The Church in London's East End
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These pages are being added to.
Some of the links below are to pages that are scheduled for more content. In 2022 I moved into post-work liberation (my preferred description of what is commonly called retirement). I also returned to live in London's East End. I first lived there, in Poplar, in 1983. Later, after a time in Hackney, I moved to Halcrow Street in Whitechapel, to a flat immediately opposite a Victorian terrace house occupied by Anglican Franciscans. Not long after I had been ordained they kindly invited me to preside at the 8am Eucharist in their small, front room chapel every Monday morning on my way to work, something I valued enormously. At that time I was manager of a social work team in the area. I became interested in the East End and its history (facts as well as myths) and in the history of the Christian presence in these parts. The Salvation Army had been founded in 1865 just along the road, and the Church of England in the East End ("Stepney Episcopal Area") had, over the centuries, produced a fair crop of men and women doing what the Gospel asks of its followers, some of them heroically and sacrificially. From 2005 to 2022 I lived just south of the Thames, in Lambeth. When I returned, the East End showed further signs of gentrification (not a universal evil, but often destroying some communities whilst creating others, usually at the expense of the poorer amongst us). It also revealed, it seemed, a diminished Christian presence. A clutch of people I admired had died (Fr John Rowe, Fr Ken Leech, Olive Wagstaff, Daphne Jones, William McCrossan ("Liturgical William"), Fr Gonville ffrench-Beytagh, Bishop Colin Winter, Bishop of Namibia in Exile, and Fr Michael Peet. The Franciscans had packed up and left, and the venerable Royal Foundation of St Katharine which I had known under the direction of the Community of the Resurrection had developed into something of a B&B with spiritual trimmings - a change no doubt forced upon it by financial necessity. Even so, it was a distressing loss to those of us who had known RFSK in its earlier days. In addition, a number of East End churches had been colonised by evangelical elements of the Diocese of London. This trend is explained as a way of saving diminishing and dying congregations. 'Church Planting' is the jargon. It seems to occur at the cost of a major change to the character - the historic DNA - of such churches. Anglo-Catholic and middle-of-the-road Anglican churches become evangelical in the mould of HTB, full of seemingly happy arm-waving congregants and ever-smiling 'MC' clergy vested in T-shirts and chinos, talking of little else but Jezus in a way which (to my mind) is sentimentalised and unrooted. Some may regard that as good, and no doubt it has staved off closures. To others, it is a depressing loss of something indigenous and often self-sacrificing and courageous in the history of the Church of England in the East End. I hope to gather here information about the various strands of what I have claimed made such a contribution to the church in London's East End. Here are some to be going on with - see right. |
The Church in London's East End (Stepney) See also -
Other East End Christian figures |
Images from a 1974 Bishop Of Stepney's Commission on the state of the Stepney Churches. Click image to enlarge.
