Until their departure to Mitcham in April 1999, the lead and glass merchants George Farmiloe & Sons were one of Clerkenwell’s longest-established firms, trading from St John Street since the 1830s. At the height of its business in the first half of the twentieth century the firm was supplying a variety of materials to the building trade, including paint, brasswork and sanitary ware, as well as lead and glass, and owned a number of factories across London, and a riverside wharf at Wapping.
Between 1860 and 1865 Farmiloes undertook a major redevelopment, erecting large new warehouses on St John Street. But these were destroyed in a huge fire in March 1868 which consumed all the firm’s buildings and terminally damaged most of the neighbouring properties to the north. Captain Shaw himself attended the blaze, with twelve engines and 68 firemen. Such was the heat that much of Farmiloes’ stock was reduced to ‘hundreds of tons of lead and glass fused into one common mass’. However, business soon resumed in a new generation of solidly-constructed warehouse buildings (the present Nos 34–36, see below), designed for Farmiloes by Lewis Henry Isaacs, surveyor to Holborn District Board of Works. The builders were Browne & Robinson on a contract of just under £13,000.
http://www.measure.org.uk/show6/ex_6_hist.html
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