Mick Hartley

Stuck out halfway to Docklands in Shadwell, on The Highway (the old, notorious, Ratcliff Highway*), is Hawksmoor’s St George’s-in-the-East.

Who would guess it had such a colourful past? The late 1850s was the height of ritualism in the Anglican church, under the influence of the Oxford Movement. From “London in the Nineteenth Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God“, by Jerry White:

But it was when extreme ritualism came to St George’s-in-the-East, in godless Limehouse, that things got properly out of hand. Protests against the Rev. Bryan King’s ministry ran through much of 1859 and 1860. Every Sunday the church was filled with ‘Rits’ and antis, for and against King’s ‘fantastic’ altar adornments and other mystical emblems. And it was overrun by locals, many of them drunk, who came to take part in fun more uproarious than an East End music hall. Week after week, indecent responses were made from the gallery, and lewd songs bellowed in the pews; hassocks were used as missiles; attempts were made to mob the altar and bring down chandeliers; shouts of ‘No Popery’, ‘Hot Codlins’ and ‘Pipes all round’, and choruses of ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘We Won’t Go Home Till Morning’ drowned out the lessons; fire-crackers exploded and peas were shot in clergymen’s faces; large bodies of police – sometimes 300 strong – sat through services to keep order; and at worst crowds of 3,000 to 4,000 invaded the church, battling in the chancel with police for an hour at a time. The church, so down on the people’s exuberant pleasures, especially on Sundays, had itself become a source of riotous joy.

For the Anglican church it’s been downhill ever since.

[* “Ratcliffe highway and Ratcliffe highway by night! the head-quarters of unbridled vice and drunken violence-of all that is dirty, disorderly, and debased. Splash, dash, down comes the rain; but it must fall a deluge indeed to wash away even a portion of the filth to be found in this detestable place. Like a drab, it lies side by side with the river, who holds it in a foul embrace, kissing its rottenness with slimy lips, and receiving into its broad bosom a portion of the corruption it contains.” – from Watts Phillips, ‘The Wild Tribes of London’, 1855]