Call The Midwife’s real story of Nonnatus House and when the nuns left Poplar

Call The Midwife launched in 2012 and it has become one of Britain’s most loved programmes, thanks to its endearing and sometimes heartbreaking tales of babies being born.The hit period drama is set in Poplar at a time when the NHS was a new concept to public health.

The show was originally set in the 1950s and centres around the nuns and midwives of Nonnatus House. The latest series recently launched on and has already left viewers captivated as the plot moves on to 1970.

Poplar is the East End of London and was bombed heavily during the Blitz, which left people with no homes, food and limited healthcare. In the 1950s parts of the area was seriously affected by poverty due to the damage that World War II had left.

The NHS was instituted after the end of WWII as part of the UK’s welfare state in an effort to ensure that all Britain had access to medical care.

While Nonnatus House is a fictional convent, the plot of the story is based on true stories. Nuns and nurses served the area to give the local impoverished residents access to medical needs, and ensure babies were born with the upmost care, this included home visits for the elderly as well as prenatal care.

Call the Midwife is based on the captivating memoirs by Jennifer Worth (nee Lee), who worked as a nurse in the East End in the 1950s, which have been adapted by the show’s writer and creator Heidi Thomas.

The first volume, Call the Midwife, was published in 2002, and it was followed by Shadows of the Workhouse in 2005 and Farewell to the East End in 2009.

Jennifer was a practising nurse and midwife, and so Call The Midwife is based on the stories from the job she did. She decided to write her books because she wanted to tell the story of a community she felt had been ignored.

Fans of Call The Midwife can visit the real life inspiration for Nonnatus House, in Poplar, East London. The real sisters and nurses, including Jennifer, were the Religious Sisters of Saint John the Divine and they lived and worked at St Frideswide’s Mission House in Lodore Street.

The original Order of Sisters were established in 1848 in Fitzroy Square near Euston. They were also sent to Crimea to work with Florence Nightingale.

In the 1880s the nuns were invited to move to Poplar by the Church of All Saints Poplar where they started working for the East End community.

The house where the sisters lived and worked at St Frideswide’s Mission House still stands today and can be visited by fans of the show.

During the 50s and 60s the sisters and the midwives became an integral part of the community in Poplar, helping out exactly as is portrayed in the show.

Poplar London reports that residents who lived in the area during the period remember the midwives and nuns very fondly. Saying that just like the show, they used to ride their bikes around in their uniforms.

Fans of the show will be pleased to discover that the real life Nonnatus House was not condemned. However, the nuns did move away in 1976 to Birmingham as work in Poplar came to an end in 1978 due to increasing absorption of nursing work into the government.

Under the leadership of Mother Margaret Faith the nuns left Hastings and established their main house in the heart of Birmingham’s Alum Rock.

Back in 2012 some of the remaining sisters spoke to the about Call the Midwife.

Sister Margaret-Angela, who joined the community in 1964 said: “The show is definitely a realistic look on how life used to be like for us. They have the costumes spot-on.

“One of the producers visited us here in Birmingham, and we showed her how we would dress ourselves using an old habit that we still have.”

Call the Midwife continues at 8pm every Sunday on One and iPlayer.