CONTEXT 176 : JUNE 2023 37 retain their fabric, even if they are not open as licensed premises. Some of them, both closed and open (such as the Grapes, 76 Narrow Street), are listed. Initial listing surveys began from 1947–49 against this backdrop of recent destruction, as Carole Ryan recorded in her article in Context in November 2009. The surveys were essentially a record of survival, rather than the nomination of buildings to be given special treatment aimed at preservation, as listing has since become. Conservation areas (of which Tower Hamlets has 58) followed the Civic Amenities Act 1967. During this period of economic decline many late-Georgian streets and squares fell into decay. A new programme of listing was launched in the 1970s to secure their future. Miles of terraces and numerous squares in areas such as Bow Road and Tredegar Square were placed on the lists. With a subsequent reversal of decline, they have today become some of London’s finest displays of neoclassical domestic architecture and town planning. With the area’s abundant stock of industrial buildings, listing was also a means of preserving warehouses, factories such as the Bryant and May match factory, and some of the old dock basins next to the Thames. These former industrial sites have been successfully transformed into mixed areas of housing, commercial, leisure and office use, with new fabric built next to sites of historic value. Typical locations are around the former St Katherine’s Dock near the Tower and along the winding path of Narrow Street, downstream to the east. Dock basins have become yacht marinas or canal-boat moorings. Touring Tower Hamlets in the 21st century will astonish those who do not know the East End and will gratify others who knew it during the years of its agony. Great architecture, such as its many fine churches, some by Nicholas Hawksmoor, is seen against a background of diversity and a widely ranging housing stock from the most humble to the grandest elegance. The borough lies between the City of London and Canary Wharf. Of the monuments in its streets, one of the most poignant is to the deaths of the 18 children killed at Upper North Street School in Poplar in 1917, by the first daylight bombing attack on London by fixed-wing aircraft. The memorial is listed and forms the core of the St Matthias Conservation Area. Another memorial is to the 173 victims of the Bethnal Green Underground disaster of 1943, when a stampede broke out on the stairs leading down to the air-raid shelter in the disused Central Line station. The worst single civilian loss of life in the UK during the war, it was hushed-up at the time but eventually received a memorial erected near to the station in 2017. Erno Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower on the Brownfield Estate in Poplar was built by the Greater London Council in 1965–67. (Photo: SebastianF, Wikimedia) Further reading Castle, Ian (2015) The First Blitz: bombing London in the first world war, Osprey Publishing Jones, RV (1978 and 2009) Most Secret War: British scientific intelligence 1939–1945, Hamish Hamilton Ward, Laurence (2015) LCC Bomb Damage Maps, 1939–1945, Thames and Hudson Graham Tite worked at the London Borough of Tower Hamlets Council in 2022 and 2023.
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