Old Stepney
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.