Commercial Street, London

Commercial Street is an arterial road in Tower Hamlets, east London that runs north to south from Shoreditch High Street to Whitechapel High Street through the East End district of Spitalfields. The road is a section of the A1202 London Inner Ring Road and as such forms part of the boundary of the London congestion charge zone.

As the name implies, Commercial Street has historically been dominated by industrial and commercial activity, which it maintains to this day. It is on the City fringes, and much industry that was seen as too noisome for the City was once exiled to such areas as this. However, since the early 1990s the street has grown increasingly fashionable, while maintaining its busy commercial feel.

Spitalfields was historically one of the poorest, most overcrowded and most crime-ridden districts in London: a parliamentary report of 1838 described this area as harbouring "an extremely immoral population; women of the lowest character, receivers of stolen goods, thieves and the most atrocious offenders". The southern section of Commercial Street was created in 1843–5 as part of a slum clearance programme, and to connect the Whitechapel thoroughfare with Spitalfields Market. It was laid out by the architect and planner Sir James Pennethorne along the approximate line of former Essex Street, Rose Lane and Red Lion Street, and entailed the demolition of some 250 sub-standard properties in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. The extension north from the market, to the Eastern Counties Railway's Bishopsgate terminus and to Shoreditch High Street, was made between 1849 and 1857 and opened in 1858. In both phases of development there was some initial difficulty in finding tenants for the building plots, and much of the street was not built up until the 1860s and 1870s. Only once Great Eastern Street had been laid out further north between 1872 and 1876, creating a continuation of the route towards Old Street and the City Road, did Commercial Street really begin to succeed as what had always been Pennethorne's aim, an artery allowing traffic to bypass the City of London. With the implementation of the London Congestion Zone in the 2000s, the road has once again seen continued activity from private and commercial vehicles seeking to avoid the 7am–6pm charge, and is a typical arterial route for emergency vehicles.

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