Tom Vowden, Stained Glass Conservator

Click here to book for my next Whitechapel Tour on Sunday 23rd August. Tour includes tea and apple strudel at the Whitechapel Gallery. One of my favourite places in the East End is Bow Church, so it was a delight to visit and meet Stained Glass Conservator, Tom Vowden, while he was working on the east window. It made me feel less guilty about my own windows which get cleaned no more than once a year, when he told me that the east window is being cleaned for the first time since it was installed more than sixty years ago. Designed by H Lewis Curtis, this window dates from the early fifties, replacing one that was blown out when a bomb hit the church during the war. The window poses something of a mystery, since it has no religious iconography and is filled with a classical architectural structure within which images of small animals are discreetly placed. Yet, in the lower part of the window, the blue coffered roof matches the Tudor ceiling in the chancel and, in the upper part of the…