View looking west towards the north-eastern entrance to Barley Mow Brewery on Northey Street, from Newell Street, Limehouse. The Taylor Walker brewing company was founded in 1730 and this Brewery was rebuilt in 1889 and registered March 1907. The brewery looks to have been rebuilt about 1820, but in 1889 a substantial new brewery, designed by the brewery architects Inskipp & Mackenzie, was added on, covering land once used for the Limehouse workhouse. The additional 150-quarter plant now gave the concern a new address, as well, with the brewery offices being in Church Row, part of a street originally running north from Ropemakers’ Fields. The business was now called the Barley Mow brewery, rather than the Limehouse brewery, as it had been before. The name evidently came from the now-demolished Barley Mow pub opposite the Grapes in Fore Street/Narrow Street. In January 1960, Ind Coope who now owned the site declared that the Limehouse brewery site would be closed, with 1,350 of the 1,950 workers losing their jobs. Within a few years the Barley Mow brewery and Northey Street were demolished and the area redeveloped as the Barleymow social housing estate and Ropemakers Field public park. The building in the background is a school and looming above that is a high-level gantry for transporting coal from the Limehouse Cut canal to the Limehouse power station (aka Stepney power station). The coal-fired power station was situated in the area bounded by Northey Street to the north, Brightlingsea Place to the east, the Blyth Wharf part of Narrow Street to the south and Shoulder of Mutton Alley to the west. It was commissioned in 1907, decommissioned in 1972 and demolished. The single chimney shown in the photo was built in 1927 to replace others because of complaints of pollution and it was the tallest chimney stack in London at 351 ft. Behind the power station is the Limehouse Board Mill, founded by Roger Hough on Blyths Wharf and land to the north of it in 1912. The mill recycled paper to make boards and moved out of Limehouse in 1986 during redevelopment of the area. Parked in the street are a Triumph Herald (registration 410 GYE), an Hillman Minx Series II (registration YKT 566), a flatbed delivery truck and several other saloon cars.
