Large hand drawn plan of Goswell Mews and surroundings in 1857. It is colour coded (with key) and labelled to show the various owners of properties depicted. The plan is unframed, and mounted on supportive backing.

Goswell Mews, North London, was the site of the Hancock family’s rubber company for over 100 years. The Hancocks were a significant British family in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known for their contributions to science, art, and industry, and the rubber industry in particular.

Thomas Hancock took up the factory site off Goswell Road from 1820, and The Hancock Co. was based here until the factory burnt down in 1834. The work was then moved to Manchester, as Hancock had entered into business with another rubber industrialist, Charles Macintosh, famed for the invention of waterproof rubberised fabric. In 1842, Thomas Hancock’s nephew, James Lyne Hancock, once again set up at Goswell Mews after purchasing his uncle’s part of the business. The company then became James Lyne Hancock Ltd., and in 1857 Lyne Hancock installed facilities for moulding and vulcanising rubber on site. The company went on to produce a wide variety of rubber products at this factory, including hoses and tubing, gaskets, and valves.

This object is part of a collection relating to the Hancock family, acquired in 2018 from a descendant and family historian of the Hancocks. The collection comprises portraits covering 4 generations of the Hancock family, personal and business archives, and a series of related objects. Thomas Hancock is the centre of the story – inventor of the patent masticator and founder of the British rubber industry. The Hancock company ran until the 1930s, led by Thomas’s nephew and assistant, James Lyne Hancock, and then a great nephew John Hancock Nunn.