Monthly Archives: November 2025

The Spiegelhalter Gap

Former Wickham’s Department Store, Mile End Road, London

East Londoners will be familiar with the eccentric façade of the former Wickham’s department store on the Mile End Road.

I’d seen pictures of the building repeatedly in magazines and books about London, and I was so intrigued I went out of my way to seek it out when I was in London.

The story has been told many times.

The Wickham family ran a drapery business at 69-73 Mile End Road and in the early 1890s they persuaded their neighbour at 75, the Spiegelhalter family, to allow them to expand by moving to 81 Mile End Road.

The Spiegelhalters were German immigrants who arrived in the East End in 1828 and prospered as clockmakers and jewellers. Otto Spiegelhalter (1845-1902) and his wife Emilia raised fifteen children, of whom three sons carried on the business after his death. Their family presence on the Mile End Road had powerful emotional significance for their extended family.

A generation later, after the First World War when the Spiegelhalter family changed its name to Salter, the Wickhams, intending to build a store to rival Selfridges, had taken over the entire block except number 81, which the Salters insisted on keeping.

The Wickhams commissioned T Jay Evans & Son to design a grand classical building to fill the entire block without waiting for the Salters to agree to move out.

The result was that the Wickhams’ building was constructed around the little three-storey jewellery shop and so both facades remain to this day.

Wickhams had sold out to Great Universal Stores in 1951 and the Mile End Road business closed in the 1960s. The Salter family, still using the Spiegelhalter name for business purposes, closed their shop in 1981. It became an off-licence, and in due course became derelict.

Sinead Campbell provides more detail in this article – Wickham’s Department Store: The Harrods of the East End – and there is more history of the Spiegelhalter/Salter family at Shop | Spiegelhalter Family History | Yorkbeach.

The entire complex is now Dept W of Queen Mary University, for which the architects of the refurbishment, Buckley Gray Yeoman (BGY), were persuaded by popular demand to retain the Spiegelhalter façade, behind which nothing original remains: Council backs controversial plans for East End oddity.

There’s a curious anomaly about the stand-off that led to this landmark.

The colonnades on each side of the central tower of the Wickham store have seven bays with six columns, and the Spiegelhalter shop breaks the continuity at the junction with Wickhams’ entrance.

It’s clear that, once construction started, even if the Salters had relented and sold their property, the Wickhams had no way of incorporating no 81 without destroying the symmetry of their imposing façade.

Diplomacy, the art of handling affairs without arousing hostility, requires compromise. We see in present-day global affairs how obduracy makes it impossible to arrive at a solution that satisfies all parties.

69-89 Mile End Road stands as a mute, subtle reminder that resistance to taking account of others satisfies no-one.

As Winston Churchill repeatedly said (apparently borrowing the phrase from Arthur Balfour), “jaw-jaw is better than war-war”.

Save Derby Hippodrome?

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Hippodrome Theatre, Derby – seating newly reupholstered (1993)

Sometimes, when news breaks of a historic building been damaged or lost by corporate vandalism I think the UK’s legislative protection for heritage is unfit for purpose.

That’s not actually true. It could work if it was applied seriously: Demolition Of Listed Buildings: Is It Legal? – Christopher David Design – Architecture & Design Solutions In Surrey.

A restricted form of protection for ancient monuments has existed in England and Wales since 1882 but the widespread destruction of towns and cities in the Second World War triggered the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947 providing blanket protection to listed buildings.

There are potentially severe penalties for damaging, destroying or carrying out unauthorised works on a listed building: a Crown Court can impose an unlimited fine and/or two years in prison, and can issue a confiscation order to reclaim profits made from the offence.

The greatest threat to heritage buildings is, inevitably, money – the shortage of public money and the excess of corporate and private fortunes.

A league table of heritage-crime offences up to 2018 indicates that even the heaviest “unlimited” fines are pocket money to property developers and affluent private individuals: HISTORIC BUILDINGS PROSECUTION FINES.

Local authorities, starved of funds for over fifteen years, struggle to preserve education, adult social care and housing and much else. Preservation of old buildings comes a long way down their priorities.

Marie Clements’, the Victorian Society’s Communications and Media Manager, highlights the lack of staff to protect threatened buildings in one of the nation’s largest cities, Birmingham: News from the Victorian Society | Heritage skills crisis in local government.

One of the most instructive controversies over a building that remained intact until less than twenty years ago is the Derby Hippodrome, which earned its keep from opening as a theatre in 1914 until it closed as a bingo club in 2007, the year after it was listed Grade II.

It was acquired by Mr Christopher Anthony who after a small fire proceeded to repair the damage by taking an excavator to the roof: Bringing the house down | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times. Mr Anthony was eventually awarded a conditional discharge after admitting ordering work on the building without permission, and later went into administration.

The theatre has ever since stood open to the elements while well-meaning bodies made repeated attempts to set up a restoration programme, led by the Derby Hippodrome Restoration Trust (formed in 2010), joined later by the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust and the Theatres Trust, and overseen by Derby City Council.

These efforts were hampered by the difficulty of identifying the building’s current owners.

Companies House lists businesses trading with the name Christopher or Chris Anthony but no such individual of that name is listed: CHRISTOPHER ANTHONY PROPERTY SERVICES LIMITED people – Find and update company information – GOV.UK.

Blake Finance Ltd is repeatedly mentioned in the local press as being responsible for the Hippodrome, but the actual connection with the Derby Hippodrome is opaque: Hippodrome Theatre: Urgent works notice needs to be served on owner but who is that? | Derbyshire Live.

A succession of fires in May 2025 prompted Derby City Council to undertake a rapid, radical demolition of the remains of the proscenium and front stalls on safety grounds.

Historic England, the Derby Hippodrome Restoration Trust, Derby Civic Society and Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust challenged this action within forty-eight hours, and work stopped.

An urban explorer, MotionlessMike, has posted a collection of images from May 2023 to show how much of the building remained until the recent series of what many believe were arson attacks: Report – – Derby Hippodrome – The End (2025) | Theatres and Cinemas | 28DaysLater Urban Exploring Forums.

Contributors to the Save Derby Hippodrome Facebook stream [SAVE DERBY HIPPODROME | Facebook] include individuals who clearly understand the technicalities of demolition and neighbours who witnessed the successive demolitions that have overtaken the structure.

There’s a comprehensive survey and discussion of the Hippodrome scandal by John Forkin at And so, the Derby Hippodrome may soon be no more… – Marketing Derby.

And so the remnants of this Grade-II listed once fully restorable theatre remain, and its supporters are yet trying to find a way of saving them: Theatre at Risk Derby Hippodrome demolished.

Second Lieutenant Iowerth Ap Roland Owen (1896-1917)

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Family tomb of Iorwerth ap Roland Owen (1896-1917), Anfield Cemetery, Liverpool

Walking through Liverpool’s Anfield Cemetery, I noticed a neat monument topped by a Gothic spire, commemorating the Owen family, on which one panel of the square base carries a carved portrait of their airman son Iowerth Ap Roland who was killed in action in 1917.

The magic of Google connected me with the research of Louise McTigue, who in its early days contributed to the informative blog of the funeral directors Sarsfield Memorials Liverpool: Blog – Sarsfield Memorials LiverpoolSarsfield Memorials Liverpool | The Oldest Family Run Monumental Masons In Liverpool.

Iowerth’s father Dr Roland Owen came from Anglesey but he and his wife Margaret lived in Seaforth on the northern edge of Liverpool.

Iowerth joined the Officers’ Training Corps at his public school, Mill Hill, and though he intended to qualify in medicine at London University he put his studies on hold in 1915, joined the Inns of Court OTC and applied for a commission in the Royal Flying Corps where he was awarded his wings after six months’ training.

He immediately left for France and on the morning of May 7th 1917 he set off on a photo-reconnaissance mission from Savy airfield to Arras where he and his observer Air Mechanic Reginald Hickling were overpowered by five German planes.

It seems that Reginald Hickling was killed instantly, yet Iowerth Owen, though he was shot in the head and chest, managed to land the plane successfully before passing out. He was bundled into an ambulance but died without regaining consciousness. He was twenty. He served in France for less than a month.

The two British airmen’s nemesis was a protégé of Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron”. Leutnant Karl Allmenröder in a short career as a fighter pilot claimed thirty victories before he himself was shot down on June 26th 1917 aged twenty-one. He too was a medical student.

Iowerth Owen is buried in St Catherine’s British Military Cemetery, Arras, and commemorated on his parents’ memorial in Anfield.

Reginald Hickling, a policeman’s son who worked as a gardener, was buried at Albuera Cemetery at Bailleul-Sire-Berthoult in the Pas de Calais. He was aged 29. A week after his funeral his brother Frederick, a Quartermaster Sergeant in the 2/8th Worcestershire Regiment, was mentioned in dispatches.

Karl Allmenröder was buried in the Evangelical Cemetery, Wald, Germany. His reputation as an air ace encouraged the Nazi government to name streets after him. All these streets were renamed after 1945 and he has no public memorial.

In a time of peace these three men would have lived their lives without harming anyone. Indeed, in their different ways they’d have made the world a better place.

Their contemporary Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) called this waste of humanity “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori” – “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”.

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