Orchard Place Bow Creek the lost village of Tower Hamlets
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Orchard Place Bow Creek the lost village of Tower Hamlets. The following is a 'blog' for 'In Your Area' published on 7th. March, 2020.
On this day 7th. March in 1903 'The Sphere' carried our image illustrating the "Training of Little Cockneys to be Cooks."
Our little 'cockneys' were attending the Bow Creek Board School which had been built by the London School Board in 1895/6.
Constructed to accommodate 350 children, the school closed within forty years when, in 1935, Bow Creek was made subject to a "slum clearance order."
Prebendary Arthur Royall, known to me as "Father Royal," reported upon researching upon the 'lost village' of Bow Creek that, "although most of the children came from very poor homes and began their school life with great handicaps the authorities were impressed by the high standards achieved."
Bow Creek, often referred to locally as Orchard House, or Orchard Place, the name, of an Inn no longer in existence, has recently been re-branded as City Island.
Father Royall quotes an unidentified source as saying ".....the Orchard House district of Bow Creek (was) an area inhabited by a piratical and predatory population and described as a sort of Alsatia for heredity dock thieves".
Some families had been established on the Bow Creek peninsular for several generations and were both geographically and socially isolated from their 'neighbours' in Poplar.
Incredibly, many of this community that was isolated on an island at the very edge of Poplar, made a living from fishing.
It is said that at the beginning of the nineteen hundreds shrimps could be caught at the mouth of Bow Creek, at the time of the clearance it was necessary to sail as far Gravesend before fishing could begin.
A small fishing fleet, shrimped from a base in the Creek, being described by The Daily Sketch as "The fisherman's dockland Hamlet of Bow Creek."
Perhaps we should not be surprised that a fishing fleet should have existed at this location given that, in the 1850s, the neighbouring Barking Creek was home to England's largest fishing fleet!
Today little memory of this lost village of Tower Hamlets exist, although a number of important historic buildings remain, not least Trinity Buoy Wharf.