Stepney's parish once covered Hackney, Whitechapel and Bromley, and it has had no boundary of its own since 1965.

Stepney

St Dunstan's, and the parish everything else was cut out of.

The manor and parish here once covered most of the inner East End. Hackney separated from it in the twelfth century, Whitechapel in the fourteenth and Bromley in the sixteenth, and what remained of the ancient parish was fully dissolved in 1866, when its three hamlets became independent civil parishes in their own right. The Metropolitan Borough of Stepney existed from 1900 to 1965, when it became part of Tower Hamlets, and the area has had no official definition of its own since.

What carries the name today is St Dunstan's Church, founded around 952 and known as the Mother Church of the East End for its age and its maritime connections; Stepney Green Park, a surviving piece of the old Mile End Green common; Stepney Green station, open since 1902; Stepney City Farm, founded in 1979; and the Stepney Green conservation area, designated in January 1973. There is no market and no shopping parade recorded here, and this page doesn't invent one.

A name that used to mean most of the East End, and has had no boundary of its own since 1965, is a genuinely awkward one to trade under. It won't place a customer on its own, so the website has to do that work directly: the actual street, the nearest of St Dunstan's, Stepney Green or the city farm, and the walk in minutes, stated the same way everywhere a search engine reads it.