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In Old Bow

March 18, 2025
by the gentle author

Mid-ninenteenth century Gothic Cottages in Wellington Way

Taking advantage of the spring sunshine, Antiquarian Philip Mernick led me on a stroll around the parishes of Bromley and Bow last week so that I might photograph just a few of the hidden wonders alongside the more obvious sights.

Edward II granted land to build the chapel in the middle of the road at Bow in 1320 but the nearby Priory of St Leonard’s in Bromley was founded three centuries earlier. These ecclesiastical institutions were the defining landmarks of the villages of Bromley and Bow until both were absorbed into the expanding East End, and the precise locations of these lost territories became a subject of unending debate for residents. More recently, this was the location of the Bryant & May factory where the Match Girls won landmark victories for workers’ rights in manufacturing industry and where many important Suffragette battles were literally fought on the streets, outside Bow Rd Police Station and in Tomlin’s Grove.

Yet none of this history is immediately apparent when you arrive at the handsome tiled Bow Rd Station and walk out to confront the traffic flying by. In the nineteenth century, Bow was laced with an elaborate web of railway lines which thread the streets to this day and wove the ancient villages of Bromley and Bow inextricably into the modern metropolis.

Bow Rd Station opened in 1902

Bow Rd Station with Wellington Buildings towering over

Wellington Buildings 1900, Wellington Way

Wellington Buildings

Suffragette Minnie Lansbury was imprisoned in Holloway and died at the age of thirty-two

Eighteen-twenties terrace in Bow Rd

Bow Rd

Bow Rd

Bow Rd Police Station 1902

Under the railway arches in Arnold Rd

The former Great Eastern Railway Station and Little Driver pub, both 1879

This house in Campbell Rd was built one room thick to fit between the railway and the road

Arnold Rd once extended beyond the railway line

Arnold Rd

Former Poplar Electricity Generating Station

Railway Bridge leading to the ‘Bow Triangle’

In the ‘Bow Triangle,’ an area surrounded on three sides by railway lines

Handsome nineteenth century villas for City workers in Mornington Grove

Former coach house in Mornington Grove

Bollard of Limehouse Poor Commission 1836 in Kitcat Terrace

Last fragment of Bow North London Railway Station in the Enterprise Rental car park

Edward II gave the land for this chapel of ease in 1320

In the former Bromley Town Hall, 1880

Former Bow Co-operative Society in Bow Rd, 1919

The site of St Leonard’s Priory founded in the eleventh century and believed to have been the origin of Chaucer’s Prioress in the ‘Canterbury Tales’ – now ‘St Leonard’s Adventurous Playground’

Kingsley Hall where Mahatma Ghandi stayed when he visited the East End in 1931

Arch by William Kent (c. 1750) removed from Northumberland House on the Embankment in 1900

Draper’s Almshouses built in 1706 to deliver twelve residences for the poor

The Crossways Estate

You may also like to take a look at

At St Mary Stratford Atte Bow

The East End Suffragette Map

3 Responses leave one →
  1. Bernie permalink
    March 18, 2025

    How I would like to see beneath the surface of these old houses!
    I am a householder in a suburb of Glasgow, with a rather shoddily built 1930’s suburban house. Its roof is slated and the nails are driven into sarking, a complete layer of timber planks, covered with waterproof felt. A roof for all seasons.

    As a young man I helped my father maintain his 1890’s terrace house in Hackney. Here the slated roof was shoddy by comparison. The nails of the slates were driven into narrow battens, and there was no waterproofing felt. A roof to be ashamed of!

    How were and are the roofs of these old houses constructed?

  2. Marcia Howard permalink
    March 18, 2025

    I love all the brick built buildings which show so much history and prosperity where relevant, not so, sadly, for the final block of hi-rise flats shown at the end. I was also interested in the Beehive stone on the Co-op building, but doing a quick ‘google’ discovered it was ‘Greeks and Romans – Beehives represented an ideal society and prosperity’. My elderly aunts, all now gone, could always remember their Co-op divi numbers.

  3. John Cunningham permalink
    March 18, 2025

    When I’m in London I like to catch the tube from Whitechapel to Bow Road and then take a walk to Bow Church Station to catch the DLR to Greenwich. On the walk you can get an experience of the East End as it is now but with historic buildings still intact and in use. I’m now retired and living outside the UK but back in the 1980s I had a secondment job in Holborn for six months,including accomodation. During the weekends I explored the nearby East End. I was fascinated by it but it was a gritty and grimy place back then and often felt threatening., especially in some of the pubs. When I go back to my old stamping grounds from that time I marvel at how it has changed. For the better I have to say!

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