The view from the pub window
The Bull, Stepney

We are in the Bull Hotel or Inn on Beverley Road at Stepney, historically in Sculcoates. Stepney is a rural-cum-industrial hamlet within Sculcoates, although it does not appear to have ever had a separate legal or administrative status. The pub is at the corner of Stepney Lane, an ancient alignment shown on the 1691 plan of Scowscot's Lordship (ie Sculcoates), its curving alignment clearly indicating that it follows an old watercourse. There must earlier have been a ford or bridge here - notice how the road is narrow through the centre of Stepney, say from Cave Street to Park Lane - but then widens. The alignment across on the west side of Beverley Road, now Park Lane, the name 'lane' again an indication of its age - was known to local residevents colloquially as "Mucky Peg Lane," but the plan for the design of Pearson Park, 1860, shows it as Bull Lane. The number of public houses at Stepney - four Bull, Rose, Park and Station, show it as a centre of population, certainly in the nineteenth century. The Rose is at the corner of a close known as Great Apeland, the southern boundary of which is Wellington Lane, another old alignment, whilst that to the north, as far as Queen's Road, is Great Ings in the 17thC, later in the 18thC known as Turnpike Close. Beverley Road was turnpiked in 1744 with a toll bar house at the corner of Queen's Road. Stepney had three windmills - one east of the Bull, off Stepney Lane (latterly a paper mill), one east of the Station public house, the third on the west side of Beverley Road at the corner of Park Lane. The offices of Thomas Hill's bottling engineers, demolished in the early 1990s and now replaced by the Chinese community housing development, was the miller's house. Joseph Rank's father, James Rank, lived there.

The present pub, or at least its front, is of 1903 by the local architects Freeman, Son & Gaskell, and is listed Grade II. The earlier pub, known variously as the Spotted Bull, Black Bull, Bull Inn, Bull and Bull Hotel, was a more modest two-storey building; its appearance can be seen from the surviving southern half of this property, now a fish 'n' chip shop. You can see there is much to be spotted of Stepney`s fascinating history from the pub window!

Chris Ketchell
Contact Chris Ketchell, Local History Unit, tel. 308065, for more information.