In 1682, Nicholas Barbon leased the Liberty of Wellclose, north of Wapping, from the Crown and set about creating a new mini suburb of St George-In-The-East aimed towards housing sea captains and the mercantile elite.
The area east of the City had positively boomed during the seventeenth century. Formerly rural, expanded trade on the River Thames caused new communities to thrive – Wapping, Shadwell and Stepney. The neighbourhoods attracted new immigrants and, an increased demand for timber after the Great Fire of 1666, especially attracted Norwegians, Danes and Swedes.
In 1683, the future Queen Anne married Prince George of Denmark and his father, King Christian V, financed a new Danish Church in Nicholas Barbon’s newly-created Wellclose Square.
The success of the ‘Danish’ Wellclose Square inspired the local Swedish community to build a parallel development. Two streets to the east, Princes Square was laid out during the 1720s. The name Prince’s Square was not royal in origin but was named after an ’unpleasant’ (said contemporary reports) speculator called John Prince.
Like Wellclose Square, a church was placed in the centre of the square. So the first Swedish church in London opened in 1729. The philosopher and scientist Emanuel Swedenborg died in 1772 and was buried there – the square was named after him in 1938 but was Prince’s Square for two centuries before the renaming.
The church was officially the ’Ulrika Eleonora Church’, named after the 1720s-era Queen of Sweden. The Swedish congregation was linked to the Diocese of Uppsala and came under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Uppsala.
London demographics are ever-changing and Booth commented in his 1898 survey that Princes Square “used to be a Swedish colony, now Jews live in the square”.
The church closed in 1910 and in 1921 it was pulled down to be replaced by a local authority children’s playground and a garden. The Swedish congregation moved elsewhere,
The square and its Georgian housing survived World War II but were swept away by the London County Council’s St George’s Estate, built between 1963 and 1970. A small park area with a memorial to the Ulrika Eleonora church was maintained.
In contrast to the eighteenth century former square, the St George’s Estate was designed in the then-fashionable brutalist style. It was one of the first London estates to include garaging and in 1972, the 28-storey Shearsmith House was put up – for a while among Britain’s tallest buildings.
