’s stayed ever since.
In the end, Wickham’s Department Store never achieved the success of its West End rivals
and wound up closing down in the 1960s.
Spiegelhalters, on the other hand, carried on going until 1982,
and although the family eventually moved out of the area,
some distant relations still run a jewellery shop down in Penzance.
But with both families now gone,
the two buildings fell into varying states of disrepair,
and the site became an obvious target for developers.
And in 2015, after nearly 100 years of holding out,
Spiegelhalters was finally demolished.
But not quite all of it!
Thanks to a local campaign, the historic frontage was saved.
The little shop behind it may have disappeared,
but the Spiegelhalters name still stands here today
as a reminder to all Londoners:
sometimes it's actually a good idea to talk to your neighbours.
If you’d like to visit the famous Wickham’s department store of London,
it’s now a Tesco Express and a Sports Direct,
while Spiegelhalters is now the main entrance to a modern office development.
(And to get in there, you’ll need to apply for an admin job at Queen Mary University.)
Either way, the buildings can be found on the Mile End Road
between Whitechapel tube station and Stepney Green.
And that’s about it for today,
thank you all for watching,
and I will see you soon.