Next door to our offices in Hanbury Street there's a blue plaque on the wall to commemorate Bud Flanagan, music hall comedian and leader of the Crazy Gang.

Over on the Spitalfields Life blog today, the Gentle Author has posted some of Flanagan's memories of the area, from his memoir 'My Crazy Life.'

Bud's reminiscences about W+K's home in Hanbury Street are of particular interest (at least to we who work there today).

Hanbury St – where I was born – crawled rather than ran from Commercial St, where Spitalfields Market stood at one end, to Vallance Rd at the other, an artery that spewed itself into Whitechapel Rd at the other. On one corner stood Godfrey Philips’ tobacco factory, with its large ugly enamel signs, black on yellow, advertising “B. D. V. ” – Best Dark Virginia. It took up  the whole block until the first turning, a narrow lane with little houses and a small sweet shop.

On the next corner was a barber’s shop and a tobacconist’s which my father owned. Next door to us was a kosher restaurant with wonderful smells of hot salt beef and other spicy dishes, then came the only Jewish blacksmith I ever met. His name was Libovitch, a fine black-bearded man, strong as an ox. From seven in the morning until seven at night, Saturdays excepted, you could hear the sound of hammer on anvil all over the street. Horses from the local brewery, Truman, Hanbury & Buxton, were lined up outside his place waiting to be shod.

Then came another court, all alleys and mean streets. Adjoining was Olivestein, the umbrella man, a fruiterer, a grocer, and then Wilkes St.

(I think this is the umbrella shop referred to, pictured in the mid 1980s.)

On one side of it was a row of neat little houses and on the other, the brewery taking up streets and streets, sprawling all over the district. On the corner of Wilkes St stood The Weavers’ Arms, a public house owned by Mrs Sarah Cooney, a great friend of Marie Lloyd. She stood out like a tree in a desert of Jews. Stapletons depository, where horses were bought and sold, was next door to a fried fish shop, number fourteen Hanbury St where I was born. Next to that was Rosenthal, tailors and trimming merchants, then a billiard saloon, after that a money-lender's house where once lived the Burdett-Coutts.

Hanbury St was a patchwork of small shops, pubs, church halls, Salvation Army Hostels, doss houses, pubs, factories and sweat shops where tailors with red-rimmed eyes sewed by the gas-mantlelight. It was typical of the Jewish quarters in the nineties. The houses were clean inside but exteriors were shoddy. The street was narrow and ill-lit. The whole of the East End in those days was sinister.

What Bud describes as the Weavers' Arms is now Grenson's shoe shop.

Wieden+Kennedy's building at number 16 stands on the site of a former sewing school for women set up by Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts (of the family mentioned above) a wealthy heiress who was the daughter of the founder of Coutts bank. More info here.