Solomon Andrade da Costa

Solomon Andrade da Costa was born in London to a Sephardi family whose earlier origins are unknown. An ostrich feather manufacturer in the boom years of the Victorian feather trade, he appears to have been quite wealthy. He took up residence at Spencer House, 303 Essex Road towards the end of his life. Spencer House no longer exists, but stood near where Marquess Road joins Essex Road, and, as the name implies, was part of the estate of the Marquesses of Northampton, who were major landowner in both Canonbury and Clerkenwell.

Da Costa had been a congregant of Bevis Marks Synagogue in Aldgate, but by the time he moved to Canonbury he was too infirm to walk (as custom would require) the three miles distance. He sought and gained the synagogue’s permission to build a place of worship in his own garden. It was opened with some ceremony in 1865, with Judah Henriques Valentine (1846-1917) as minister.

Da Costa himself died the following year, but the synagogue kept going, and its congregation grew. Although it followed the Sephardi rite, quite a number of the initial congregants were Ashkenazim, perhaps attracted by its nearness to their homes. What was to become the North London Synagogue was still at this date using hired rooms in Barnsbury Street – the Lofting Road shul not opening until 1868 – and moves to set up a synagogue at Dalston had not begun, so Andrade’s shul should probably be recognised as the first in Islington.

It kept going at the Essex Road address for some 20 years, by which time – with a congregation of about 200 – it needed larger premises. One of the congregants, Salomon Pool, a cattle importer of Dutch origin, obtained permission to build a new synagogue in the garden of 39 Mildmay Park. This continued to serve the community for another 40-odd years, but finally closed in 1937. The house still stands, but no obvious trace of the synagogue is understood to remain.