I VENTURED FARTHER afield on my third business trip to London (which was also combined with a trip to Frankfurt) since I had tacked on a weekend to the work week.  Our friend Michael, who was a former colleague of Mary Elizabeth’s from the late 1980s, had been living and working in London since then.  His girlfriend Melanie, whom I had never met, was a former banker and had decided to give it up to study herbal medicine.  If that weren’t interesting enough, she was also a singer and involved in performing baroque chamber music.  As luck would have it, she was singing with the Thames Chamber Choir in a performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor at a local church.  We arranged to meet at St. Dunstan’s and All Saints in Stepney for the concert and then come back to Canary Wharf for dinner.

I had no idea where Stepney was or how to get there so did some research.  It was a few miles north of Canary Wharf in a section of the East End, nestled in between Whitechapel and Mile End and south of Bethnal Green.  I mentioned it to a few of my colleagues, who regarded my news with a jaundiced eye.

“You’re going where?” My colleague with the double-barreled last name asked.
“Stepney.” I replied, not entirely sure where that was.  There was a pause.
“Why d’you want to go there?” he asked with the tone of mild disdain and a little disgust.
“A friend is in a concert in a church there.” I tried to explain helpfully.  Another pause.
“Well, you’d better take a taxi and make sure it waits for you to get inside.”

Oh dear.  I did a little more research and discovered that the church had a website, and much to my delight, an active band of bell ringers.  Not many Americans are familiar with the peculiar pastime of Change Ringing, but I learned it when in college at the University of Chicago, which was one of 15 towers in North America at the time with this particular kind of bell set-up. Essentially, it’s a way of ringing big bronze tower bells that are mounted to wooden wheels, which when rotated by means of a rope (and a human), will cause the clapper to strike the bell with a gloriously loud sound.  Since the rhythm of the bell’s ringing is governed largely by gravity and the circumference of the wheel, it’s impossible to significantly alter the cadence of the bells, which means that ringing tunes isn’t practical.  Instead, the bells are rung in sequences which are changed each time the bells are rung.  It takes one person per bell to make them ring and six is generally the minimum number of bells rung at the same time, so it’s a team endeavor. I was an active ringer in Chicago during my college years, but when I moved back to New York, wasn’t able to keep it up since there were no rings in the city.  When I learned that Stepney had a band, I emailed the Ringing Master (as they’re called) to ask if I could join the practice, which was to be the night after the concert.  I hadn’t heard back from him, but was hoping that perhaps there would be some special ringing for the concert, and I could find my way up to the tower and introduce myself – if I wasn’t murdered or kidnapped by the people in between the taxi and the church door, that is.

At the appointed hour, I went downstairs and asked the doorman to get me a taxi to St. Dunstan’s in Stepney.  Because of its relatively remote location, the hotel generally has a bank of taxis waiting close by, so there was no delay.  The taxi took off bearing me in a north-westerly direction, so far as I could tell.  What I saw whizzing by was a mixture of old row houses and newer but run-down apartment buildings.  There were random pubs on the way, but since it was dark, there wasn’t that much that I could see.  What I did notice here that I hadn’t seen in any other part of London was a significant number of Fried Chicken takeout places, with gaudy neon signs.

We pulled up in front of an old stone church – clearly in a pre-concert mode, with people strolling in, and a warm yellow light spilling from the front doors which were directly under the bell tower.  St. Dunstan’s is an old church – founded in 900 AD, with the chancel of the current building dating from the 1200s and the nave and tower dating from the 1400s.  Unlike many of its sister churches in the East End, St. Dunstan’s managed to avoid being leveled by bombs during the blitz in 1941 – only losing its stained glass to a nearby explosion.  The church sits in the middle of a much larger-than-average churchyard, which was expanded apparently in the 1600s to accommodate the many deaths from the plague.  There are no memorials from that time, with most of the current stones dating from the 1700s and 1800s.  The churchyard’s large size sets the church apart from the surrounding houses and other buildings, so it presents a distinctly different feeling of place.  It also made for a large area of darkness enveloping the building, which didn’t do much to assuage any fears inspired by my snooty colleagues.

Once inside, I could tell it was an incredibly old church – not only because of the style of the architecture and appointments – but also because of its unmistakable feeling of centuries-old decrepitude.  Sadly, the church looked like it had seen better days.  This wasn’t surprising I later found out due to the decreasing church-going population and increasing mosque-going population in the East End, which in addition to churches, had ironically also rung the death-knell for pubs, which have failed to thrive in the teetotalling muslim community.

The church was configured with the apse and alter facing east, in the traditional style.  The stone walls were covered in a thick whitewash, which had started to come down in places due to damp and age, no doubt.  The stone columns and arches that support the roof were generally gothic, but varied in style from the front to the back.  A number of old tombs and memorials lined the walls, and a saxon cross took center stage – embedded in the wall above the altar.  This cross is quite well-known and rather rare apparently, but looks completely in-place with the rest of the church.

The concert that evening featured the Thames Chamber Choir and a small orchestra; they were planning on performing Bach’s Mass in B-minor in its entirety.  I knew the piece well, because coincidentally, a friend had give me the CD several years earlier.  After meeting up with Michael, we seated ourselves in the somewhat uncomfortable pews as the concert began.  From the first meditative “Kyrie” from the choir, I knew were were in store for a wonderful concert.  There were about 12 singers and an equal number of instrumentalists, so there was a strong sound, but on an intimate scale. As the concert unfolded, leading up towards the triumphant “Et Resurrexit” and the final hopeful “Agnus Dei,” I looked around the church (while trying not to appear inattentive) and tried to imagine what it was like in the 1400s when it was completed, startled by the realization that the Bach piece being performed was written several hundred years after the church was built.

I thought about the history of worship in this church and how the changing fortunes of the surrounding neighborhoods affected its congregation – now seemingly at an all-time low.  What did the people wear who came to church here in the 1400s?  What did they sound like?  What were they praying for? It was amazing to think about worship going on in the same place for over 1,000 years.  This was the kind of experience almost completely unavailable to Americans and yet accepted as commonplace by the Brits.  I continually try to articulate what it is about London and the UK which I find so compelling – ground which has been covered by countless writers over the years – so I can only retread where others have gone by commenting on the amazing concurrency of history and modern life.

As the end of the concert drew immanent, I remembered that I had hoped to hear bells, or somehow make a connection.  Sadly the bells were silent that night – hanging mute but massive – high above Stepney High Street behind the louvers in the old flint tower.

As we walked out of the church into the cold night air, I looked around and realized that I had absolutely no idea where I was.  I could see the lights of Canary Wharf off to the southeast, and the unmistakable outline of the Gherkin to the west, but aside from those landmarks, I had no idea how to get back.  Unfortunately, neither Michael nor Melanie really knew their way around here either, so we struck out in a southerly direction, hoping to come across a larger thoroughfare where maybe we could flag down a taxi.

We walked past dozens of modest, but well-kept row houses – identical except for their window treatments on our way to Commercial Road, which was a few blocks away from the church.  Melanie was still dressed in her floor-length formal black dress she wore for the concert, so we probably looked a little out of place on the grim and noisy Commercial Road.  We waited and waited for a cab, but none came.  We started walking east towards Canary Wharf where we were having dinner trying to figure out the bus routes and if any of them would take us close to our destination.
Just as we were starting to despair, a taxi drove by and we able to hail it and climb inside.  I would be happy to be able to report to my snobby colleague that my foray into the East End was without accident or incident.

Go to next chapter: Saturday Night