
01/07/2025
Dockers Anglican.
The rugged polychromatic neo-gothic drama of St Peter’s Church and clergy offices in Wapping. Created in phases from 1865-6, this rough diamond of high Anglicanism was designed by architect F. H. Pownall as a mission and its creation followed years of fundraising.
The purpose of the complex - like many other missions across mid 19th century London - was to provide religious moral teaching for the tough dockside community, but St Peter’s also went on to provide local social welfare, evening classes and served as a hostel for homeless girls.
Caught in an urban island shaped and cut off from the rest of the city by the Thames and the vast bodies of water that make up the old London Docks, Wapping was a frontier town and its dense and haphazard fabric defined by the needs of shipping, heavy industry and warehousing and marked by overcrowding, poverty and decay.
Appealing to a multicultural and transient local population, one time clergyman Charles Fuge Lowder would stage processions, rituals and pageants in the streets outside to rally followers, hugely popular spectacles that were challenged by the Church of England authorities for their strongly Catholic associations.
Bombed during WW2, the complex was partially rebuilt during the postwar years at a time when the urban fabric that it was once embedded within was completely erased leading to its strange exposed ogre-like form outside and its mix of delicate and brutal, light and heavy drama inside.