Bow railway works was built by the North London Railway in 1853 on a 10-acre (40,000 m2) site which also included a sizeable wagon repair shop, under the direction of William Adams the locomotive superintendent.
[1] A new erecting shop was built in 1882 under Adams' successor J.C. Park, who continued producing 4-4-0 and 0-6-0 tank engines for the railway.
Bow works was then the smallest of fifteen workshops owned by that company, but was one of the newest and best equipped.
In the 1930s the works developed and manufactured the Hudd automatic train warning system for the L.T.S.R., which later led to a British Railways (BR) team from the national headquarters setting up in Bow to develop BR's standard Automatic Warning System.
In 1956 the workshop repaired diesel-electric locomotives for the nearby motive power depot at Devons Road (the first in the U.K. to become all-diesel).