Spitalfields: A Portrait A neighbourhood shaped by refuge, trade and reinvention — from Huguenot silk weavers and Jewish tailors to Bengali restaurateurs, market porters, preservationists, artists and the people who still call it home.
13 min read
Hawksmoor's Christ Church closes the view down Brushfield Street. There may be no building in London that explains its neighbourhood better than the one standing at the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street.
It is an elegant Georgian chapel, completed in 1743 for French Protestant refugees. In the nineteenth century it became a centre of Jewish religious life and in 1897 was converted into the Spitalfields Great Synagogue. As the Jewish population moved away and a new Bangladeshi community established itself in the surrounding streets, the building changed again. Since 1976 it has been the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid Sacred London Brick Lane Jamme Masjid
French church, synagogue, mosque: three centuries of migration contained within the same four walls. Hebrew memorial tablets still survive upstairs. Outside, an eighteenth-century sundial carries the Latin motto Umbra Sumus — “we are but shadow” — while a gleaming modern minaret rises in front of it.
It is tempting to tell the whole history of Spitalfields this way, as a succession of peoples handing the neighbourhood from one to another. Huguenots are replaced by Jews, Jews by Bangladeshis, workshops by restaurants, market porters by artists and bankers.
Yet spend time in the extraordinary archive accumulated by Spitalfields Life and that version begins to seem too tidy. Communities overlap. Trades survive by changing hands. People leave but continue returning for decades. Buildings acquire new occupants while retaining traces of the old ones. Newcomers discover that someone from another continent lived an oddly similar life in the same house a century earlier.
Spitalfields is less a series of replacements than a place continually being rewritten without quite erasing what came before.
Its story begins with another institution of refuge. In 1197 a hospital and priory called St Mary Spital was founded just outside Bishopsgate. The word Spitalfields ultimately comes from the fields belonging to this medieval hospital. A market developed alongside it; the City of London traces today's Spitalfields Market Food Markets Old Spitalfields Market
The location mattered. Spitalfields sat immediately outside the jurisdiction and restrictions of the City, close enough to sell goods to London but sufficiently beyond its walls to accommodate activities, people and trades that did not fit comfortably inside. That pattern would repeat itself for centuries.
The arrival that transformed the neighbourhood came after 1685, when Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and intensified the persecution of Protestants in France. Thousands of Huguenot refugees crossed the Channel, including highly skilled silk workers from established weaving centres such as Lyon and Tours. Spitalfields became the largest concentration of Huguenots in England; by around 1700 French could be heard routinely in its streets.
They brought more than labour. They brought techniques for producing sophisticated silks — damasks, brocades, velvets and richly patterned fabrics — that helped turn Spitalfields into an internationally important centre of luxury manufacture. Raw silk arrived through the Port of London and emerged from workshops in the East End as expensive clothing and furnishings for wealthy customers.
The architecture still records the prosperity this created. Princelet Street, Wilkes Street and Fournier Street filled with handsome brick houses during the early eighteenth century. Master weavers and silk merchants occupied the lower rooms, while looms could be installed in workshops above, where large windows admitted the daylight required for intricate work.
One of these immigrants was Jean Rondeau, a serge weaver born in Paris in 1666. Fleeing religious persecution, he settled in Brick Lane, raised twelve children and became successful enough to build a substantial house at 4 Wilkes Street in 1723. His son John became a master silk weaver and commissioned patterns from Anna Maria Garthwaite, the remarkable textile designer who lived nearby and whose surviving designs are among the masterpieces of eighteenth-century English silk.
Three centuries later, one of Jean's descendants, Stanley Rondeau, discovered the connection through genealogy and began volunteering at Christ Church Spitalfields Sacred London Christ Church Spitalfields
Above these streets rose Nicholas Hawksmoor's Christ Church, completed in 1729. Its immense stone portico and extraordinary steeple remain visible from far beyond the neighbourhood, monumental in comparison with the narrow houses around it. Spitalfields in the eighteenth century was therefore not some impoverished fringe of London: parts of it were wealthy, architecturally ambitious and devoted to the manufacture of one of Europe's great luxury products.
But silk did not provide prosperity forever. Foreign competition, mechanisation and changing trade rules steadily weakened the industry. By the middle of the nineteenth century the great age of Spitalfields silk was effectively over, leaving behind houses whose generous upper rooms were remarkably adaptable to another textile economy.
This time many of the workers were Jewish.
Large numbers of Jews fleeing poverty, discrimination and pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe settled around Whitechapel and Spitalfields in the later nineteenth century. Former weaving rooms became tailoring workshops and sweatshops. Synagogues appeared in houses, back rooms and converted chapels. Yiddish joined the succession of languages heard in the streets.
The surviving memories are strikingly domestic. One account of Tenterground recalls three families sharing a house with the water tap and lavatory in the courtyard. On the ground floor, tailor Jack Lipschitz ran sewing machines in the front and back rooms with his wife, daughter and brother, moving the pressing outside in summer. Somehow the same rooms were also their home.
The grand houses of eighteenth-century silk masters had become factories for a new immigrant clothing trade.
Petticoat Lane Food Markets Petticoat Lane Market
Spitalfields Life preserves the people behind statistics like these. Laurie Allen grew up nearby in the post-war years and remembered an overwhelmingly Jewish Petticoat Lane whose barrow boys would shout to clear a path through the crowds. Fred, the chestnut seller, stood at Bell Lane and Wentworth Street every Sunday for more than half a century, roasting chestnuts over hot coals while the neighbourhood changed around him.
Politics was as much a part of this world as commerce. Historian Bill Fishman remembered platforms being erected near Brick Lane where Communists, Socialists and Labour activists addressed crowds of Jewish workers in Yiddish. The East End became a centre of trade unionism, socialism, anarchism and anti-fascist organisation, much of it generated within communities whose members worked punishing hours in tiny workshops only streets away.
Sandys Row Synagogue Sacred London Sandys Row Synagogue
The door of Sandys Row Synagogue, built as a Huguenot chapel in 1766. This repeated pattern — people moving outward as circumstances improved while maintaining an emotional connection to the streets where their families began — would occur again.
By the middle of the twentieth century, men from Sylhet in what was then East Bengal were arriving in London, some after working as seamen in the British merchant navy. More followed after the partition of India and eventually the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Many entered precisely the industry Spitalfields already possessed: clothing.
Garment factories provide one of the threads connecting Jewish and Bengali Spitalfields. Delwar Hussain, writing about a night and day inside Brick Lane Mosque, recalled that his own father worked as a machinist in a leather-jacket factory opposite the beigel shop Bakeries Beigel Bake
The mosque itself makes the connection architectural. Children now learn the Quran in upstairs rooms where Torah lessons were once taught, and Hebrew inscriptions remain in a building filled with Arabic prayer. Rather than destroying the history of the previous community, its new use has inadvertently preserved pieces of it.
Businesses followed families. Taj Stores traces its Brick Lane history to the 1930s and expanded as the Bengali population grew. Sweet & Spicy opened in 1969, one of the earliest curry restaurants on Brick Lane, and became a local institution rather than the tourist-oriented curry house that the street would later make famous. Entrepreneurs such as Sanu Miah moved between factory work, restaurants and other businesses, constructing lives in much the same improvisational fashion as generations before them.
The Bangla Town arch over Brick Lane, and the boatman painted on the gable at Hopetown Street. This new life was not welcomed peacefully.
On 4 May 1978, Altab Ali, a twenty-five-year-old Bengali garment worker, was murdered in a racist attack near Whitechapel. His killing came during a period in which Bengali residents faced regular street violence and the National Front attempted to establish a visible presence around Brick Lane. The response became a defining episode in modern East End history. Thousands marched behind Ali's coffin from Whitechapel towards central London, and local youth organisations, anti-racist groups and residents organised against racist violence.
The photographs and oral histories collected by Spitalfields Life make this history feel immediate. Participants remember being frightened to walk alone after work and organising patrols to protect residents. They also remember the moment fear began to turn into organised resistance. The park where Altab Ali died now bears his name.
The neat idea that Spitalfields belongs successively to three communities breaks down even further when you look at the people who do not fit the sequence.
At 38 Princelet Street, for example, the Singh family established another long Spitalfields history. Suresh Singh grew up there in a Sikh household and remembers being sent to Sunday school at Christ Church because there was no Sikh temple locally. His family's presence complicates any attempt to reduce the district to a simple Huguenot-Jewish-Bengali progression.
The textile tradition is equally persistent. Walk down Wentworth Street in the twenty-first century and shops selling spectacular Nigerian and Ghanaian fabrics continue a clothing trade that has existed in one form or another for centuries. Franceskka Abimbola began by selling African fabric from the back of a car before establishing her own shop. The people changed, the fabrics changed and the customers changed, but Spitalfields remained a place where migrants turned cloth into enterprise.
Meanwhile two enormous institutions supplied another kind of continuity.
Truman's brewery operated around Brick Lane for more than three centuries. By the twentieth century it had become an industrial world of its own, employing generations of local families. Former master brewer Derek Prentice remembered it not simply as a factory but as a community of people who sometimes spent fifty years working there. It finally closed in 1989.
Beside it was Spitalfields Market. Charles II granted a formal market charter in 1682, and in the nineteenth century former market porter Robert Horner created much of the great iron-and-glass market building that survives today. For generations, trade began while most Londoners were asleep. Porters hauled crates, greengrocers arrived to buy, cafes and pubs operated through the night and an entire economy existed around the movement of fruit and vegetables.
Jimmy Huddart began around the market as a boy and eventually became a licensed porter and union representative. Before forklifts, porters physically manoeuvred great loads on wooden barrows; gaining a coveted licence was itself a progression from the humble role of an “empty boy” collecting discarded boxes.
Paul Gardner represented another lineage. His great-grandfather opened a business on Commercial Street in 1870 servicing market traders' scales. As shopping habits changed, subsequent generations moved into paper bags and market supplies. One family business adapted alongside the market for a century and a half.
And then, remarkably quickly, the old economic geography disappeared.
The fruit and vegetable market moved to Leyton in 1991, two years after Truman's brewery closed. Photographer Phil Maxwell remembered the old market as an entire ecosystem populated not just by traders but cafes, homeless people, scavengers, sex workers and lorry drivers. Once the market moved, much of that supporting ecology vanished with it.
At almost the same moment, another Spitalfields was being rescued.
By the 1960s and seventies many Georgian houses were derelict and demolition appeared entirely plausible. Architectural historians and conservationists including Dan Cruickshank, Mark Girouard and members of the newly formed Spitalfields Trust occupied threatened buildings in Elder Street, confronted developers and campaigned for their restoration. Cruickshank's photographs show just how much surrounding historic fabric was already being destroyed.
Elder Street, where the campaigners occupied the threatened houses. The campaigns succeeded spectacularly. Fournier Street and Elder Street now contain some of London's most celebrated Georgian domestic architecture.
They also produced a paradox.
The historian Raphael Samuel identified it as early as 1988: historic houses might be lovingly preserved at precisely the same moment that the occupations, businesses and communities which gave the neighbourhood its social identity were being dispersed.
The strange figure of Dennis Severs captures something of this transition. An American who arrived in Spitalfields when few outsiders wanted to live there, Severs transformed 18 Folgate Street Museums Dennis Severs' House
Artists, architects, writers and preservationists helped save Spitalfields physically. Their success also made the Georgian houses desirable. The derelict district became fashionable; the fashionable district became expensive.
Artist Adam Dant, who moved to the area in the 1990s, has observed an almost perfect inversion. When he arrived, spaces stood empty because the neighbourhood was derelict and nobody wanted them. More recently, he suggested, spaces can stand empty because few people can afford them.
This is the tension running through modern Spitalfields. The old market building survives magnificently, but the wholesale fruit traders have gone. The Truman brewery survives as an enormous architectural presence, but nobody brews Truman's beer there. Huguenot houses that once became crowded Jewish sweatshops are now among the most valuable small houses in East London. Brick Lane's Bengali restaurants turned the street into an international destination, yet the community that created “Banglatown” has itself increasingly followed earlier Spitalfields populations towards suburbs farther east. Delwar Hussain has described friends and relatives moving to Seven Kings, Ilford, Barking, Dagenham and Essex — a migration outward that echoes the earlier departure of Huguenot and Jewish families.
And yet it would be a mistake to declare the old neighbourhood dead.
On Sundays people still trade in Petticoat Lane. Sandys Row still functions as a synagogue. Five daily prayers take place in the former Huguenot chapel on Brick Lane. African textile dealers continue the centuries-old association of Wentworth Street with cloth. Christ Church still towers over Fournier Street. The Victorian market hall is still crowded with stalls, even if what they sell has changed almost beyond recognition.
More importantly, memories continue to migrate back into the neighbourhood even when people do not.
Jewish families whose grandparents left return to Sandys Row. Huguenot descendants search old addresses on Wilkes Street. Bangladeshi Londoners return to the mosque in which they studied as children. Photographers such as Phil Maxwell, Sarah Ainslie and Paul Trevor have spent decades recording people who might otherwise disappear from the historical record. And through Spitalfields Life, market porters, shopkeepers, tailors, publicans, silk weavers' descendants, brewers, imams, artists and eccentrics have been allowed to occupy the same historical space.
That may ultimately be what makes Spitalfields different from London's more perfectly preserved historic quarters.
Its importance does not reside solely in its Georgian houses, Hawksmoor church or old market. Nor is it simply that generations of refugees and migrants settled here.
It is that the same fundamental process has occurred repeatedly. Someone arrives with very little. They rent a room. They learn a trade or use one they already possess. A front room becomes a workshop. A market stall becomes a shop. A machinist becomes a restaurateur. Children grow up with opportunities their parents did not have. Eventually the family moves somewhere more comfortable, while another newcomer occupies the space they leave behind.
The buildings endure precisely because their meanings do not.
At the corner of Fournier Street, the eighteenth-century sundial still looks down upon worshippers entering Brick Lane Mosque.
Umbra sumus.
We are shadows.
Spitalfields is what remains when the shadows overlap.
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