Brick Lane Jamme Masjid (Former School And Vestry To Neuve Eglise)

Former school and vestry, built around 1743 to serve the neighbouring Neuve Eglise, a French Protestant chapel. Probably designed by Thomas Stibbs, surveyor to the congregation's mother church at Threadneedle Street in the City of London. The building has since been converted to form part of a synagogue (1897) and later a mosque (1976).

The structure is constructed of stock brick with stone dressings and a tiled roof. It presents as a plain four-bay Georgian house of three-and-a-half storeys above a basement. The entrance doorway is positioned on the left, accessed via five stone steps, and comprises double-leaf four-panelled doors set within a timber doorcase with panelled reveals and a moulded architrave on shaped supporting brackets. The windows are six-over-six-pane sliding timber sashes with stone cills and flat-arched heads of gauged brick. The roof is of plain tile with lead-covered dormers.

The interior has been much altered but retains some plaster mouldings and a timber main staircase with turned balusters.

The building's history reflects the changing ethnic and religious character of Spitalfields. Built to serve the Huguenot community dominant in the local silk-weaving industry during the 18th century, the complex was leased in the early 19th century by the Society for Propagating Christianity among the Jews, an evangelical group founded by the Jewish-born convert Joseph Frey, to serve as its headquarters. The chapel passed to the Wesleyan Methodists in 1819 but reverted to missionary use later in the century. In 1897 a Lithuanian Orthodox Jewish group known as the Mahzikei Hadas ('Strengtheners of the Faith') acquired the site and employed the firm of Messrs Maples to convert the chapel into the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, with No. 59 used as a Torah school alongside the chapel's remodelled attic space. As the Jewish population dispersed to the suburbs in the second half of the 20th century, Muslim immigrants from eastern India and Bangladesh arrived; the synagogue fell into disuse before becoming a mosque in 1976. Following interior remodelling in 1986, No. 59 now serves as the main entrance to the mosque complex and accommodates its administrative office and teaching facilities. The former chapel building, now the mosque's main prayer hall, is separately listed at Grade II*.