Cordelia Street, Poplar in the 1860s and its echoes today

Cordelia Street, Poplar in the 1860s and its echoes today

As I said in my last blog, my grandfather, James, was born in 1874 in 12 Cordelia Street, Poplar.  His family lived there from 1873 to 1877.

I noticed a short article which referred to a pub at 10 Cordelia Street, virtually next door, called the Horn of Plenty Arms.  It was established in 1864.  The first landlord/owner/developer was Onesiphorous Randall. 

Apparently this rather unusual Christian name followed Saint Onesiphorus who was one of the seventy disciples chosen and sent by Jesus to preach. They were chosen sometime after the selection of the Twelve Apostles (Luke 10:1-24). St Onesiphorus was bishop at Colophon (Asia Minor), and later at Corinth. Both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches hold that he died a martyr in the city of Parium (not far from Ephesus) on the shores of the Hellespont.  So now you know!

However, this is not what I wanted to tell you about.

On https://lookup.london/statue-cordelia-street-poplar/

Katie wrote in 2016

“I recently spotted this secret statue on Cordelia Street, Poplar.

As you can see, it’s pretty well hidden…

It’s mounted on the wall of the Susan Lawrence Primary School, built as part of ‘Live Architecture’ during the Festival of Britain in 1951. The Statue however, dates from an earlier building.

A pub called The Horn of Plenty stood at 10 Cordelia Street from 1866 – 1947 and this statue was part of the pub’s decorations. The pub was destroyed during The Blitz and this statue was found later, hiding among the rubble of the Randall Market area where the pub was situated, and chosen to be returned to its original site once the Susan Lawrence School was built.

Susan Lawrence was a member of Poplar Council and was one of the first to be sent to prison over the Poplar rates protest. She later became an MP and was the first woman to be chairman of the Labour Party. The School is still open today, but now known as the Lansbury Lawrence Primary School.”

So one has to assume that Thomas O’Donoghue, my great grandfather, would have recognised this statue in his local.

But what makes this story so wonderfully circular is that the Randall Market was named after the Onesiphorous Randall in the first paragraph.

From https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols43-4/pp207-211#p1

“The splendidly named Onesiphorus Randall was one of the many publicans in early nineteenth-century London who were involved in property speculation. A native of Holt in Norfolk, Randall settled in Poplar in 1819, and from 1820 until 1831 he was the licensee of the Silver Lion in Pennyfields, and subsequently of the Globe Tavern, Blackwall, until 1835. From the mid-1820s he became involved in building speculation in the East End, and started to amass a fortune from the development of cheap houses for rent to the lower middle classes.

The nineteenth-century development known as the Randall's Estate was centred on a seven-acre field, the Grove, which lay to the east of Upper North Street. To the east of the Grove the ancient Black Ditch or common sewer, which formed the eastern boundary of the estate, while its western one was along Upper North Street. Those boundaries merged at the north and south to form a lozenge-shaped area developed by Randall during the early 1850s.  At the centre of the development was Randall's Market, much of which was built during 1851–2.”

Many of the streets that our family lived in were built by this man.  His story makes really interesting reading, so if you want more go to the british-history link above.

Sources & acknowledgements:

https://alondoninheritance.com/tag/lansbury-estate/
https://pubwiki.co.uk/LondonPubs/Poplar/HornPlenty.shtml
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onesiphorus
https://lookup.london/statue-cordelia-street-poplar/
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vols43-4/pp207-211#p1