Locksmith Charlotte Road: A Pub That Outlasted Its Own Street Name

At 63 Charlotte Road stands the Bricklayers Arms, a pub with a documented trading history going back to at least 1805. What makes the record genuinely unusual is the address itself. So, early directories list the same building under Charlotte Street, Old Street Road. Later entries call it Charlotte Street, Curtain Road, and at least one 1830s source names it John Street, Curtain Road, seemingly describing the identical spot. The street eventually settled on Charlotte Road, but the pub itself never stopped trading through any of those changes.

Even so, the surviving licensee records read almost like a pulse check on the area's own fortunes. Through the Victorian era, names turn over with startling speed. In 1876 alone, the pub changed hands three separate times within twelve months, passing from John Edwin Pratt to James Henry Dodsley to Arthur Smith in quick succession. Running a City-fringe pub in that era, it seems, was rarely a settled career.

One Census, One Family's Story

Even so, the 1921 census captures something more specific still. That year's licensee was John Margulis, aged thirty-two, born in Odessa, Ukraine. He ran the pub alongside his wife Sarah, born in Spitalfields, their young daughter, and a barmaid named Rachel Goldberg, also born in Spitalfields. It's a small, precise snapshot of the East End's genuine immigrant history, playing out not in a factory or a market stall but behind the bar of an ordinary local pub. Records confirm the Bricklayers Arms was still trading under its own name as recently as 2018, well over two centuries after its first recorded landlord.

Even so, this one address has quietly outlasted every name London ever gave the street around it. We take a similarly steady view of the locks we work on: what matters is whether something still does its job, not how many names its surroundings have gone through.