Tower House (aka Rowton House)

Info from workhouses.org.uk: In 1892, a new type of hostel for down-and-out or low-paid working men appeared in London — the first of the Rowton Houses created by philanthropist Lord Rowton. His aim was to provide a cheap accommodation that was better and cleaner than anything else available at the time.

The first Rowton House, at Vauxhall, which opened in December 1892, was personally financed by Lord Rowton. Following its success, a limited company was formed to expand the scheme. The Whitechapel Rowton House, on Fieldgate Street, was the fifth to be built — it opened on 11th August 1902 and provided 816 beds.

Rowton Houses were all constructed along the same basic lines. The ground floor and basement contained the entrance hallway, dining room, smoking lounge, reading room, washrooms, barber's shop, shoemaker's and tailor's rooms, clothes and boot cleaning rooms, parcels room etc. The upper floors contained large numbers of private cubicles each of which contained a bed, chair, shelf, and a chamber pot. Residence in the establishment cost 6d per day although no access to the cubicles was permitted during the daytime. Lodgers could either buy meals in the dining room or cook their own food, also obtainable from a shop in the dining room.

In 1907, Joseph Stalin and Maxim Maximovitch Litvinov (a Jew who later became Stalin’s Commissar of Foreign Affairs) spent two weeks at the Whitechapel Rowton House whilst attending the Fifth Conference of the Russian Social Labour Democratic Party. The writer Jack London also encountered the establishment in 1902 when he was staying incognito in the East End of London. London later wrote: "The poor man's hotel," they are often called, but the phrase is caricature. Not to possess a room to one's self, in which sometimes to sit alone; to be forced out of bed willy-nilly, the first thing in the morning; to engage and pay anew for a bed each night; and never to have any privacy, surely is a mode of existence quite different from that of hotel life." (In People of the Abyss, Jack London called Tower House "the monster doss house.")

It's now been converted to flats.