Whitechapel, Middlesex
Historical Description
Whitechapel, a parish and a parliamentary borough in Middlesex. It lies 1¼ mile E from St Paul's, London, and forms a compact, busy, and densely crowded portion of the metropolis. It is crossed by a main road known as Whitechapel High Street and Whitechapel Road, which was formerly part of the road traversed by the stage coaches on their way into Essex. It still retains a few of the old inns and many old fashioned houses. Its industries include brewing, distilling, sugar-refining, iron-founding, bell-founding, floor-cloth manufacture, dyeing, and wholesale tailoring. A large trade in toys is carried on in Houndsditch, and Rag Fair in Rosemary Lane is famous for its sales of old linen and cast-off clothes. There are also in the neighbourhood of Houndsditch some of the largest bonded tea warehouses in the United Kingdom. Petticoat Lane, long famous for its Sunday morning fair, is now shorn of much of its former importance, and has been re-named Middlesex Street. Many thousands of Jews live in Whitechapel, and a walk through this district on a Saturday afternoon affords one of the most curious of the sights of London. The churches and public buildings of Whitechapel are noticed under LONDON, where also will be found the statistics, civil and ecclesiastical.
Administration
The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.
| Ancient County | Middlesex | |
| Ecclesiastical parish | Whitechapel St. Mary | |
| Hundred | Ossulstone | |
| Poor Law union | Whitechapel |
Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.
Directories & Gazetteers
We have transcribed the entry for Whitechapel from the following:
- Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Whitechapel (St. Mary))
Land and Property
A full transcript of the Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for Middlesex is online.
Maps
Online maps of Whitechapel are available from a number of sites:
- Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- Google Streetview.
- National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
- OpenStreetMap.
- old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
- Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
- A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)