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”.