The Impact of Diasporas by Joanna Story Iain Walker

Author:Joanna Story, Iain Walker [Joanna Story, Iain Walker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138240100
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

The shifting landscape of an urban mission

Both Fieldgate Street and the East London Mosque, as gathered religious communities, have represented staged interventions into an urban landscape whose conventions have been shaped over centuries by the presence of Christian churches. Anglican parochial identity as the church of the whole territorial area (not just of a committed membership) has remained resonant, and has never been static in form or merely residual. The cultural resonances of Establishment have themselves changed repeatedly over historical time. By the later-nineteenth century, Methodism, as a firmly-rooted mission church, was articulating itself architecturally in a comparable idiom to that of the Church of England to make analogously ambitious religious claims, as well as continuing to take over pubs and other secular buildings. In complementary ways at different points across the twentieth/twenty-first centuries, each church worked both within and across denominational boundaries to reconceptualise ideas both of parish and of mission, and in so doing to rearticulate Christian witness.

Bow Road – now in East London’s inner suburbs – offers an example of the stretching of the borders of identity drawn around faith buildings, as the intertwined histories of Methodist and Anglican congregations reveal the shifting cartography of the metropolis. From its nineteenth-century origins, the Methodist Home Mission in Bow operated in a dynamic urban context that was in constant flux, demographically and religiously, moving from suburb to inner city to inner suburb within a little over a century, with changing socioeconomic conditions. In 1938, William Clapham, since 1920 Minister of Bow Road Methodist Church and recently-appointed Superintendent of the combined Poplar and Bow Mission, recalled a time, only 60 years before, when Bow was a middle-class suburb surrounded by market gardens and rhubarb fields. By the interwar period, better-off families had moved to the new eastern suburbs of Forest Gate, Manor Park, Ilford, and Seven Kings, and the three- to four-storey houses had each been divided into overcrowded flats (Methodist Recorder, March 21, 1935; Clapham 1938, 60). Within 100 yards of the main road were some of London’s worst slums (Clapham 1938, 56). Migration out from the inner city and in from other parts of the country had created a zone of poverty in a previously prosperous area; the bucolic Anglican parish of St Mary’s Bow Road was now an urban area, and Methodist missionary activity was being refocused to confront this new reality.

In 1935, the Methodist Recorder commented that it was surprising that effective mission work was being carried out ‘in a Chapel of the Greek order, with a facade reminiscent of the Parthenon’. Contrary to the expectation that East Londoners would not be attracted to such a place, they were responding in large numbers (Methodist Recorder, March 21, 1935). The Corinthian columns that had emblematized the self-confidence of the Methodist Home Mission in the 1860s were now making a new impact, following architectural restoration and renewal of the Mission in the 1920s. There was a large Jewish population around the church, reflecting movement out of the inner

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