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Today it is just another East End street, and passers-by doubtless sometimes wonder at the roots of its curious foreign name. But Swedenborg Gardens marks the home of one of the most extraordinary men of the 18th century – a brilliant scientist whose visions were to change the way many saw God and religion. It was here he lived in the heart of the East End’s Swedish community, and here he had his conversations with his maker.

Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm on 29 January 1688. The son of a clergyman, he grew up in a home filled with intellectual, philosophical, political and moral debate. He was certainly an intense child, writing later: “From my fourth to my tenth year, I was constantly engaged in thought upon God, salvation, and the spiritual sufferings of men, and several times I revealed that at which my father and mother wondered … from my sixth to my twelfth year my delight was to discourse with clergymen concerning Faith.”

Leaving Uppsala University at 22, he decided to travel Europe and immersed himself in an astonishing variety of disciplines. To the specialists of today, his work in physics, astronomy, metallurgy, mineralogy, geology, chemistry, watchmaking, bookbinding and lens grinding is staggering. And the tireless Swedenborg was a creator too. He designed a submarine, an aeroplane, a steam engine, an air gun and a slow combustion stove.

Most of his designs were never built, but undaunted he wrote numerous books, as well as taking a seat in the Swedish equivalent of our House of Lords. He also took up a post as the King of Sweden’s Assessor of Mines.

From the 1720s, Swedenborg was dividing his time between Sweden and London. The English capital attracted him, because its free press allowed him to publish his often controversial works without hindrance or censorship. Arriving in Wapping, Swedenborg first made his home in Wellclose Square, near the Highway.

Wellclose and Prince’s Squares were lined with grand townhouses, built by the wealthy Swedish merchants who had settled in the area. These timber traders had their wharves at Wapping, and soon the local Swedish community grew, with shopkeepers, craftsmen and itinerant sailors. In 1728, the community raised money for their own place of worship – and London’s first Swedish church was built in Prince’s Square.

Swedenborg became a regular worshipper at the new church. He was still commuting between his native and adopted countries - returning to the Swedish parliament to deliver a paper on the future of the national currency, coming back to London to publish his groundbreaking works on the brain and cerebral cortex – but soon his life was to take an extraordinary turn.

In 1744 Swedenborg began to have vivid, disturbing and exhilarating dreams and visions. He told no-one, merely logging his experiences in his diaries. But trying to make sense of it all, he began a meticulous study of the Bible. Then, in April 1745, came the experience that changed his life forever. God appeared to him, telling him that he would reveal truths to humanity through Swedenborg.

For the next 25 years, Swedenborg became ever more prolific, publishing 18 theological works at his own expense. Resigning his job as Mines Assessor, he wrote ceaselessly, expounding on the hidden, inner meanings to the stories of the Bible; the fundamental nature of God, Humanity and Creation; the truth about the afterlife; the key to personal spiritual growth and the secrets to a happy marriage, to name but a few.

Swedenborg kept as low a profile as such a productive writer was able. He published his work anonymously in London (his followers in Sweden began to be persecuted by the authorities), and he made no attempts to set up a church to disseminate his ideas.

But the secret escaped one night back in Gothenburg. Dining with friends, he suddenly became pale. Asked what was wrong, he said he had just ‘heard’ that a fire had broken out near his home in Stockholm, 300 miles away. A little later he became relieved, explaining that the fire had been put out safely. Days later, a messenger arrived from Stockholm, with exactly the same story. His vision became the talk of the town, and people realised that Swedenborg was the author of the extraordinary tracts that had been appearing.

On 29 March 1772, Swedenborg died at his Wapping home, and was buried in the little Swedish church in Prince’s Square. Not much remains to be seen now. The Swedish community has long since dispersed, and the visionary’s remains were removed to Uppsala Cathedral in 1908. The church closed in 1910 and, despite a fierce campaign, it was demolished in 1921.

In 1938, Prince’s Square was renamed Swedenborg Square. But though the fine old houses of Swedenborg and Wellclose Squares escaped the Blitz, they couldn’t dodge the planners. In the 1960s both were demolished as slums by the GLC.

We all know Whitechapel, home of the Blind Beggar, the London Hospital, and entrance to the East End as you emerge eastward from the City. But what was the ‘White Chapel’ and what became of it?
The present Whitechapel/Mile End/Bow Road has for centuries been the main highway out of London into Essex. About a mile beyond Aldgate, 13th century travellers out of the City would have come across the alba capella or White Chapel, standing just to the south of the main road.
Another name for the distinctively whitewashed church was the chapel of the Blessed Mary of Matfelon. There are a number of myths about the naming of the chapel – one that it refers to a ‘felon’, a sailor hanged for robbing a local widow. Another is that it refers to the knapweed (otherwise known as matfelon) that grew in the locale. Most likely is that the Matfelons, a local family, had a hand in the funding of the church.
By the middle of the 14th century, the area that had begun as an overspill from London was becoming a sizable community in its own right, and St Mary Matfelon was established as the parish church. The parish, meanwhile, had become known as Whitechapel – the glistening white of the building’s stone had made it a well-known landmark on the London-Essex road, and the name had stuck.
Sometime in the late 1300s the white chapel was replaced by a new church, 100ft long and 60ft wide, and as the parish grew in population, legacies from parishioners made it richer. In 1410, the rector, Roger Haldanby left £2 for the belfry. John Sonder left £4 8/- 6d in 1428, and Robert Mason left 3/- 4d (about 17 pence in today’s money) in 1437.

This new parish of Whitechapel was effectively a suburb of the City, an extension of the ward of Portsoken. But even if it was increasingly affluent, it was a higgledy-piggledy and unhygienic offshoot. The historian John Stow wrote in the late 1500s about what had become a filthy shanty town. The field by Whitechapel church, “being sometime the beauty of the city on that part, is so encroached upon by building of filthy cottages, and with other purpressors, inclosures and laystalls (notwithstanding all proclamations and Acts of Parliament made to the contrary) that in some places it scarce remaineth a sufficient highway”. So chaotic had the unregulated development of Whitechapel become, that people were building shops and homes that actually blocked the route out to Essex.
It’s probably inaccurate to describe Whitechapel at the time as London overspill. What was happening was that the increased size and affluence of the City was starting to draw immigrants like a magnet from Essex, Suffolk and beyond. People travelled to the capital in search of work and riches, and fetched up camping outside the City gates, where lodgings were cheap – if not pleasant. Stow had, in fact, recorded the first emergence of the East End slums, with subdivided properties and an endless inpouring of new souls to fill them. The pleasant Essex countryside “without” the City wall had gone forever.
But though the new population may have been poor and transient, they were devout. Parishioners left money for lights to be burned before the statues in the church. Individual fraternities, or associations of worshippers, also endowed tapers to be burned in the church – Blessed Trinity, St Luke, the guild of Corpus Christi and Our Lady, the guild of St Katharine and St Margaret were just some of the associations remembered in the church.
The church was rebuilt again in 1669, and again after excavations in 1874. But the church was destroyed for the last time by enemy bombs in the Second World War, and was never rebuilt. Now, all that remains of the white chapel is a name.

Jane Cox will be familiar to many readers of East End History. The author of London’s East End: Life and Traditions and a number of genealogical works has devoted 25 years to researching and archiving Tower Hamlets.
Now she has turned her attention to “The mother church of the East End”, the venerable St Dunstan’s – once as important to the religious fabric of London as St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey is today.
And the results of her research – soon to form the basis of a new book – are the subject of this month’s talk at the Ragged School Museum.
The church’s very antiquity makes compiling a history difficult. We know that it was rebuilt in the 10th century by St Dunstan – then Bishop of London – so it is even older than that. Until the 13th century it was the only church for the whole of Stepney; then the whitewashed chapel of Whitechapel was built.
Jane’s research into the history of the church seek to separate fact from legend by going back, where possible, to the original sources.
Her book will trace the history of the church and its village from earliest times, bringing alive the cast of royal servants and fishermen from the Marsh (now the Isle of Dogs), the turbulent hot-gospellers, officious vestrymen, sailors and tailors, ‘top-booted’ gentlemen parsons, parish clerks on the fiddle and sextons on the make.
Stepney church was once the church for the whole of what is now the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and part of Hackney. The enormous far-flung parish was said to be the “most ample in Europe”, covering, at its greatest, seven square miles.
Village church
In the early middle ages people from all the villages and hamlets east of the Tower of London – Bow, Whitechapel, Poplar, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Mile End, Shadwell, Limehouse, Wapping and Ratcliffe – came trudging along the lanes to worship and seal their rites of passage at Stepney church.
In the 13th century only the farmers and fishermen of the Marsh had their own chapel-of-ease elsewhere.
The Mother church stood for many hundreds of years among walled orchards and waving corn, flanked by fine houses.

In the 16th century the riverside hamlets became ‘sailortown’, crowded with ships’ workshops and lodging houses for the navy. And the sea captains and merchants of the East India Company were the congregation and financial backbone of the church for two hundred years or more.
As the population of its great neighbour, London, swelled and spilled out into the East End, row upon row of houses marched relentlessly over the fields of Stepney.
The sky was dark with the masts of ships on the river and the air hung black with soot and grime; dockers and factory workers took their place in the pews instead of gentlemen, sailors and market gardeners.
And the Church had to grow with its new congregation. Between the 14th and the 19th centuries the old parish church spawned no less than 67 daughter parishes as the rural retreat sank beneath the weight of humanity into a seething slum.
Stepney was like a vast transit camp, taking in Dick Whittingtons who flocked towards London in search of work, and many thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers from abroad.
Anchors in Stepney
As the newcomers arrived, so others left, many seeking a new life across the Atlantic.
Driven to crime because of their poverty, East Enders were deported to Botany Bay in great numbers. For thousands of American and Australian families, Stepney Church is their home anchor; the place where their ancestors were baptised, married and buried.
Now, the only remnant of the medieval East End, it stands in its leafy churchyard, as if on a village green, miraculously saved from the Blitz.
It is one of the liveliest and best loved churches in London and, for the genealogical fraternity at least, the best known of all English churches.

As dim as a Toc H lamp, went the joke. But for World War One soldiers and generations of young
people since, the Toc H club, founded by local
vicar Philip Clayton, was a beacon of hope.
Philip Thomas Byard Clayton was born in Queensland, Australia, on December 12, 1885. Two years later, Philip and his parents returned to England, where
he attended St Paul’s School. He went on to Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied
theology, coming out with a first class degree.
The newly graduated Philip – or Tubby as he became known – entered the church, and in 1910 went as a curate to St Mary’s Portsea.
Soon his life was overtaken by the Great War and, in 1915, he went to France as an army chaplain. It was during the war that his real life’s work began.
Signallers’ code
In December 1915, he opened Talbot House in Poperinge, a club just behind the lines in Flanders. It became known to the thousands of soldiers who found a touch of home there and a brief respite from the horrors of war as ‘Toc H’. This was a reference to the army signallers’ code, whereby the
initials of Talbot House – TH – would become Toc H.
Civvy Street
During the war, hundreds of men committed themselves, should they survive, to entering the church as priests. Tubby’s first task after the war was at the Ordination Test School, established in a disused gaol in Knutsford, Cheshire, where these men were prepared for theological college. He was the main inspiration and was, for a short time, a member of the teaching staff. Already, how-ever, he was planning for the rebirth of Toc H.
This was not to be a simple ex-service organisation, but an attempt to preserve and hand on to succeeding generations the special atmosphere and camaraderie which had characterised Talbot House in Poperinge. It was an ambitious project, but Tubby was determined to carry Toc H into Civvy Street.
In 1922, with the Toc H movement still in its infancy, he was asked by Archbishop Davidson to become the vicar of All Hallows by the Tower, in Newark Street, E1, and to bring new life to an ancient church with an uninterested and dwindling congregation.

At first this looked like a
distraction from his real work. But All Hallows gave him a base, letting him distance
himself from the day-to-day administration of Toc H and gain the freedom to act as a roving ambassador.
He was the vicar of All Hallows for the next 40 years and Tower Hill was his home for the rest of his life.
He travelled the world, renewing wartime friendships and launching Toc H throughout what was then the Empire. But Tower Hill was not neglected. He began formulating and discussing plans to beautify the area and to
create open space. These bore fruit in the establishment in 1932 of the Tower Hill Improvement Trust.
Towards the end of 1932 Tubby sailed for West Africa where he had his first contact with leper colonies. He was deeply moved by this experience, and within six months had inspired 50 people to volunteer for five years’ unpaid work with lepers and raised £25,000 for the British Empire Leprosy Relief Association.
At the start of the Second World War, he established a Toc H Club at the naval base at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys. Then in 1941, he was appoin-ted chaplain to the Anglo-Iranian Line and spent much of the rest of the war at sea with the tanker fleet.
In 1940, All Hallows Church was bombed and Tubby’s first post-war priority was its rebuilding – a task which required all his energy and powers of persuasion.
He succeeded, of course. In 1962, Tubby resigned as vicar of the newly rebuilt All Hallows. He remained in Tower Hill, active in both Toc H and the Winant and Clayton Volunteers, until his death, just after his 87th birthday, in 1972.
These days, Toc H is as active as ever, as the pictures on this page show. Volunteers work on a variety of comm-unity projects – running a
children’s playscheme or camp, tackling conservation or construction projects, running a leadership training course
or first aid training.
The charity encourages a mix of volunteers, so that they learn, through living and working together, to break down stereotyped views and make friends from new cultures.

THE East End suffered badly from bombs in the Second World War, Stepney worse than most. And what the Luft-waffe’s bombs didn’t flatten was to meet its fate at the hands of developers’ wrecking balls in the 1960s.
But take a walk down past Stepney Green, pass by Ben Jonson Road, and cut down the tiny stretch of Stepney High Street and you come to St Dunstan’s Church.
Suddenly you get a sensation of how the old village of Stebenhethe must have looked in the hundreds of years before it was swallowed in the eastward sprawl of the City.
The medieval church stands on a winding stretch of road, quaint and countrylike amidst the regimented grid of modern roads. Look at the pictorial map of Stepney, drawn in 1681, and compare it with the modern A-Z layout, and the reason becomes clear.
Amid massive redevelopment, the church – the heart of the ancient village – survives untouched, as it was hundreds of years ago.
It’s all the more remarkable as St Dunstan’s is by the far the oldest church in the borough. It dates from not long after Stibba, the Saxon warrior who gave Stepney its name, first landed.
Three millennia
Before Stibba’s Hythe, meaning landing place, became Stybbanhythe, then Stibenhede, and afterwards Stebenee, there was a church there. In this fast-changing world, it’s amazing to reflect that in January next year, Stepney will have been in existence through three millennia.
And for hundreds of years after its foundation, St Dunstan’s remained the sole church standing to the east of the City gates.
In fact, Stepney can lay claim to being the first of the Tower Hamlets. Shoreditch and Aldgate were hard by the walls of the City itself – suburbs in modern parlance – but Bow didn’t get its own church till 1311, and the famous White Chapel had only been built a hundred years before that.

With its enviable position as an established village amidst the Essex countryside, Stepney became popular and fashionable. It was thriving and prosperous, with a rich mix of farmers, millers, silk weavers, coopers, brewers and throwsters – the men and women who made the silk thread into yarn.
And in 1299, the good burghers of Stepney included the Lord Mayor of London, Henry le Waleys, emphasising the hamlet’s status as a rural retreat for the wealthy Londoner.
In the Middle Ages, parliament would tour, sitting in different halls in London. And so it was in 1299 that Stepney became, briefly, the home of the mother of parliaments.
And it could offer stiff competition to modern-day Mayfair for its sprinkling of nobs and aristos.
By the early 1500s, Stepney was still a fashionable spot and, in 1503, the wife of Henry VII made a note in her account book, detailing her payments to the Duchess of Suffolk, for a stay in her house in ‘Stebenhath’.
And just to the east of St Dunstan’s stood the mansion of the Marquis of Worcester. Visit the adventure playground today and you’ll be standing on the same spot.
Excellent hunting
What made Stepney so popular with kings of the time was its access to the excellent hunting in the old forest which covered the land, and all within an easy hour’s ride of London.
There’s little of the rural idyll left today of course. Snatches were saved in the establishing of Victoria Park, and the open green space of Stepney Green itself.
But walk by St Dunstan’s on a warm summer’s evening. Let your eye travel along the curve of the road and settle on the medieval, tree-flanked church – and you can picture the village that was.

The East End has been renowned for many trades down the centuries – home for what was once the biggest docks on the planet, the sweatshops of the London garment trade, further back it was even the market garden for the neighbouring city.
Few people, though, picture Tower Hamlets as a refuge for those engaged in the quiet and introspection of religious devotion. But in the Middle Ages the area east of the City was home to many of London’s monasteries and nunneries.
Seeking escape from the noise and disease of the capital, the monks, sisters and friars had built their establishments in what was then countryside.
In the few short years between 1535 and 1540 they would all be swept away, as Henry VIII and his Chancellor, Thomas Cromwell, set about dissolving the monasteries, casting their members into the streets and plundering their wealth for the royal coffers.
Henry changed the social and religious fabric of his country in the process. But in the decades beforehand, the old English social order of power vested in the competing religious orders, their fabulous wealth housed in the monasteries, was seen in miniature in Tower Hamlets.
Debauchery
The Augustinian, or Austin Friars, were a mendicant, or travelling order of friars, and had first come to England from the Continent in 1248. Augustine himself had become bishop of Hippo in North Africa in 396AD, after renouncing his earlier life of debauchery and self-indulgence. His order was founded on its leader’s fierce opposition to heresy.
By the Middle Ages the Augustinians had become a familiar sight on the streets of London, begging money to continue their charitable works. And by Henry’s time their work on the street had been so successful they had funded both a friary at Aldgate and an Augustine nunnery at Shoreditch.
St Benedict was born in 480 in North Italy, and this Catholic priest invented the whole monastic way of life.

By the Middle Ages, the Benedictine monasteries were largely responsible for the spread of education, the copying of religious scripts, and the teaching of reading in Europe – they founded several Oxford colleges.
The Benedictine nunnery at Bishopsgate was therefore a beacon of learning in the Dark Ages of medieval London.
The third major order vying for the charitable pennies of the East Enders of the time was the Franciscans.
Their founder, St Francis of Assisi, may have eschewed material possessions to live in poverty with the animals, but by the 1500s the Franciscan nunnery at Minories was very rich indeed, as its Greyfriars, or Friars Minor (from who Minories took its name) did their work of soliciting funds on the City’s streets.
Add to the list St Mary’s Hospital at Bishopsgate and St Mary Bethlehem – the notorious Bedlam hospital on the site of what is now Liverpool Street Station – and much of the wealth of the nation resided in Tower Hamlets.
Divorce
Henry had a pressing practical need to subvert the power of the Catholic Church – he was seeking a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and legitimisation of his new wife Anne Boleyn and their children, and the Pope was refusing to play along.
But just as important to such a proud king was that the London monasteries possessed wealth to dwarf his own treasury – and the leaders of those monasteries and nunneries looked to Rome for their authority, not to England’s King.
In 1530, the brown and black-habited mendicant friars were a common sight on the streets of the East End. In 1534, Cromwell’s Acts of Supremacy demanded that all religious orders pledge their allegiance to the Crown instead of the Pope, and made him head of the English Church.
Many agreed. Many didn’t and were executed. But by 1540 the monasteries were gone. Henry had rifled £140,000 in the process – a huge sum, the normal Crown income being only £100,000 a year.
The medieval Tower Hamlets, with its religious authority, was dead. From now on the power and wealth in the East End would rest with the merchants, as Britain’s new fleets brought riches back from all over the globe.