Albert Stern House (Formerly Beth Holim) And Annex To Rear

Albert Stern House (formerly Beth Holim) and Annex to Rear

This is a former old people's home for Sephardic Jews, known as Beth Holim, designed by Manuel Nunes Castello and built in 1912-13. It has since undergone mainly internal alterations and been converted to student accommodation, now known as Albert Stern House.

Beth Holim comprises two buildings: the main house at 253 Mile End Road and a more modest contemporary row of cottages for married couples located behind Ifor Evans Place. Both overlook the Old Velho Sephardi Jewish Cemetery to the rear.

The main house has a five-bay red brick façade to Mile End Road, rising three storeys plus basement and attic. The design deliberately evokes an early 18th-century house. The façade features red rubbed brick arches to timber sash windows, prominent stone quoins and plat bands, a timber modillion cornice, and hipped dormer windows set in the attic mansard—all characteristic of that period's domestic architecture. The elevation is densely articulated: stone keystones to the first floor windows abut the plat band, which in turn touches the window aprons of the storey above; the quoins are large, with only small sections of plain brickwork between them and the red brick window surrounds. This successfully evokes the terraced houses of early Georgian London, which were often constructed by skilled artisan craftsmen and characteristically richly detailed. The ground floor is clad in rusticated stone and features a carved doorcase adorned with garlands of fruit and foliage. Two inscribed stone panels with lugged surrounds on the ground floor record the building's opening on 16 February 1913 by Edward Lumbrozo Mocatta, and document the historic importance of the site as an early location for a Jewish hospital and the significance of the surviving cemetery, described as 'the first cemetery acquired by Jews after their resettlement in this country'. The rear elevation follows the same style as the façade but with plainer detailing and fewer stone dressings. Balconies run across the upper storeys, and there are two bay windows at ground floor level.

The interior follows an E-shaped plan above ground floor level, with two light wells serving this densely built plot. Skylights between the wings on the ground floor provide light to the main E-shaped circulation space, which survives well, though most original rooms have been subdivided for student accommodation. The hallway and landings retain their arched ceilings and several original double doors. The staircase preserves its timber handrail and decorative metal balustrade. Fireplaces have been removed from the rooms, but window casings, door architraves and cornices survive. There are also some wall cupboards and a second timber staircase in the attic.

The married couples' cottages form a secondary, much plainer architectural range but are historically and functionally linked to the main building. This two-storey row, located to the north-east of the main house, originally accommodated married couples admitted to Beth Holim. The cottages and main house are connected by a veranda which, though altered, appears on Edwardian maps and may partly be original. The brick row is L-shaped around the corner of the cemetery and has tiled pitched roofs. The five front doors are original plank doors, and windows retain timber casements with leaded lights. The original number of individual houses is unclear, but three surviving staircases are present. Two define clearly separate houses with two rooms on each floor accessed via small staircases, while the third belongs to a larger unit that may once have comprised two smaller houses. A plaque on the façade, designed in the style of a 17th-century grave marker like those in the adjoining cemetery, records: 'these cottages rebuilt by Ella Mocatta' with the date 1913. Single-storey additions and alterations have been made to the nearly blind rear elevation, including insertion of at least one plastic window and rendering and blue painting of part of the wall; this elevation is of little architectural interest.

Beth Holim was a hospital and old people's home serving Mile End's Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community. The institution is considerably older than these buildings alone. A plaque records that a Jewish hospital for poor women and a lying-in facility occupied this site in 1665; other sources, including Sharman Kadish's Jewish Heritage in England, trace Beth Holim's origins to Whitechapel in 1748, with a move to Mile End in 1790. The Mile End Road site was certainly occupied by a Jewish hospital by the late Georgian period, appearing as a 'Jews Hospital' on John and Christopher Greenwood's map of London published in 1830. More than one hospital building has always stood on the site. The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1876 shows a building in the same location as the married couples' annex, also L-shaped and labelled 'Asylum for the Aged'.

The rebuilding of Beth Holim was sponsored by the Anglo-Jewish Mocatta family, who came to England from Spain in the 1650s. This area north of Mile End Road has long been associated with Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. The first cemetery for Sephardic Jews in England, known as Old Velho Cemetery, was established here in 1667 and survives to the rear of Beth Holim, where it is listed Grade II. The history of continuous Jewish settlement in England, beginning under Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate in 1656, is celebrated in the rebuilt Beth Holim. Beyond the façade plaque commemorating Old Velho and the 17th-century origins of the hospital for poor and lying-in women, the architectural style itself references the period of Jewish readmission to England. In the Edwardian period, urban domestic architecture from the mid-17th to early 18th century was often treated as a single stylistic phase. Beth Holim's historicist design draws inspiration from the terraced houses of the early 18th century and, through stylistic association, the architecture of the 1650s. It also reflects the contemporary fashion for the Wrenaissance style—a revival of Christopher Wren's architecture from the second half of the 17th century.