The years since the War have seen
enormous changes: the rebuilding of the
parish: motorways and the flyover coming
uncomfortably close to the church
building: changes in the make up of the
local population with the arrival of a large
number of Muslim neighbours and
increasing ‘gentrification’: new groupings
of churches with the Bow Group of
Parishes and all the wider changes in
Church and society, women priests and
new forms of worship among them.
In 2006 came the major development of
the union of the parishes of St Mary’s and
Holy Trinity, Mile End.
Through all these changes the ancient
church of ‘Stratford Bow’, has survived! In
2012 the Olympic Torch will pass by St
Mary’s Church marking the advent of the
Olympic Games in London. Further
improvements to the old building are
planned. St Mary’s can look forward
confidently to its 700th anniversary on 17
November 2011.
Michael Peet, Rector of Bow
THE HISTORY OF
BOW CHURCH
About the year 1110 a stone bridge was
built across the Lea after Queen Matilda
had fallen into the river while crossing the
ford there. A community, known as
Stratford-Atte-Bowe (after the bow shape
of the bridge) grew up by the bridge and
near to the Priory of St Leonard.
By the end of the 13th century, local
people, fed up with having to go all the
way to St Dunstan’s Stepney to church —
especially in winter — felt confident and
rich enough to petition for their own place
of worship. On 17 November 1311, Bishop
Ralph Baldock of London licensed the
building of a ‘chapel of ease’ in the hamlet.
The story of Bow Church had begun.
Building the Church
It took several years to find a site for the
new chapel, (and probably to raise the
money), but finally, King Edward III
granted a piece of land ‘in the middle of the
King’s highway’ and the church was built. It
was still part of St Dunstan’s parish and
served by a curate. In 1381 the Essex rebels
in the Peasants’ Revolt swept over Bow
Bridge and past the new church on the
way to meet King Richard II at Mile End.
(Did some of them, maybe, stop for a
prayer — or for a bit of looting?)
The Church Rebuilt
By the late 1400s the church needed major
repair and, probably, enlargement and
work began on what was known as ‘the
Great Work’. By about 1490 the church as
it now is had taken shape.
For hundreds of years the church’s site in
the middle of the road was cluttered with
other buildings. To the east was a market
hall (and the village stocks!) and several
tenements and an inn were built right by
the west door.
In 1500 the inside of the building would
have been very colourful with lots of altars
and statues, including ones of Jesus,
Mary, St Anthony and St Clement (on the
altar sponsored by the local Bakers’
Guild). In front of them burned candles
supplied by the parishioners and above
the chancel screen a large crucifix (the
Rood) looked down on the congregation.
The whole life of the village would have
been marked by the church’s round of
ceremonies, processions and customs,
including a couple of visits each year to St
Dunstan’s in Stepney. But things were
about to change!
The Protestant Reformation
The Reformation, which was to change the
Church from Catholic to Protestant in the
mid 1500s, was strongly supported in
Stepney and Bow. In a few years, out went
allegiance to the Pope, the Latin services,
statues, candles and pictures; vestments
and processions and many old and much
loved customs and in came the English
Bible and services. The church would have
looked and felt quite different and people
must have been very divided in their
reactions. In 1535 the old Priory of St
Leonard was closed down and its chapel
made into a parish church.
Meanwhile, in 1538 proper church
registers of baptisms, marriages and
funerals began to be kept and can still be
seen in the London Metropolitan Archives.
George Lansbury
A major politician in the first half of the
20th
century,
Lansbury was a
Christian
Socialist
and pacifist. He was
a local councillor,
Mayor of Poplar, MP
for Bow & Bromley
and campaigned for
women’s
suffrage.
He founded the
Daily Herald, was a
member of the first
Labour Government and became leader of
the Labour Party. In his old age he strove
to avoid war, even going to meet Hitler.
He was nominated for the Nobel Peace
Prize.
For forty years he was a member of the
congregation at Bow; a Sunday school
teacher, youth leader, PCC member and
Churchwarden. At his funeral in May 1940
the church was packed with statesmen and
ambassadors but also with hundreds of
ordinary people who loved ‘Good old
George’. In February 2009, the 150th
anniversary of his birth was celebrated by
a memorable service at the church
attended by many members of his family.
In 1916 St Mary’s had had a narrow escape
when a Zeppelin bombed Bromley High
Street, but the Second World War brought
disaster. On 11 May 1941 the church was
hit in the last major raid of the Blitz. The
tower and western part of the church were
smashed, but the eastern part was patched
up and opened for worship in December.
Restoration began in 1949, when the
architect said, ‘Bow church has in no way
been destroyed. It still exists, however rickety
and wounded’ — though there was still
much to do when Queen Elizabeth (later
the Queen Mother) visited the church in
1951. St Mary’s, with its new tower and
new bells, was rededicated on 30
November 1952.
The Victorian Age
Bow developed in the 19th century from a
village of about 2,000 people to a London
slum of 42,000. Railways and factories
were built; overcrowding and pollution
were dreadful and cholera was a scourge.
In 1868 Roman Catholic nuns opened a
convent in Bow because they wanted to
work ‘in the worst part of London’.
Bow Church had to cope with these vast
new social problems. Under Rector George
Driffield (1844–88), the parish underwent
major changes. The building was
refurbished, the worship modernised and
lay people involved in running the church
for the first time. The rise in population
led to the old parish being divided into
four, and the creation of St Paul’s, St
Stephen’s and St Mark’s.
However, the future of the building still
looked bleak. In 1882 Walter Besant wrote:
‘the beautiful old church of Bow, crumbling
slowly away in the East End fog, with its
narrow strip of crowded churchyard. One
hopes that before it has quite crumbled away
some one will go
and make a
picture of it!’
“BOW
CHURCH
DOOMED”
was the gloomy
headline in the
local paper on 14 November 1896. For
much of the 19th century, the future of the
church building had been in doubt and
repeated proposals had been made to pull
it down and rebuild. Then a crisis came
when the chancel roof collapsed. Surely
the old place was finished now! But the
fledgling
conservation
movement
intervened; money was raised and a fouryear programme of restoration was put in
hand with an ‘Iron Church’ (above) erected
in front of the west door for temporary
use. In June 1900 the repaired and
refurbished church was reopened. Double
glazing and wall panelling had been fitted
and a second vestry had been built. It had
all cost £6,500.
In 1903 a London religious census showed
that 548 people had worshipped at St
Mary’s on census day. So it was that Bow
Church entered the 20th century!
On 3 August 1553, Mary Tudor rode
through Bow in triumph to become Queen
and the Catholic faith was restored. But
bitter religious conflict continued and in
1555 thirty-six Protestants were arrested at
a house in Bow churchyard and one of
them, Elizabeth Warren, was condemned
for heresy and burned at the stake just
outside the church. Another thirteen were
burned at Stratford where there is a
memorial to them. Sadly we have no idea
of what St Mary’s priest, Nicholas
Farkson, thought about all this or of what
happened to him.
A little later Mary died and her sister
Elizabeth became (a Protestant) Queen.
Over the years things settled down. The
Church of England and its Book of
Common Prayer took shape and religious
life in Bow became more peaceful.
The 17th Century
But in the 1640s life in Bow was hit by the
Civil War. The Church of England was
abolished and the minister of Bow
dismissed and replaced by a series of
Presbyterian ‘interlopers’. As with the
Reformation 100 years before, Stepney and
Bow, with lots of Puritan sympathisers,
seem to have been on the radical side!
Then in 1648 the War came literally to
the church door when 600 Royalist troops,
retreating from a failed rising in Kent,
crossed the Thames to the Isle of Dogs
and marched up to Bow Bridge to get
into Essex.
For about a week they occupied Bow,
beating off Parliamentary attacks. The
local Home Guard (the Trained Bands)
were disarmed and locked up in the
church until they promised to go home
quietly. On 7 June, having gained some
recruits, the Royalists marched into Essex
and up to the terrible siege of Colchester.
Did any Bow lads march with them — and
did any come back?
With the Restoration of Charles II and the
Church of England in 1660, St Dunstan’s
asked for the arrears of the 24 shillings
(£1.20p) a year that Bow Chapel was
supposed to pay to its mother church.
They claimed over £59. St Mary’ disputed
this enormous sum — half a century’s
worth — and for six years they argued,
with Bow agreeing in 1666 to pay £16. But
from now on Bow Church was seen as
virtually independent of Stepney.
At this time Bow was a favourite place for
Samuel Pepys to ride out to for a picnic or
to have a meal at the Queen’s Head Inn.
(His wife once accused him of having a
girlfriend in the village!) Pepys may also
have visited the enormously popular Bow
Fair held every year at Whitsun. The fair,
which ran for 400 years until 1823, was
notorious for a great amount of binge
drinking and riotous behaviour.
In 1701 Prisca Coborn, the daughter of the
Bow minister and the widow of a rich local
brewer, died and left money for the
founding of a school (now part of Coopers
and Coborn School, Upminster). She was
buried in the church, by the west door.
Also buried here in the crypt was Philip
Ludlow, the first Governor of the
American colony of Carolina, 1689–95.
An Independent Parish
In 1719 Bow Chapel finally became
independent after being a daughter church
of St Dunstan’s Stepney for 400 years. On 6
April the Bishop of London consecrated
the parish church of ‘St Mary, Stratford
Bow’, and Robert Warren was inducted as
the first Rector. Some of the congregation
would have sat in the new church gallery
and all would have admired the fine
modern moulded plaster ceiling, both paid
for out of Prisca Coborn’s bequest.
During the 18th century, the church was
done up, a new organ provided and five
bells presented to the church by John
Cook, ‘collar maker to the King’.
In 1789 a complaint was made that the
church was ‘a great obstacle in a much
frequented thoroughfare. The church is, as it
stands, in the very centre of the town and
carriages are obliged to separate, some going
on one side and some on the other side of the
church, and frequent stoppages are occasioned
in both passages.’ The solution was to pull it
down, but fortunately they didn’t!
The Rector and the
Corkscrew!
In 1802 Samuel
Henshall
became
the Rector of what
was still a village
church. He was an
eminent
scholar,
Professor of AngloSaxon at Oxford
and the author of many learned books, but
his main claim to fame was his taking out
of the first patent in the world for an
improved corkscrew! He died in 1807 and
is buried in the church chancel. Corkscrew
collectors from around the world
presented a memorial plaque to him on 24
August 2009, the anniversary of the
granting of the patent.
Henshall was followed by the splendidly
named Rectors, Frodsham Hodson and
Hamlet Harrison.
In 1825 the area around the church was
cleared of its buildings and the churchyard
created.
But on 29 January 1829, disaster struck
when the upper part of the church tower
was severely damaged in a great storm.
Though it was rebuilt — with ‘medieval’
battlements — the architect proposed that
the old church was now getting so frail
that it really ought to be demolished and
replaced with something modern!