The story of Temple Street is inseparable from the wider history of east London's furniture trade, an industry that once made Bethnal Green and Shoreditch the manufacturing centre of an entire nation's domestic life.

By the mid-nineteenth century, the area west of Cambridge Heath Road had become something approaching one enormous factory. Small workshops, timber yards and polishing rooms lined every street and alley, their output flowing to the great retail houses of Tottenham Court Road and beyond. Cabinet makers, upholsterers and French polishers worked in a dense network of interdependent trades, with raw timber arriving via the Regent's Canal and finished pieces dispatched by horse-drawn cart to wholesalers across the city.

It was into this thriving ecosystem that brothers Charles and Henry Winkley intervened at the close of the century. Between 1898 and 1904, they demolished four blocks of older terraced housing between Temple Street and Teesdale Street and replaced them with a planned mixed-use development that integrated three types of residential accommodation with three small factories, numerous cabinet makers' workshops, and a row of shops along Old Bethnal Green Road.

The four blocks were designed as a community in miniature. High-fronted shops occupied the commercial streets, while behind them, mews courtyards concealed rows of one and two-storey workshops, each with its own loading doors for handling timber and large items of furniture. The three-storey terraces facing Temple Street and Teesdale Street combined ground floor workshops with residential accommodation above, enabling craftsmen to live directly beside their place of work.

This integration of domestic and productive space was not unusual in east London, but the completeness and coherence of the Winkley Estate was exceptional. It represented the high point of a building tradition rooted in the realities of artisan life, where the boundaries between home and workshop were deliberately fluid. The estate contained the largest number of surviving purpose-built furniture workshops in Tower Hamlets and became, in time, a nationally important record of the renowned East End furniture trade.

The trade itself declined through the twentieth century, its slow collapse accelerated by wartime bomb damage, the rise of out-of-town manufacturing, and shifting economic currents. By the 1980s, the furniture industry had all but disappeared from these streets. Yet the buildings remained, and with them the spatial logic of the original plan. In 2008, the Old Bethnal Green Road Conservation Area was designated, with the Winkley Estate at its centre, formally recognising the architectural and historic significance of what Charles and Henry Winkley had created over a century earlier.