Rectory Gardens

The C18th Rectory of St Anne's Limehouse (q.v.) that gave its name to the public garden failed to survive the Blitz and a residential development now forms the garden’s western front. The garden consists of a central grass area that ramps down to meet the canal edge; mature London plane and lime trees are on the boundaries and a small grove of younger trees now occupies the Rectory’s former footprint. When the Rectory was built in 1730, a house of 17 bedrooms, Limehouse was largely rural and the house probably stood in open fields with a direct and uninterrupted relationship to St Anne’s Church. It is said that the Rector was collected each Sunday and driven to church by horse and trap. Daniel Lysons, writing in ‘The Environs of London’ (1811), described the parish of Limehouse, which contained ‘about 90 acres of land not covered by buildings: of these about 6 are market-gardens; the remainder is chiefly occupied by cowkeepers, whose stock of cattle amounts to about 100.’ In enumerating the endowment of the rectory, he also made mention of ‘the parsonage-house and garden’.

The relationship between the Rectory and St Anne's Church remained unbroken until 1766, when the construction of the Limehouse Cut was authorised by the River Lee Act. Cutting through the largely open land, it formed a short-cut between the River Thames and River Lee Navigation avoiding the curves of the lower reaches of the River Lee or Lea at Bow Creek, and the need to wait for the tide to make the long detour round the Isle of Dogs. However, like many of London’s waterways prior to the building of the Victorian sewers, The Cut became unpleasantly insanitary by the 1860s. By the mid-C19th the Rectory, now bordered on three sides, had lost its once spacious surroundings. Stanford’s 1862 Map of London shows the house with an oval garden to the west and fields to the east and south abutting the canal and railway line, with Commercial Road to the north. The First Edition OS Map of 1869 shows a definitive garden curtilage incorporating garden design to the east to complement the oval flower bed to the drive entrance. The fields to the south, between the Rectory and railway, are now replaced with buildings. The garden boundaries remain almost identical today, with only the Rectory now missing.

The LCC War Damage Map of Poplar indicates that the Rectory sustained blast damage during the Blitz, presumably leading to the building’s demolition soon afterwards. The Rectory later relocated to No.5 Newell Street closer to the church, which was formerly the site of No.12 Church Row, a house where Charles Dickens’ godfather once lived, where he was visited by the famous novelist when a boy. Prior to the demise of the Rectory its garden regularly served as the venue for the annual garden fête for the church.