Poplar is a district located due east of the City of London, on the north bank of the River Thames and includes the Isle of Dogs, a large peninsula bounded on three sides by a large meander in the river. From the mid-eighteenth century until the 1970s the area was increasingly dominated by wharves and docks that were the heart of Britain’s seaborne trade. Of all the traders using the docks two companies were pre-eminent. These were: 1/. the East India Company (established in 1600 as the ‘Governor and Company of Merchants of London‘) and 2/. the West India Company (firmed in 1780 as the ‘London Society of West India Planters and Merchants’). Much of these two companies’ profits depended on the use of slave labout in their respcctive domains of influence.
The two companies’ new docks
In 1802, in order to avoid the sclerotic congestion of shipping further west towards London Bridge, the East India Company developed docks on the Isle of Dogs, and was soon followed by the West India Company whose new docks opened there in 1806.
After the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 the two companies’ fortunes began a long decline. The 1833 Act of Parliament had abolished slavery throughout the British Empire with the exceptions “of the Territories in the Possession of the East India Company”, the “Island of Ceylon” and “the Island of Saint Helena”. In 1838 the two companies merged. After 1843, with those territorial exemptions to the 1833 Slavery Act nullified, the combined Companies’ domination of the UK’s international sea trade was doomed to a long slow decline.
Isle of Dogs chapel
A small chapel had existed on the Isle of Dogs from the middle ages, to serve the sparse population. It was abandoned as a place of worship by the time the Reformation period, and any remains of it were swept away by the development of the docks.
St Matthias: East India Company
As early as 1654 the East India Company had provided its London workforce with a chapel on the north side of Poplar High Street. The area was then in the parish of St Dunstan, Stepney, whose church was considered too far away for the company’s riverside and warehouse employees to attend. In the later nineteenth century the East India Company chapel became a parish church in its own right; St. Matthias. It still stands today, though now a community asset.
All Saints: West India Company
In 1817 the West India Company agreed to underwrite the cost of a brand-new parish church of All Saints (consecrated 1823; patron: Brasenose College, Oxford), the parish being carved out out of Stepney parish. As with Sr Matthias the church was in large part funded by the profits of slavery.
The church of All Saints is a handome, imposing, building designed by Charles Hollis (d. c.1830) with a 161-feet-high steeple. The organ for the new church was built by the London organ-building firm of Henry Russell; see note below. There is nothing in the present-day building – so far as I could see – that indicates the parish’s links with the slave trade.
During the Second World War aerial bombing severely damaged the west end of the church putting the Russell organ beyond repair. The church was restored and its interior remodelled, providing a new west gallery with a ‘second hand’ organ.
Pipe organ
The new organ (1953, by N. P. Mander Ltd.) was formerly in the Clapham Congregational Church (south London), although provided with a new case. It had been newly installed in Clapham in 1902 by the London firm of A. Hunter and Sons. It is a large instrument with a clear and bright yet rich tone, enhanced by the buiding’s generous clean acoustic. On my visit there to play this organ I found it particularly encouraging of improvisation, and rather well-suited to the European Romantic repertoire.
‘Call the Midwife’ and ‘East Enders’
As a coda, it is worth mentioning that Poplar is the area in which are set two popular BBC TV series: ‘Call the Midwife’, which is based on the work of the real-life nursing nuns of the Anglican Order of St John the Divine; and ‘EasterEnders’, which is entirely spurious.
The ‘Call the Midwife’ mission buildings and nuns chapel (c.1893; patron, Christ Church Oxford) remain on Lodore Street, converted to secular use. The adjacent parish church of St Frideswide, patron saint of Oxford, was destroyed by aerial bombing in the Second World War; the area is now part of All Saints parish.
Find out more …
– Podcast
– -Sean Coleman, Mark Williams (2025) Short history of the East India Company
resource, accessed 12 July 2025
– Reading
– – Survey of London: Volumes 43 and 44, Poplar, Blackwall and Isle of Dogs (British History Online), online resource accessed 25 October 2016
– – Organ specification (National Pipe Organ Register), online resource, accessed 25 October 2016 NB. The National Pipe Organ Register listing gives the builder as Timothy Russell, but the Register’s database of organ builders shows that Henry Russell, not Timothy, was in charge of the firm at the time the All Saints organ was installed.
– – The Community of St John the Divine, online resource, accessed 1 February 2019
– – Parish website, online resource, accessed 29 December 2022.
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