8th February 1938
'Express Fee Paid 6d'

81 East India Dock Road and St. Stephens Church

This house, detached in a large garden, was built in 1817–18 on copyhold property leased from John Perry by the brandy merchant Duncan Dunbar, the owner of vacant ground on the site of No. 79, Balnagaith House, eastward. Like that house it was given a Scottish name, Forres House. In 1870 it was bought by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners for £1,400 from J. W. Perry Watlington, who gave them back half the price. This was for use as the vicarage of St Stephen's Church, from which it was, however, separated by No. 83. The Commissioners' architect, Ewan Christian, did not think much of the construction of the Regency house, or the subterranean location of its offices, or its low ceiling heights. He insisted on changes and a minimum thickness of 14in. for the external walls. The changes were made by the local architect, John W. Morris. Later, the vicar's daughter remembered it as having 'a great many small rooms'. In 1886 Margaret Perry Watlington sold the strip eastward of No. 81, at one time intended for a road northward, to the vicar, the Rev. R. J. Elliott. He had been taking homeless boys to live in the vicarage but 'as his daughters grew up' found it necessary in that year to build St Stephen's Home for Orphans and Fatherless Boys here. John W. Morris was again the architect and the builder was J. K. Coleman of Poplar High Street. Behind, a small home for six old people was built. For the boys' home Morris designed a plain 'Tudor' building with straight-sided gables and rectangular, mullion-and-transomed windows under hood-moulds, executed in brick and stone — a rare intrusion of this style into Poplar. In 1909 the vicarage was abandoned as too expensive to run, in favour of a clergy house at No. 15 Poplar High Street.

The church was damaged in an air raid in 1917, incurring some £2,650-worth of repairs. Messrs Powell — presumably James Powell & Sons — supplied two stained glass windows at that time. Damage was inflicted more than once in the Second World War and the church was demolished in 1950. The choir-stalls were removed to St Peter's, Grange Park, and the ragstones were utilised in making the low boundary wall of this part of the Lansbury Estate along East India Dock Road between Saracen Street and Upper North Street.

Source: british-history.ac.uk

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