Pass through a short tunnel from St John Street and you emerge in Hayward’s Place. This part of Hayward’s Place, as far as Woodbridge Street, is purely residential, and consists of little Victorian terraced houses. These are all on the south side of the street. The north side is one of the walls of the St Paul’s Square residential development.
Hayward’s Place was part of the Sekforde Charity’s estate. The eastern half of Hayward’s Place was built in 1836, with houses on both sides. The street was named after the developer, James Hayward, an ironmonger. The houses were designated not as second rate, not even third rate, but as fourth rate – as ignominious as it gets. Nicholdons’ Distillery bought the properties in 1871 and knocked down the north side to enable expansion of the distillery. Some of the houses were destroyed by bombing in the War and rebuilt by Nicholsons’ in the 1950s.
Crossing Woodbridge Street, the situation is much the same – but in reverse. All the buildings are on the north side this time. The south side is just the back of a building in Aylesbury Street.
The first building you encounter is Woodbridge Chapel, built in 1833 for Independent High Calvinists. In 1895 the chapel bought by John Groom’s mission. John Groom’s Crippleage and Flower Girls’ Mission (to give it its full name) was established in 1866 by evangelical reformer John Groom to provide food, warmth, and religion to ‘the poor girls who sold flowers to support themselves in the streets of London’. During the Second World War – with the flower girls now probably making aircraft – the chapel was let to the Clerkenwell and Islington Medical Mission, which still holds Sunday services and runs a National Health Service surgery. (Its their sign on the side of the building.)
The only other building which uses Hayward’s Place as its address, is Nos 17 – 18 Hayward’s Place. This was built in 1923 to provide an additional warehouse and factory for John Groom’s mission. (It would seem those poor flower girls were put to work.) The building was later turned into a gas-meter factory. In 2019 the factory was updated as offices by the architects, HUT. (The way they describe it is: ‘retrofitted to suit the current office demands and 21st century ways of working’ – good brochure talk.)
This is a final view back the other way from Sekforde Street to the barely visible tunnel into St John Street.
