London’s Pocket Parks: Trinity Gardens, E14

This is a modern pocket park just north of Canary Wharf that was only briefly turned from fields into homes before returning to grass as a public park.

This part of London was still pretty empty in the early 1800s and was just starting to show some new housing developments in the 1820s

As a corner plot next to two busy roads, it developed mainly as warehouses facing onto the East India Dock Road, and behind them, a school and a small row of houses facing onto Upper North Street. There was also the City of Canton pub, and, of course a church — Trinity Chapel, which, along with the graveyard and church hall, took up a large chunk of land.

Greenwood map 1828 showing outline of the park
OS map 1867 showing outline of the park

The chapel was a large church building designed in 1840–41 by William Hosking FSA, and built by John Jay. With its large, elegant frontage — a combination of Grecian and Italian Renaissance styles — directly facing the main road, the grand building came to dominate its streetscene at a time when chapel architecture in the East London was generally low-key.

It was an independent chapel, not part of the Church of England, and was mainly paid for by the shipyard owner George Green, a prominent local Congregationalist with non-denominational sympathies. A squabble with the local Anglican church saw the chapel’s bell silenced for many years until, eventually, it was allowed to ring out.

The area would likely look pretty much the same if it weren’t right next to the heavily bombed docklands, and pretty much the entire area was flattened by bombing raids.

Where there is today a park, pretty much everything was destroyed, save a few free-standing warehouses, a garage, and remarkably, a row of Georgian houses known as the George Green’s Almshouses.

The chapel was one of the first to be rebuilt, although this time in the modernist style. Its design was so striking that it was featured in the Exhibition of Live Architecture for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Built as Trinity Congregational Church, 1949-1951, by Cecil Handisyde and D Rogers Stark, with the engineer Felix Samuely. The design was an early British interpretation of modern Scandinavian style and the architecture made early use of concrete and wide open spans inside the building. The full estimated cost of the church was £80,000, of which the War Damage Commission contributed £49,000 and the Congregational Union of England and Wales a further £15,000.

In 2006, the building was acquired by the Calvary Charismatic Baptist Church, which leans towards the conservative evangelical arm of the Christian faith.

The old warehouses and graveyard next to the church could have been redeveloped, but it was decided to keep the space open as a public park, which was created as part of the post-war “Stepney and Poplar Reconstruction Area”, and was included with several other post-war clearance sites to be retained as open spaces.

There’s a hint in a 1950s map that it had a large pond in the middle, but if that was the case, it was certainly not there a decade later. Maybe a nice idea in a designers office that clashed badly when presented with the real world.

A black poplar and some new elms were planted in April 2014 to mark the centenary of WWI.

The northern half of the park, next to the houses is where the graveyard used to be, and today there’s a solitary burial site preserved in the park. The grave is significant, as it’s for George Green, the man who paid for the original church to be built there. The tomb was restored in 2024.

One oddity that isn’t really an oddity is the large anchor in the park. A ship’s anchor in an area rich in seafaring history isn’t the odd bit, but quite why this anchor in the park is — why this one, why here, where did it come from, when did it arrive?

Looking at old photos, there was a plaque on the plinth that probably explained the anchor, but it disappeared, along with the critical words of understanding, around 2013, which is incredibly frustrating.

As a park, it’s rather municipal in that it’s a wide open grass space with some trees around the edges and a small play area in a corner. Otherwise, it’s more of a shortcut for people walking through or exercising their dogs. Denser planting along the park’s road-facing edge, next to where the elms were planted in 2014, could improve the atmosphere when you consider its proximity to the busy East India Road.