As a young tv reporter I stumbled upon a cluster of abandoned houses sitting in the shadow of Hawksmoor’s brooding Christ Church Spitalfields. The Church was then a looming black presence standing guard over an abandoned vegetable market and the neglected early Georgian houses which clustered around it. It was hard to believe they’d once been the swanky homes of prosperous Huguenot - French Protestant - silk weavers. The Nineteenth Century had been tough on these fine homes with many split into