Posts Tagged ‘Muriel Lester’

Bow, Kingsly Hall, a Nursery, Grime, Quakers & more

Sunday, March 13th, 2022

This post continues from my previous post on this walk by me on 1st August 1988, Coventry Cross, Gandhi, Graffiti, Drag Balls …

Stroudley Walk, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-21-Edit_2400
Stroudley Walk, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-21

The buildings of the Diary and the Rose & Crown are still standing at the north end of Stroudley Walk where it meets the end of Bromley High St, but the closed diary became Hussains Convenience Store and then Jalalabad Grocers and half is now a mobile phone repair shop.

The Rose & Crown had opened here around 1720, as the Bowling Green Inn, though the building here is from the 1880s. It closed in 2007, was boarded up for some years before reopening around 2014 as a coffee bar and fast food restaurant.

This was formerly the north end of Devons Road, and a sign for this painted on the brickwork at the left of the pub had virtually disappeared when I made this picture in 1988. Later repainted it has now almost disappeared again.

Kingsley Hall, Powis Rd, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-25-Edit_2400
Kingsley Hall, Powis Rd, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-25

I wrote more about Kingsley Hall and the sisters Muriel and Doris Lester in the previous post on this walk. They used a legacy from their younger brother Kingsley to set up a house where they lived in relative poverty and served the neighbourhood as well as campaigning for peace and justice across the world. A plaque on the building records that Mahatma Gandhi lived in a small cabin here during his three month stay attending a government conference as a representative of the Indian National Congress. You can read and see more about his visit and the sisters on the Muriel Lester web site.

This image gives a better view of the whole building, which dates from 1928. It faces the Devons Estate, built for the London County Council in 1949 and described by Pevsner as being in their ‘pre-war manner, but with all the drabness of post-war austerity‘. Those moved from slums into its maisonettes and flats would have taken a far more positive view and the estate was solidly built and well-designed to the standards of the day.

Clyde House, Bruce Rd, Bromley-by-Bow,  Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-26-Edit_2400
Clyde House, Bruce Rd, Bromley-by-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-26

Clyde House is still there at 46 Bruce Road, looking in rather better condition now. Built in 1884 it appears to have been built as a pair with its double-fronted neighbour at 48.

Children's House, Nursery School, , Bruce Rd, Bromley-by-Bow,  Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-11-Edit_2400
Children’s House, Nursery School, Bruce Rd, Bromley-by-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-11

Sisters Muriel and Doris Lester helped to set up the Children’s House on Bruce Road 1923. Doris had trained as a teacher and they commissioned Charles Cowles-Voysey to design a building based on Maria Montessori’s ideal learning environment for young children. The school was opened in 1923 by H G Wells and is still a school, run by Tower Hamlets Council.

Inside there is a 12 metre mural painted in 1935 by Eve Garnett, the illustrator, artist and writer of the first children’s book about working class characters, The Family from One End Street, in 1937. There is now a campaign to save and restore the mural which is dirty and damaged and the web site is asking for donations to pay for this.

Regent Square, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988  88-8a-15-Edit_2400
Regent Square, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-15

The Crossways Estate, built in 1970 was apparently at the time known as the ‘Pride of Bow’, for its three 25 storey towers and a low rise block, Holyhead Close, built over the railway line. Later it was more prosaically referred to as the ‘three flats.’

It was here that Grime developed in 2003, after Rinse FM squatted in a flat and broadcast illegally from here, and it was also where Dizzee Rascal and others grew up.

Like many council developments the area around the estate was hard to navigate, with walkways and roads often not shown on maps. My contact sheet says ‘Regent Square and gives grid reference 375827 for the first of the five images I made. The three towers were Hackworth Point, Mallard Point and Priestman Point and are on Rainhill Way.

And also like many council estates, it was subjected to a policy of ‘managed decline’ and by 1999 was in a very poor state, so bad its demolition was under consideration. Tower Hamlets decided to retain and refurbish the estate which passed to Swan Homes after a residents ballot in 2005. Its towers now refurbished and clad more brightly this is now the Bow Cross Estate.

Bow Church, station, DLR,  Crossways estate, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-56-Edit_2400
Bow Church, station, DLR, Crossways estate, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-56

The ‘three flats’ seen from Bow Road and Bow Church DLR station which opened on 31 August 1987.

Mornington Grove, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-61-Edit_2400
Mornington Grove, Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8b-61

Mornington Grove not only gets a mention in the London 5: East volume of Pevsner (p619) which describes these houses as “unusually grand for the area” but also has an extensive web site covering its history by Ken Ward, a resident in the street, from which this information is extracted – and which has far more detail. And it really is an interesting history – if you have the time do click the link and read more.

The land of a nursery here was bought by the Quaker meeting in Ratcliff in 1812, and houses on Mornington Road were developed by them from 1854-1889 – those on the east side in this picture being among the later development. Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington was the son of the first Earl of Mornington, and the fourth Earl lived nearby on the north side of Bow Road.

Many of the houses in Mornington Road were compulsory purchased and demolished for the Whitehapel and Bow Railway (later the District Line) and others by World War II bombing of what had in 1939 been renamed Mornington Grove. Under the Quakers, at least 5/7th of the rents of the houses went to the support of the poor.

Most of the houses in the street, by then under multiple occupation, were sold by the Quakers to a housing association in 1980, becoming social housing, though many have now been sold off.


More from Bow in the next post from my walk in 1988. You can see larger versions of any of these pictures by clicking on the image which will take you to my album 1988 London Pictures from where you can browse.


Coventry Cross, Gandhi, Graffiti, Drag Balls …

Thursday, March 10th, 2022

Coventry Cross, Gandhi, Graffiti, Drag Balls …

Stanstead House, Devas Street, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets 1988 88-8a-53-Edit_2400
Stanstead House, Devas Street, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets 1988 88-8a-53

My previous walk on 31st July ended at Bromley-by-Bow, and I returned there the following day to continue my wanderings, starting on Devas St and the Coventry Cross West Estate, built by the LCC in the early 1950s, and in 1988 it had recently passed from the GLC to Tower Hamlets. Like all council housing it was very much compromised by the opposition under Thatcher to social housing, with the ‘right to buy’ policies selling off properties to tenants on the cheap and local authorities being largely prevented from building more as well as being starved of cash.

The estate serves as a reminder of an age where councils were able to provide large numbers of socially rented homes before we moved to an era dominated by private profit. Many council tenants who bought their own properties found it very impossible to pay back the loans they had taken on, and sold them as soon as they were able, with many of them now privately rented as ‘buy to let’ properties with rents several times social housing rates.

The six-storey Newmill House at left is linked to the four storey Stansted by a massive archway, with another the west linking to another six storey block, Brimsdown. The estate is now managed by Poplar HARCA and has been renovated around ten years ago.

Stanstead House, Devas Street, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets 1988 88-8a-54-Edit_2400
Stanstead House, Devas Street, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets 1988 88-8a-54

A portrait orientation view of the same arch into the estate. When built Newmill House at left, a long block running parallel to the Blackwall Tunnel Approach, contained 55 flats.

Gandhi plaque, Kingsley Hall, Powis Rd, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets 1988 88-8a-42-Edit_2400
Gandhi, plaque, Kingsley Hall, Powis Rd, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a42

North of the railway line, my walk took me to Patrick Connolly Gardens, now rather lost in the Devons estate, and then on to Powis Road where I made this picture of Kingsley Hall.

Kingsley Hall was opened in 1928 by philanthropists and peace campaigners Muriel and Doris Lester who opened the centre using the legacy from their brother Kingsley who died in 1914 when only 26. They had previously helped to set up a Children’s House on Bruce Road nearby in 1923. Muriel Lester (1883-1968) was one of the world’s leading pacifists, and is thought to have been unsuccessfully nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in the 1930s.

The building had previously been Zion Chapel built by Strict Baptists but was then disused. The sisters were also Baptists, but of a very different nature, they were radical and committed to a social gospel and justice issues and the hall became a centre for their community work with Muriel also serving as its pastor. They donated their wealth to serving the people of Bow and lived a simple and humble life.

Muriel had met and travelled with Mahatma Gandhi often in her work as Travelling Secretary of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and when he came to London as the representative of the Indian National Congress Party to argue in a conference for independence he rejected the suite offered him by the government at the Hilton Hotel, saying he would rather stay with Muriel Lester at Kingsley Hall. He stayed there for three months, living in a cell on the roof in the same simple style he did in London.

Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988
Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-44

I doubt if I would have photographed this street corner were it not for the message ‘big Love’ in large letters on the corrugated iron sheeting. Though it does look as if the writer went on to write something beginning with HATE. This was somewhere fairly close to Kingsley Hall.

Edgar Rd, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-46-Edit_2400
Edgar Rd, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-46

The fence here has several messages as well as some peeling posters. The longest text reads ‘AS LONG AS WE HAVE NOT SMASHED EVERYTHING THERE WILL BE RUINS!!’, an exceedingly philosophical example of graffiti which I’ve not seen elsewhere, though I wonder if it could be from a song lyric.

Considerably more common is the ‘VICTORY TO THE MINERS’, and I think the Female Sign – the planetary symbol for Venus ♀ – may mean the painter was a woman.

Tudor Lodge, Bromley High St, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-31-Edit_2400
Tudor Lodge, 85, Bromley High St, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-31

This may have had some connection with Tudor House, whose grounds were bought in 1898 by the LCC to make a public park, which is now Bromley Recreation Ground a couple of hundred yards away, but more likely just with the Tudor family who lived in Tudor House and in the Old Palace closer to where Tudor Lodge used to be.

The archway informs us that this was Tudor Lodge Sports and Social Club, catering for Weddings and Funerals; over a door at left it tells us the ‘Bow Bridge Sports & Social Club Meets Here’. It was by then a large men’s social club, but the impressive cross above the doorway suggests that this was originally a Christian institution of some kind, perhaps a convent or priory

In the 1980s it became a venue for Drag Balls which had begun as the Chelsea Arts Ball, before moving to the Parchester Hall and then on to here. Later in the 90s was the home of Ron Storme’s Transvesti Extrodinaire club.

There is now a completely different modern Tudor Lodge at 95 Bromley High St on the corner with St Leonard’s Road.

How Memorial Gateway, St Leonards Priory, St Leonard's St, Bromley-by-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-33-Edit_2400
How Memorial Gateway, St Leonards Priory, St Leonard’s St, Bromley-by-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-33

The only part of the parish church of St Mary with St Leonard to survive following bombing in 1942 and the building of the Blackwall Tunnel Approach Road. The church was built in 1843 to replace the former chapel of St Leonard’s Priory, a Benedictine nunnery first recorded in 1122 and destroyed after the dissolution of monasteries in 1536, after which its chapel had been used as a parish church. Chaucer wrote of the nunnery as the “Scole of Stratford atte bowe“.

The How Memorial Gateway was erected in 1893 as a memorial to the Rev G A How, vicar of the church from 1872-93. It is Grade II listed and in poor condition.

Bromley High St, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-34-Edit_2400
Bromley High St, Bromley-By-Bow, Tower Hamlets, 1988 88-8a-34

There is still a large tree and a telegraph pole on the corner of Bromley High St with St Leonards Street, but the lower buildings on the left of the picture were demolished a year or so ago.

Just visible in this picture is the coat of arms of the London County County on 72-4 Bromley High St (Barry wavy of six Azure and Argent on a Chief of the last the Cross of St. George charged with a Leopard of England. The Shield is ensigned with a Mural Crown Or – though it’s too small on the photo to see any details) announcing this as the Bow Bridge Estate, which was completed in 1934. I hope Poplar HARCA kept this when they demolished the building.

My walk through Bow will continue in a later post. Click on any of the images above to see a larger version in my album 1988 London Photos, from where you can browse the album.