Bow Quarter

From the mid-19th century to more than three-quarters of the way through the 20th century it was the location of the Bryant and May match factory. At the turn of the two centuries it was London's largest factory. A blue plaque outside the entrance commemorates the role of social pioneer and feminist Annie Besant in leading the demands for better pay and conditions. The result was that some of the first welfare institutions in Britain for industrial workers began on this site, including the provision of a dentist. At full production in 1911, the Bow site employed more than 2,000 women and girls. It finally closed in 1979, when 275 people worked there, production being transferred to…

The site had fallen into disrepair when in 1988, developers Kentish Homes, with designs from ORMS Architects (chief project architect Oliver Richards) - embarked upon one of east London's first urban renewal projects. In a history of the development in his 2009 book A Journey Through Ruins - The Last Days of London, historian Patrick Wright describes the process of gentrification of the area. As he puts it: "The coinage dreamed up to turn the Bryant & May factory into the Bow Quarter gave an altogether new turn to the rhetoric of an east London trade that local Member of Parliament (MP) George Lansbury once dismissed as 'room farming'. As the sales line of the developers went: 'Parisians…