Demo against racism in London, 1994
In the year 959 CE (Common Era), the peaceable King Edgar of Wessex, father of the future King Ethelred the Unready, was criticised by his subjects for inviting people with evil foreign customs to England. Over the following centuries, several of his successors were better known for the Acts they invoked to expel unwelcome foreigners from London, and though not all were successful, from time to time communities left the city for the continent Jews in 1290, Italians in 1456, Frenchmen in 1544, blackamoores in 1596.
Just the same, London was, always has been, and remains, a city of immigrants and refugees, owing its size, its periods of prosperity and its great diversity to the waves of foreigners who came, worked and settled, within and outside its walls. The word refugee refugie comes from the welcome accorded the persecuted Huguenots in the 18th century. Today, Londons ethnic people make up much of the heart and spirit of the vast metropolis.
The peopling of London, for all of its history one of the largest cities in the world, in fact took place in a series of waves, interspersed by slower trickles of new arrivals. Some of the principal roads within the city walls were laid out by the Romans, who brought with them men from Gaul, Greece, Germany and North Africa, all speaking a different form of Latin. Not long ago, archaeologists working in Spitalfields, exploring the site of St Mary Spitals mediaeval hospital, found the stone sarcophagus of a 4th century Roman matron.
By the 7th century, London was a thriving port and market. Then, and ever afterwards, the city became, as Peter Ackroyd puts it in his biography of London, hungry. It needed, and absorbed, foreign settlers and workers to compensate for its high mortality rates, to work in its busy port, to create its textile industry and to attract international trade to compete with Spain and France.
In 1255, the chronicler Matthew Paris observed that London was overflowing with Poitevins, Provencals, Italians and Spaniards. In 1850, Wordsworth, thinking back on an earlier visit, recalled:
Every character of form and face:
The Swede, the Russian; from the genial
South, The Frenchman and the Spaniard; from remote
America, the Hunter-Indian; Moors,
Malays, Lascards, the Tartar and Chinese
And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns.
Wordsworths verse suggests random arrivals, the drift of travellers in search of fortune. The truth was more systematic.
Weaver, from a 15th century manuscript
Among the earliest immigrants to settle in Londons East End were the French-speaking refugees from The Netherlands in the mid 1550s, though it was not until Louis XIV rescinded the Edict of Nantes which had allowed the Protestants a measure of tolerance that they began to flee to England in any number. In the following years, some 50,000 Huguenots settled in various parts of the country, at least half of them in and around the city of London. They found lodgings and work outside the city walls, in Soho and Westminster and particularly in Spitalfields, where by 1700 the Huguenot community was said to number 23,000, worshipping in nine Huguenot churches. In the streets, it became more usual to hear French spoken than English.
Most of the Huguenots were weavers, poor people forced to leave everything behind them. They went to work for more prosperous master weavers, also Huguenots, who built themselves fine houses along Spitalfields narrow streets such as the one which today houses the Museum of Immigration at 19 Princelet Street, off Brick Lane where they planted dahlias and tulips in their gardens and kept pigeons and songbirds. At the height of its prosperity, Spitalfields, by now one of the greatest weaving centres of Europe, had 12,000 looms, its weavers working in attic rooms, lit by especially enlarged long windows. On the first and second floors lived Monsieur Ogier, master weaver, with his family.
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Spitalfields: all human life is here
The city that the French speakers found themselves in was crowded, noisy, dirty, unsanitary, dangerous and immensely lively. It was also drunken, containing, according to the historian William Maitland, 8,659 brandy shops and 6,000 alehouses. The smell, from the stink industries using dyes and chemicals, glue and paraffin, was appalling. Houses and workshops, crammed one upon another, were lit by candle and heated by open coal or wood fires a baker was said to have inadvertently caused the great fire of London in 1666 with his stove.
Heavily polluted water, drawn largely from the Thames, open cess-pools, rotten food, and endemic disease all contributed to high infant mortality 4 in every 10 children died before the age of 2 not helped by the practice of feeding young babies on meat, buttered rolls, muffins in oiled butter and calves-feet jelly.
Describing the water that flowed into the Thames in 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote of:
Sweepings from Butchers Stalls, Dung, Guts and Blood,
Drownd Puppies, stinking Sprats, all drenched in Mud,
Dead Cats and Turnip-Tops
Petticoat Lane Market, in the East End of London, in an 1872 engraving.
Personally, Swift declared, he preferred to stick to wine, the water being so obviously dangerous. The East End was, said visitors, a heart of urban darkness, a pest-stricken place where scenes of sickly horror and despair abounded. It was not until the 1770s that any real effort was made to introduce street cleaning and sewers, or that the new vaccination for smallpox reached London from Turkey, where it was popularised by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu during the epidemic of 1721.
The Huguenot artisans were more than simple weavers. They brought with them skills as clockmakers and glass blowers, gunsmiths and engravers. They made wigs, wove tapestries and printed calico, and started a felt hat industry. The East End prospered. Potters arrived from Delft bringing with them engineers, skilled at drainage, as well as brewers and mapmakers. Paternoster Row, near St Pauls Cathedral, became the centre of the citys book trade; Smithfield opened markets; Clerkenwell welcomed watchmakers; cobblers settled in Bethnal Green and Shoreditch. In 1747, Robert Campbells London Tradesman listed over 200 separate manufacturing trades, though for most of the 18th century clothing and textiles remained the East Ends main employer. While the eastern districts turned to trade, the rich moved west, building more salubrious and spacious houses in Mayfair, Piccadilly and Bloomsbury.
The Immigration Museum can be visited by appointment, or on special open days. May open days are on the 4th, 11th and 25th.
Special opening every day Sunday 15 Sunday 22 June during Refugee Week For details click here.
Eighteenth-century London was a city dominated by its river, the Thames, and its tributaries. Visitors to the wharves and warehouses that lined the quays noted the forest of masts along the waters edge, as galleons moored to unload their cargoes of tea, china, cotton and pepper from the East Indies, rum, coffee and sugar from the West Indies, corn and tobacco from North America, hemp, tallow, iron and linen from the Baltic states.
The Huguenots were not Spitalfields only or even most numerous foreign settlers. The small Jewish community, established in England with William the Conqueror, was expelled in 1290 by Edward I. But 366 years later, Oliver Cromwell, recognising the benefits to be derived from international trade, welcomed Jewish merchants once again to London. Prosperous Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal came first, bringing with them banking and delicate work as engravers. They were followed by poorer Ashkenazi from Central and Eastern Europe.
With the Huguenot community moving away from the area, or absorbed into the indigenous population, the Jews settled in their former homes and workshops. Many took work as tailors and shoemakers. Others sold oranges and lemons from barrows, as well as shells, tortoises, parrots, foreign birds and ostrich feathers.
The Jews, noted Henry Mayhew in 1851, soon cornered the market in spectacles and sponges. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Jewish population of London had reached 120,000, swelled by new refugees fleeing the pogroms of Eastern Europe. In M. Ogiers garden in Princelet Street, the dahlias and tulips were dug up to make way for a wooden synagogue, with a gallery for women and children above, and a cellar below, excavated out of the earth, for meetings and weddings.
1903: the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe led to housing problems in crowded cities such as London. A Report on the Commission on Alien Immigration questioned Britain's age-old policy of granting the "right of asylum" to foreign refugees.
The successive waves of new arrivals were not all welcome. The older, established communities feared the threat they posed to housing and employment. The silk industry was vulnerable to fluctuations in demand and competition from abroad. From time to time, there were riots, first against the Huguenots, later against the Jews, perceived and branded as living off cheating and nocturnal rapine.
After them came the Irish, driven towards London by famine, and soon helping to build canals, docks and railways. Irish boys, remarked Henry Mayhew, were hardier than Jewish ones. They needed less food, and did not mind going without shoes or sleeping in a noisome den. And after the Irish came Africans, first as slaves and servants Elizabeth I tried to expel the Blackamoores which are crept into this realm and later as sailors and students; Americans, as refugees from the war of independence; Italians, who sent street musicians from Palma, glass blowers from Venice, ice-cream makers from Naples.
All through the 20th century, until their numbers were checked by Immigration Acts, they kept coming, bringing new nationalities in their wake, as political repression ebbed and flowed in different parts of the world, and acute hardship drove families to seek better lives. In the 1950s came south-east Asians labourers, lawyers, doctors and students crucial to the post-war reconstruction of Britain and to its new booming economy, bringing with them traders and restaurant owners. They were followed by Somalis and Chinese, Tamils and Arabs. A hundred yards from M. Ogiers house in Princelet Street, where Huguenot weavers once sat at their looms in the attic and Jews from Poland and Lithuania prayed in their garden synagogue, lies now fashionable Brick Lane, with its Bangladeshi restaurants and shops.
The East End of London: diversity in the soul
The Queen Mother visiting a School in Tower Hamlets, in London
In no part of Britain is the diversity of its people so apparent as in the city of London, and nowhere, perhaps, more so than in the streets of its East End, where traces of the former waves of Huguenots, Jews, Irish and south-east Asians are visible in every house and alley. The ethnic population of the UK is today said to amount to some four million people. The children in the schools in and around Spitalfields, Hackney, Whitechapel and Westminster speak more than 300 languages.
It was not until 1920 that a work permit system was introduced into the UK, designed to check and control the numbers of those seeking sanctuary and new lives in the wake of the Great War. During the last quarter of the 20th century, approximately 25,000 work permits were issued each year, the numbers rising sharply in the late 1990s. In July 2002, the Labour government announced that they intended to expand this figure, to allow as many as 175,000 workers to enter the UK in 2003, bringing with them their families. The argument, it seems, is that by providing greatly increased legal routes for entry, this will reduce the numbers of those currently estimated at over 50,000 who arrive illegally.
Spitalfields, whose small museum reflects the remarkable diversity of the people who have lived in its rooms, is no longer a staging post for new arrivals in the way it once was. Many of the immigrants whose evil foreign customs once perturbed the native Londoners but whose lasting presence so enriched the city with their skills and culture, did not stay, but spread out around the country or were absorbed into the fabric of the city. One in every four Londoners is said today to carry some trace of Huguenot blood.
Whether persistent civil wars across Africa and Asia, natural disasters and profound poverty continue to bring migrants to London in such numbers, no one can say. Nor is it yet clear whether, when and how the developed west will at last take proper stock of the magnitude of the problem, or of its own falling population and rising numbers of dependent elderly people, and formulate fair and humane international policies for managing the future of migration. Until then, Londons East End provides a visible reminder that the great cities of the world were always, and remain, places of transience and refuge.
The Museum of Immigration is campaigning for its survival. The only museum of conscience in Europe to tell and to celebrate the stories of centuries of incomers, from all parts of the world, it is struggling to raise £3 million to safeguard its future.
The Museum of Immigration is campaigning for its survival see how you can help.
There could hardly be a better time for a museum that underlines how much our societies gain from different incomers, be they asylum seekers or economic migrants. Where better than Spitalfields, in Londons East End, to tell the stories of exile, hope and renewal?
The magical building at 19 Princelet Street, a 1719 refugee Huguenot merchants home, with weaving garrets and a tiny attached synagogue, is redolent of different peoples and different uses. It houses a touchingly simple exhibition Suitcases and Sanctuary, made by todays children, some only recently arrived from todays war zones.
The Museum of Immigration is rarely open to the public because the building is so fragile and the charity is raising funds for repair. They still want visitors and need support. Click here to arrange an appointment and get details of upcoming open days.
The Museum of Immigration LEFT: Suitcase of memories - what would you take, if you had to leave home forever with just one small bag? Visitors to the Museum and their children exchange experiences across social and cultural divides, by writing on a luggage tag how they preserved - or imagine they would preserve - the treasures from another country and another life. CENTRE: Children visitors to the Museum. RIGHT: 'Waking up in safety': class poem by a mainly Asian class of nine year olds at an East End school, imagining the experience of French refugees in 17th century Britain. Photo credit: Joel Pike/The Spitalfields Centre
