Tower Hamlets - A very brief history

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets as we know it today came into being in 1965. It was the result of merging three smaller boroughs, Bethnal Green, Poplar, and Stepney into one large unit.
There were people living in the area for centuries, long before the Romans came. It is not known if this was a permanent stone age settlement or not. The soil though, would have been ideal for farming and so makes it more than likely that they were actually local residents.

There is obviously no written history for this period in time and very little archaeological evidence has survived. It is, according to Kevin Kerrigan in his ‘History of Tower Hamlets’, a fact that around 200 years prior to the Roman invasion of 43 AD the area was part of the territory captured by the Belgic tribes. They had invaded in the second century BC.
When the Romans came they chased these tribes to their capital town of Catuvellauni (now Colchester) where they defeated them. The town later became a colony for veteran Roman legionnaires who stayed here.

During the Roman attack on Britain, Claudius himself brought reinforcements including a herd of elephants, to aid the armies in their pursuit through the east end. Once they had taken Colchester they stayed to plan their assault on the rest of Britain. The road they built between London and Colchester was to be one of the most important.
There is evidence that there was a Roman farming settlement at Old Ford around three hundred years after their arrival. This probably could have been one of the main suppliers of fresh food to the City of Londinium.

When the Romans left Britain around the year 410 AD (all troops were needed to defend their own city from invasion) there followed a period known as the ‘dark ages’. It was so called, because there is no recorded history and we are left in the dark about many things. Very little is known apart from the fact that when the Saxons divided the country up into kingdoms, Tower Hamlets became part of Mercia. A Germanic tribe, the Angles settled when the Romans had left, and over time this led to what we know as the Anglo Saxons.

Christianity slowly became the dominant religion over the years and the church started to become rich as well as powerful. As the wealth of the church grew so did the areas of land in it’s possession. The manor that included present day Tower Hamlets and Hackney came under possession of the church in the form of the Bishops of London.
 In 1078 William the Conqueror started the beginnings of the Tower of London with the construction of the White Tower as part of London’s defenses. In later years it was the settlements, or hamlets around the Tower that provided the soldiers to man the fortress. These ‘Tower Hamlets’ covered the area of today’s borough and a part of Hackney.