St Dunstan’s Church, Stepney
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.