Crispin Street Women’s Refuge

This Victorian building was once a women’s refuge in Spitalfields. It is located on Crispin Street, a street perpendicular to the western end of Dorset Street
The Women’s Refuge was built in 1868 and was in use until the 1970s. The Sisters of Mercy provided accommodation for 300 women and children and 50 men. The Car Park opposite covers the site of Millers Court where the last and most brutally murdered of Jack the Ripper’s victims was found. At the end of Crispin Street are the former premises of Donovans (paper bags) and Daltons (peanuts).
1860​.In that year a night refuge for homeless women and children in former stables in Providence Row, Finsbury Square opened. This accommodation soon proved to be too small, and a freehold site in Crispin Street, including vacant ground said to have been used for fairs was purchased.
A new building from the designs of ‘Messrs. Young’ was opened in the latter part of 1868. It provided accommodation for 300 women and children, and 50 men, with a convent for the Sisters of Mercy who were in charge of the work. Annexes in Gun Street and Artillery Lane subsequently opened as hostels for working girls.
The building in Crispin Street is of institutional character, containing three lofty storeys and a basement, with a front of eclectic and forbidding character built in yellow stocks and dressed with stone. The windows are grouped in twos and threes by buttresses, and each storey shows a different form of window arch. Those of the ground floor are segmental and dressed with stone labels; those of the first Boor are round-​headed, and those of the second floor are again segmental. The doorways are emphasized by cornice-​hoods on consoles, coarsely detailed and over-​large in scale. There is an attic storey to the pavilion at the north end of the front, and the body of the building has a pitched roof of slate.