For anyone who knows the area, these were the addresses of the various East London Federation of Suffragettes projects, 1912 - 1924:
First ELFS HQ - 198 Bow Road (site only)
A baker’s shop that became Sylvia Pankhurst’s first East London office. To the shock and, I’m sure, disapproval of the local inhabitants she painted ‘Votes for Women’ in gold paint on the shopfront, and addressed a crowd from a wooden platform outside (you can see in the picture from the previous post).
Second ELFS HQ - 321 Roman Road (site only, at the junction of Roman Road and Parnell Road)
No gold paint this time, but flags hung outside in the symbolic suffragette colours of green, purple and white.
Women’s Hall and cheapity-cheap restaurant - 400 Old Ford Road (site only)
Sylvia opened the Women’s Hall (which used to stand beside the Lord Morpeth pub) in 1914 on her 32nd birthday, and the cost-price restaurant was opened in 1915, providing cheap, healthy food to eat in or take away. What do we have now? A billion fried chicken shacks/stops/huts/points. Incidentally, I find ‘Chicken Cottage‘ the most perplexing - visit their eerily hyper, flash-saturated website, where you can even sign up for their e-newsletter. Why go anywhere else for the latest news and gossip about nasty nasty chicken?
Toy Factory - 45 Norman Road, now Norman Grove
In fact it didn’t just make toys, it churned out boots and clothing as well, intended to provide fairly-paid work for women with small children whom they couldn’t offload on a relative - there was also a creche and a nursery. This is a radical move even by today’s standards, when women’s caring responsibilities are a major cause of the modern gender pay gap (currently standing at 17%, folks!) Anyway, in a typical tale of idealism mercilessly squished by The Man, the toys were very popular until other manufacturers began to copy the designs and undercut the market.
The Mother’s Arms - 438 Old Ford Road (site only, on the corner of Old Ford Road and St Stephen’s Road)
Originally the Three Colts Arms and then the Gunmakers’ Arms, Sylvia & Co took over a derelict pub and transformed it into a mother and baby clinic and Montessori school. What a wonderful bit of symbolism! I love how earnest it all was, it makes me feel all tired and cynical.
By the way, this is all snaffled from Rosemary Taylor’s book again, Walks Through History: Exploring the East End
Leave a Reply