Save Spiegelhalters

The Twentieth Century Society (C20) is supporting a campaign to locally list Spiegelhalters in East London.

Spiegelhalter’s survived competition, the Depression and the Blitz to become a powerful symbol of East End indomitability, but there are plans to replace it with a modern glass atrium, entirely out of character with the surrounding conservation area. C20 Society is supporting a campaign to ask Tower Hamlets Council to locally list Wickham’s, includingSpieglehalter’s.

At Guildmore we’re interested in everything that’s good for the East End.

What is special is the extraordinary story this case tells, with chapters from two decades of the C20th. The local listing would be for Spiegelhalter’s and for the Wickham’s department store that surrounds, and would have subsumed, it if Messrs. Spiegelhalter had not dug their heels in and refused to sell up.

The site today is therefore a record of 1920s development and of the appreciation of the quirky and extraordinary in the 1960s, particularly through its celebration in Nairn’s enormously influential book Nairn’s London, recently republished by Penguin Books. The current issue of Private Eye has an article on the site and this campaign.  Read more or sign the petition.