All Saints Church, Poplar

All Saints Church, Poplar, stands on Newby Place in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, the Church of England parish church of Poplar — a granite and Portland stone monument of 1821–23, Grade II listed since 1950, whose elegant 160-foot steeple has watched over two centuries of dockland boom, Blitz, poverty and regeneration, and which today stands in the very shadow of Canary Wharf.

Poplar's church history begins far earlier. In 1396 the small village of "Popelar" with Blackwall was granted to the Cistercian monks of the Abbey of St Mary de Graces beside the Tower of London, becoming one of the Tower Hamlets in the parish of Stepney; its people supplied labour to the expanding City — including militiamen at the Tower — along with crops and livestock from the newly drained marshland. By the time Henry VIII sold the land to private families, Blackwall had a thriving shipbuilding and repairing industry. St Dunstan's, Stepney was then the parish church, and baptismal records from the early seventeenth century show just over half of Poplar's fathers occupied in river or sea trades. In 1614 the spice traders of the East India Company established their main shipyard at Blackwall with headquarters in Poplar, served from 1652 by a company chapel on Poplar High Street, now St Matthias Old Church. The population grew despite the ravages of plague, swelled in 1685 by Huguenot refugees whose silk manufacture and weaving began East London's enduring cloth trade.

The nineteenth century transformed everything. To escape the heavy duties levied on cargoes discharged within the City, massive capital was risked in building docks east of the Pool of London: in 1800 the West India Docks were dug out manually across the northern reach of the Isle of Dogs, principally by Irish immigrant labourers; the dock companies built the main road — now Commercial Road and East India Dock Road — in 1803, and the East India Docks opened in 1806. The construction destroyed many homes and impoverished local lives, and dock employment was forever subject to the vagaries of weather and market forces; yet by 1811 the population of Blackwall and Poplar exceeded 7,000, rising to 43,000 within fifty years. As wealthy merchants moved in, Parliament in 1817 made Poplar a parish in its own right. A book sealed in the reign of George III, setting out the new parish's rights and responsibilities, remains in the church archives — including the remarkable provision "that the Rector retains the right to close off the East India Dock Road to prevent noise during the time of Divine Service."

The Poplar Vestry purchased a house, garden and field from Mrs Ann Newby — whose name survives in Newby Place — and in 1820 invited designs for a church to reflect Poplar's new independence and prosperity. Of thirty-six entries, the winning design came from Charles Hollis, recently appointed architect of the Gothic parish church of St John the Baptist at Windsor. Hollis had worked as clerk to a prominent Poplar parishioner and submitted under the pseudonym "Felix"; when his design won, accusations of preferential treatment flew, and the West India Dock Company complained to the Bishop of London with a supporting report by the great engineer John Rennie favouring another design — in vain. Hollis's original scale model is still displayed in the church, and he designed the Rectory too. Built by the engineer Thomas Morris, whose grave lies north of the church door, All Saints was expensive for its period: budgeted at £20,000, it finally cost just over £33,000, paid from the rates with loans from parishioners John Stock and George Green, later refinanced on better terms by the West India Dock Company. The Bishop of London laid the foundation stone on 29 March 1821 and consecrated the church on 3 July 1823, the living established under the patronage of Brasenose College, Oxford — comfortable enough for the first rector, the Reverend Samuel Hoole, to be driven to Divine Service from the Rectory in a horse and carriage. His successor, buried opposite the front door, gave his name to Bazely Street. The Ionic portico rises to a Corinthian façade and the slender steeple; the tower holds a ring of ten bells cast by Thomas Mears II of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1822 at a cost of £1,060, overhauled by John Taylor & Co in 1926 and still rung today.

The original interior had grand galleries on all sides and a pulpit that could be cranked upward for the benefit of large congregations; above the organ — installed for £675 — further galleries accommodated the children of the Poor Law Institute, kept in order by beadles whose staffs survive, one still on show. The royal coat of arms marking All Saints' civic status, now on the organ gallery, originally stood over the altar; the small cast-iron altar containing a chest for valuables now rests in the Sacrament Chapel, later embellished by Martin Travers, who also designed the tabernacle. The original east window was so harshly criticised that the artist is said to have committed suicide; it was curtained off and finally bricked up in the 1890s, when under the influence of the Oxford Movement the church took on a High Church Catholic style, with great steps to a new carved high altar commissioned from Oberammergau by the rector Arthur Chandler, later Bishop of Bloemfontein. Three decades earlier, the Reverend Thomas Nowell had faced grimmer challenges: the sudden 1866 collapse of major City investment banks killed off the local shipyard industry in the same year as a great cholera epidemic, and as the gentry fled Poplar an elegant brass plaque at the east end honours Nowell's tireless work for his increasingly poor parishioners. The churchyard was re-ordered as a public garden in 1893 by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association's landscape gardener Fanny Wilkinson, completed by her successor Madeline Agar in 1905–06.

The twentieth century tested the church severely. In the dock-blighted recession of the 1920s the ritual and decoration were simplified, the interior painted white and the adjustable pulpit removed. During the Blitz, All Saints took a leading role in holding its targeted dockland community together: bombs repeatedly damaged the building while hundreds sheltered in the crypt — until late in the war a V-2 rocket devastated the church, destroying the east end and bringing down the roof. The 1950s restoration removed the galleries, added a west organ gallery with choir stalls housing a large Hunter organ brought from Clapham Congregational Church and reconditioned by Mander Organs, and supported the roof on a high steel grid masked by four substantial pillars. The restored high altar stood beneath a massive baldacchino, later cut in half with the front section placed against the east wall as a reredos. A 1980s appeal repaired the tower and exterior; parishioners redecorated the interior in 1991 with an anonymous local builder's gift of labour and scaffolding, and the churchyard was relandscaped with a Heritage Lottery Fund grant in 1999.

In 1964 the Parish of Poplar became the first Team Ministry in the London Diocese, combining nine parishes in an area among London's poorest for overcrowding, unemployment and deprivation — all beneath the towers of Canary Wharf. A modern parish centre was created in the crypt, the bodies removed in 1989 and re-interred at the East London Cemetery, the church floor rebuilt in steel and concrete with heating and air conditioning. In 1999 the parish re-opened St Nicholas' Church on the Aberfeldy Estate for a growing congregation. The church's organists have included Elizabeth Stirling, the celebrated Victorian organist and composer who held the post from 1839 to 1858 — and its name lives on in All Saints DLR station, which takes its name from the church it serves.