Royal Foundation of St Katharine

The church, a royal peculiar, was the heart of the Precinct of St Katharine by the Tower, a small but densely populated district; a Liberty with extra-parochial status, and which later became a civil parish.

In the 15th century its musical reputation rivalled that of St Paul's Cathedral and in 1442 it was granted a charter of privileges which made it and its 23-acre (93,000 m2) precinct a liberty with its own prison, officers and court, all outside the City of London's ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction.

[4] Its liberty status and the fact it was personally owned and protected by the Queen Mother, meant that it was not dissolved but re-established in a Protestant form.

It continued to exist through the religious changes of the time: reversion to Roman Catholicism under Mary I, return to Anglicanism under Elizabeth I and the Puritan Revolution.

Its continuing establishment of lay brothers and sisters, however, drew hostile attention from extreme Protestants—for example, it was only saved from being burned down by the mob in the 1780 Gordon Riots by a small group of pro-government inhabitants.

[8] By Henry VIII's time, there were 1,000 houses (including a brewery – the Red Lion Brewery) in the precinct, with many foreigners, vagabonds and prostitutes, crammed along narrow lanes (with names like Dark Entry, Cat's Hole, Shovel Alley, Rookery and Pillory Lane) and many houses in poor repair – John Stow's 1598 "Survey of London" called them "small tenements and homely cottages, having as inhabitants, English and strangers [i.e. foreigners], more in number than some city in England".

The ringleaders of the protestant mob that sought to destroy the church was led by a lame soldier named MacDonald, and two women, one black and one white.

[12] The area of St Katharine's by the Tower was grouped into the Whitechapel District in 1855 and became a civil parish in 1866 when its extra-parochial status ended, following the Poor Law Amendment Act 1866.

There was commercial pressure for another dock, further upriver near the Pool of London, close to the heart of the City, and St Katharine's was chosen as the location in 1825.

The institution, now called the Royal Foundation of St Katharine, moved to a site near Regent's Park, where it took the form of almshouses and continued for 125 years.

The present location, which is a mile from its original site, became a retreat house with Father John Groser as master and members of the Community of the Resurrection from Mirfield providing worship and service.