Modern Age

Reconstruction of the church began in 1949 with a new brick tower and a classical cupola on top to house the clock, sitting upon the fourteenth century Kentish ragstone base with its Tudor additions. New bells were cast down the road at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.

‘Bow Church has in no way been destroyed. It still exists, however rickety and wounded’ the architect HS Goodhart Rendell wrote to George Ansell, discussing restoration plans. The future Queen Elizabeth II visited to view work on the reconstruction on March 1951 and drove through Bow to be greeted by crowds after her coronation in June 1953.

A new west window was installed to replace the one destroyed in the blitz. Designed by H Lewis Curtis in an idiosyncratic classical style, it includes images of a small animals, a cat, a squirrel, mice, doves and an owl, believed to have been included as a tribute to Arthur Broome, Curate of Bow from 1820-24 and one of the founder members of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty of Animals that later became the RSPCA. He was one of twenty-two people who gathered at a meeting in June 1824, – possibly at Bow Church – to found a society that would protect animals. It is even said that the debts incurred by the organisation meant that Arthur himself was imprisoned.

As part of the East End, Bow has experienced successive waves of migration and immigration through the centuries. St Leonard’s cemetery contains Huguenot graves and the population of Bow was increased by thousands of Irish workers in the early nineteenth century. Many Jewish families from Eastern Europe who prospered in Whitechapel and Spitalfields moved out to better houses in Bow during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, establishing a synagogue in Campbell Road. 

After the war, people came to Bow from former colonial territories, especially India, and the Campbell Road synagogue was converted to a gurdwara by sikhs from the Punjab. ‘The Bombay Grab,’ a pub founded in the eighteenth century in Bow Road as the brewery tap for George Hodgson’s brewery, which exported IPA to India, became a mosque and Islamic community centre in the nineties.

The rush for post-war redevelopment resulted in many serviceable nineteenth century terraces, pubs and small shops being unnecessarily swept away in Bow, breaking up long-established communities, only to be replaced in many cases by housing of inferior quality. Yet, as part of the Festival of Britain 1951, a model development was constructed in Poplar and named the Lansbury Estate.

The second half of the twentieth century saw industry move away as factories relocated to the outskirts of London. With matches supplanted by mechanical lighters, Bryant & May closed and the building was converted into flats. In the sixties and seventies, the London Docks were run down and shut, only to be rebuilt in the eighties with tall towers of glass and steel on the Isle of Dogs serving the financial industries. But while Canary Wharf’s international business centre has flourished, many in Bow live in poverty without any benefit from this conspicuous display of wealth.

In 1967, Bow Bridge was replaced by a concrete flyover designed by Andrei Tchernavin which nevertheless maintains the arch of the bow that has distinguished successive bridges over the River Lea at this spot since the twelfth century.