BOW COMMON LANE

Client : Countryside Properties

Location : Mile End, London

Completion date : 2018

The inspiration behind the decorative fencing to Leopold Estate came from a recent chapter in Bow’s manufacturing past. 

The suffragette, Sylvia Pankhurst, unlike her mother and sisters, concentrated her energies on local campaigning with the East London Federation of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and disagreed with the more militant tactics encouraged and employed by some of the suffragettes.  Amongst her many contributions to East London, Pankhurst set up a toy factory in a house located on 45 Norman Road (now Norman Grove) just north of Bow Common Lane in 1914. Created as a co-operative and staffed entirely by local women, the factory offered decent wages and good working conditions. 

The East London Federation Toy Factory as it became known, helped to fill the gap in the toy market left by the Germans whose goods were no longer being imported (nor welcomed) into Britain during the First World War. The factory produced a wide range of goods, from simple wooden toys (made with wood sourced from George Lansbury’s yard in Bow), to dolls and stuffed animals. 

Pankhurst successfully managed to convince Harry Gordon Selfridge to stock the toys in his then newly opened department store on Oxford Street.  Of the many toys that were created in this small factory, perhaps the most endearing product was the socialist teddy bear.  The first stuffed toy bear was introduced to the world in 1903 by the German toymaker Richard Steiff and continued to be the dominant producer of the toys, however the war put a stop to the import of these into the country.  Consequently, the bears manufactured in Pankhurst’s factory were able to step into the breach and meet the demands of British children.    

The resultant decorative pattern is a tessellation of what at first appears to be abstract shapes which on closer inspection are in fact templates commonly used to cut out pieces of fabric that make up the various parts of a teddy bear’s head, body, legs and ears.