All Saints Church, Poplar

The true foundations had been laid 425 years earlier, when in 1396, the small village of ‘Popelar’ with Blackwall had been granted to the Cistercian monks of the Abbey of St Mary de Graces just by the Tower of London, and came to be known as one of the Tower Hamlets in the parish of Stepney. The settlements provided some of the labour-force for the expanding City of London, including the militiamen at the Tower, as well as crops and livestock from the newly drained marshland. By the time the land was sold off to private families under Henry VIII, the Blackwall area had also established a thriving shipbuilding and repairing industry.