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This close-up photo comes from the ever-wonderful Spitalfields Life. The photo of the site comes from Sarah Wise who gives an excellent explanation of the Italian Boy story and all the background, relevant to this area before the Columbia development happened. We've lightened both photographs which enables the detail of the edifice to be seen more clearly.

Sketches by Boz has another (poor) photo and describes the object as a 'drinking fountain'. Again by lightening, one can see that it is indeed the same edifice. And lastly that same Spitalfields Life post has another photo showing this edifice but it's way off to one side of the photo which is busy with people so the edifice is easy to miss. It's only in that photo that the true size become apparent. It shows 4 or 5 people standing on the top and the door in one face is easy to see.

Columbia Dwellings were built by Angela Burdett-Coutts and designed by Henry Darbishire. There were 4 large residential blocks around a central courtyard, completed 1859-62. See Columbia Market, built alongside the flats, for more information. The whole area was demolished and rebuilt in the 1950s/60s.

We've found two maps showing the development: 1895 map and 1916 map.

The open space at the centre of Columbia Dwellings was known as Columbia Square (not to be confused with Columbia Market quadrangle). Maps consistently show something at the centre of Columbia Square, and the 1895 map labels it a 'clock tower'.

Susan S. Lewis’s 2012 Philosophy dissertation “The Artistic and Architectural  Patronage of Angela Burdett Coutts”, writing about the Dwellings: “The design consisted of four blocks, five storeys high, each containing forty five apartments …. The blocks formed a square around a large Gothic clock tower on whose side was an inscription on which Angela Burdett Coutts had her name inscribed. Clock towers were to become a standard feature in market hall design as a means of emphasising authority and as a prominent central feature in the design, used in a similar way in this housing development all eyes would have been drawn to the name of Burdett Coutts as founder. Outside on the main street was a drinking fountain in  Portland Stone and granite. … The use of a tower and a fountain incorporating features which were increasingly used in public spaces during the nineteenth century, could also in this instance be said to add to the insularity of the buildings, a private world within a public one behind the high forbidding walls of Columbia Square dwellings, built to keep the evils and temptations of the city out.”

Spitalfields Life attracted this interesting comment: "Are there any known photos of Columbia buildings where I lived with my large family. We used to climb the clock tower in the square as kids?"

One question we have not yet answered: why and when was the upper section of the clock tower removed? And what did it look like before the disfigurement? Other clock towers from this period (e.g. QMC and St George's Circus) suggest that all we can see in the photographs is the base section, and that there would have been a column section above, then the clock face(s) and then some type of finial.

As a side issue, we can’t quite understand what was at the centre of the Market, the Columbia Market quadrangle. Susan S. Lewis’s dissertation,  writing about the Market: “A great clock, a standard feature of new market halls, stood in the centre of the square, and  also contained machinery for the water supply.” We’ve found two images of the Market quadrangle (distinguished by the arcades on the surrounding buildings) and they both show a basin fountain at the centre: Victorian Web and iStock.  Maps don’t show anything there. Perhaps the dissertation has confused the Dwellings Square and the Market Quadrangle (easily done).