30 King Street, Bridge Public House

For generations this attractive art nouveau building was a focal point as what used to be the Bridge public house. For several years in the 19th Century it had the unusual distinction of also being the coaching station for railway passengers, who had to go through the hotel – then known as the Bridge Inn – to buy their tickets in a back room. They would then go on to the coal depot at the top of Salem Street – later the rear station yard – to climb onto a few carriages attached to empty coal trains going back to Washington, where they had to change trains.
Later in the Victorian era the inn achieved some notoriety for the arrest there of a culprit in a particularly gruesome murder in Morton Street, off Mile End Road. The pub eventually closed towards the end of the 1960s, together with the neighbouring jewellers shop, Alexander’s. The white glazed tiles to the rear offshoot remain largely intact. These would have been used to reflect natural light into the back of the property. LOCAL LIST