Stepney’s Lost Mansions

Click here to order a copy of Journal of a Man Unknown Today I publish Novelist & Historian, Gillian Tindall‘s exploration of the lost mansions of Stepney that came to light during the Elizabeth Line construction Three hundred years ago, Stepney was still green fields with just a frill of ribbon-development along the main road and around St Dunstan’s. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, though terraces of neat Regency houses were spreading fast, there was pasture land beyond. The Stepney of Cockney tradition only arrived with the expansion of the docks, the laying of railway lines to service them, and the rapid in-filling of the fields with rows and rows of small houses for the population that provided the work force. But what was Stepney like before – much longer ago – when London was still contained within its medieval walls whose gates shut at night? By one of those flukes of time and chance, it was the construction of the Elizabeth Line which helped literally to bring…