Time Travelling in Spitalfields: the decline into poverty

Posted on 11th Oct 2026 by English Ancestors

My last post was about the Huguenots in Spitalfields in London’s East End. My intention was to move straight from that to the late nineteenth century and the Jewish migration when I know, from looking at census records, that conditions were very different from the elegant living of the Huguenots still in evidence today through the presence of their fine Georgian townhouses.

However, I found I hadn’t yet satisfied myself about how the area enjoyed by the Huguenot merchants and master weavers could become what it was by the 1880s. I needed to close that gap. That’s what this post is about.

As with the previous Spitalfields post, I am indebted to Dan Cruickshank and his excellent book: Spitalfields: The history of a nation in a handful of streets (2016) for much of the information that follows. He, too, highlighted this issue of wealth alongside poverty:

‘One of the defining features of Spitalfields life through the centuries is the extent to which is has constantly embodied paradox: great wealth alongside appalling poverty, beauty juxtaposed with squalor.’

Dan Cruickshank: Spitalfields (2012) page 323

The previous post, then, focused mostly on the wealthier Huguenots – the merchants and master weavers who had the money and business acumen, and made the decisions about the direction of the silk weaving industry in Spitalfields. Today’s post comes down the social and weaving hierarchy to the journeyman weavers – the men and their families who actually did the weaving. They were paid by the completed piece and worked from their homes. Below is a typical street where such people lived. The wide window on the upper floor of the two houses closest to the camera mark them out as weavers’ cottages. The general look of the street indicates skilled artisan rather than wealth. By the time this photo was taken the street had fallen into serious levels of poverty. It has since been demolished.

Weavers’ houses on Florida Street, Bethnal Green, since demolished. Image dated 1896. Public domain.

Unrest, division and rioting
From the very beginning, away from the genteel homes of the Huguenot merchants and master weavers, disputes and unrest were often the order of the day in Spitalfields. The experienced journeyman silk weavers were well-organised and ever-ready to defend themselves. They were skilled artisans, and expected to be paid fairly for their work. We cannot condone their methods, but should bear in mind that no other way existed for them to achieve change. The power was with the merchants and master weavers – not just power and control of the business, but within society as a whole. For centuries the vote had been the preserve of those with property – beyond the reach of most artisans; and there were few peaceful means of demanding reform of country and society.

In 1675 the silk weavers of Spitalfields had rioted against the introduction of new machines. Later, the importing of inexpensive cotton from India brought more riots that included attacking women wearing dresses made of muslin, calico or linen, tearing the dresses from them or pouring ink or chemicals over them.

In the 1730s Irish weavers came to the area to work alongside the existing weaver workforce. Weaving in Ireland had developed significantly, in parallel with that in England, and for the same reason: Huguenot settlement. However, there, the cloth was linen and although most of the actual weavers were Roman Catholic, the industry was Protestant owned and managed. A series of punitive anti-Catholic laws gradually deprived them of any power, wealth and rights unless they converted to Protestantism. Their choice was to remain as second class citizens in their own land; to convert; or to leave. Many of those who came to settle on the edges of Spitalfields were impoverished unskilled workers, but the skills of the experienced weavers adapted to silk weaving.

All this led to new tensions and more riots. In weaving, as in other trades, the Irish workers were prepared to work for much less pay than the locals: as little as two-thirds or even half of the going rate. The Huguenot masters and merchants were hard businessmen. They took advantage of this, reducing wages for the existing working population. This, combined with general anti-Catholic hostility and additional segregation for some created by a language barrier, resulted in anti-Irish aggression and protests. It was said that, even in an area clearly spiralling into poverty, for more than a century the even more extreme poverty of the Irish in Spitalfields remained visible.

As the eighteenth century progressed and wages for skilled weavers continued to reduce, such was the anger amongst the weavers that they turned their modus operandi to forming ‘combinations’, stalking the streets in heavily-armed gangs and breaking into homes of master weavers to smash the looms and cut the woven silk upon them. The same fate was extended to any journeymen weavers believed to be working for lower rates. From 1765 such activity was punishable by death.

Protection for Spitalfields silks and silk weavers
However, alongside the public executions, in 1772 the government passed The Silk Manufactures Act, commonly known as the ‘Spitalfields Act’. Amongst other measures, this established that the wages of journeymen silk weavers within the legally recognised boundary of Spitalfields should be fixed by magistrates at Quarter Sessions. There were penalties on masters paying below the set rate, as well as for journeymen who demanded more. The number of apprentices any silk weaver could have at any one time was limited to two; and the ‘combinations’ were banned. The provisions applied only to male weavers, and were not extended to female weavers until 1811.

In addition to this, throughout the eighteenth century there were prohibitions on foreign silks, some aimed directly at luxury French items; and there were high tariffs and import duties on other related items that were not specifically banned.

The impact of the French Revolution
The years following the French Revolution were worrying times for the British government, who were concerned that the same fate should not befall the monarchy, aristocracy and status quo here. Given the melting pot of French Protestant Huguenots who had suffered at the ruthlessness of the monarch in France, alongside the Roman Catholic Irish population whose ancestors had suffered at the hands of the Protestant British upper echelons, together with the history of Radicalism amongst the English silk weavers, Spitalfields was considered a high risk for sedition and treason.

For the weavers, the now outlawed ‘combinations’ had been a means (albeit dangerous, violent and destructive) of ‘taking back control’ after suffering decades of increasing poverty and uncertainty. Now, in 1792, a new means of taking control was established: the London Corresponding Society. Their goal was the promotion of the reform of Parliament, and their existence highlights the decent levels of literacy amongst the men of humbler backgrounds who formed their membership. In general these were journeymen of English and Irish heritage rather than the Huguenot journeymen weavers. The London Corresponding Society, along with many other similar groups up and down the country, was outlawed by the Unlawful Societies Act of 1799. In the same year, the Combinations Act – aimed more widely, not just at silk weavers – banned any attempt to organise within work sectors, including collective bargaining.

An absence of flowers…
Alongside the radical groups, the Spitalfields community had enjoyed a whole range of cultural and intellectual interests, and various learned societies. These continued long after the earlier decades of prosperity when there was money to spare. In retrospect, it could be said the pastime of rearing flowers was a barometer for the living standards of the Spitalfields weavers. The weavers were known for displaying pots of home-grown flowers along the ledges of their weavers’ windows, arranged with evident artistry, and perhaps even providing artistic inspiration for their work. Many also had small flower gardens where they spent their leisure hours raising flowers or pigeons. The weavers’ love of songbirds is also well-documented. Of course, when times are hard, such pastimes will gradually cease, either for lack of money or lack of spare time when more hours must be worked to bring in the same amount of money. In 1795 John Thelwall wrote:

“[…] those gardens are now fallen into decay. The little summer-house and the Monday’s recreation are no more; and you will find the poor weavers and their families crowded together in vile, filthy and unwholesome chambers, destitute of the most common comforts, and even of the common necessaries of life.”

From John Thelwall: ‘On the Causes of the Late Disturbances’.
In: Dan Cruickshank: Spitalfields (2012)

The death throes of the Spitalfields silk industry
Since the end of the seventeenth century, the silk industry had somehow, and often uneasily, accommodated the tensions between the English Protestant, the Calvinist Huguenot and the Irish Catholic journeyman weavers. It had found a way to contain the hard-nosed business minds of the Huguenot masters and merchants and to balance that with a fairer system for the weavers. There were also protectionist measures in place to prevent, or at least reduce the threat of foreign imports.

John Thelwell wrote the above passage in 1795, but the first two decades of the nineteenth century seemed to herald a new ‘Golden Age’ of the silk trade in Britain. This was in no small measure thanks to the Napoleonic wars, and Napoleon’s plan to ban all Continental trade with Britain. This period of apparent success culminated, however, in the 1824 repeal of the Spitalfields Acts, and with that the removal of safeguards on journeymen’s wages. It also opened the way for increased use of machinery rather than cottage-based handlooms, and it was around this time that the French Jacquard mechanical loom entered the British weaving industry.

It wasn’t just the sudden flooding of the market with cheaper imports that harmed the silk industry in Britain. Fashions change. Women were looking for lighter, more practical dresses. Spitalfields silk, whilst undoubtedly stunningly beautiful, was created through a complex manufacturing process that produced a woven fabric resembling embroidery. It was heavy to wear, time-consuming and expensive to produce, and the dyes used in creating the floral designs meant the garments could not be washed for fear of colour runs. It was, really, the natural end of Spitalfields’s silk industry.

If you’re interested, this is a good time to watch Julia Sawalha’s episode of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are? Although Julia’s father is Jordanian (and the second part of her story here focuses on that), her mother is of French Huguenot descent.

The Huguenot story really gets under way at around 9 minutes.
From 11 minutes to 13:37 you’ll see actual examples of exquisite Spitalfields silks, with realistic floral decoration of the type designed by Anna Maria Garthwaite (mentioned in my last post) as recreated by the hands of the weavers.

After that there are some scenes filmed in the streets discussed in my last post, where the fine Huguenot houses are still to be found.

From around 18:22 the story focuses on the impact of the decline of the silk industry in Spitalfields, and on Julia Sawalha’s ancestor who was Huguenot, but a journeyman weaver rather than a moneyed master weaver.

Finally, from around 23 minutes there is historic information about why the Huguenots fled France

Poverty and deprivation

‘It is not in the power of language to describe their long and continued miseries not brought on by idleness, intemperance or a dissolute course of life, but human wretchedness absolutely produced by want of employment’

Dr William Hawes, Physician to the London Dispensary, 1792-93

Dr William Hawes recorded his thoughts, above, while witnessing the impact on the Spitalfields silk weavers of the severe trade crisis of 1792-93. The London Dispensary offered medical advice and medicines at minimal cost to the poor and needy of the area and remained in operation on that basis until the creation of the National Health Service. In 1797, such was the distress of the inhabitants that local philanthropists formed the Spitalfields Soup Society to to serve good quality soup, again at cost, to local people. By 1812, 6000 people were fed daily. Bearing in mind the creativity and curiosity that had thrived in Spitalfields when times were good, it is telling that in that same year – 1812 – a group of Quaker philanthropists, concerned at the widespread illiteracy levels, established a school for local children aged 6 to 14. The cost to parents was a penny per day. What all these initiatives had in common is that they were aimed at the ‘industrious’, or ‘deserving’ poor; and yet such was the poverty that increasingly, they were out of the reach of local people. After the repeal of the Spitalfields Acts in 1824, when thousands more weavers were thrown into destitution, few local families could afford the penny fee, and by the end of the 1830s the school had closed.

By 1839 the most skillful journeyman weavers in Spitalfields were earning around fifteen shillings a week – a fall of five shillings since 1823. However, for the less skilled ‘plain weavers’ the overall average appears to have been more like seven or eight shillings per week. By 1849 the average weaver’s wage was 5 shillings and sixpence per week. The nation’s response, from 1834, was the workhouse.

As the nineteenth century progressed, Spitalfields became increasingly densely populated. This came about through different means. First the existing houses, intended for one family, were occupied by several families. Even the fine Huguenot houses gradually fell into disrepair and over-occupation, although the merchants and master weavers themselves moved away, diversified their business interests and expanded their activities into other trades, other parts of the UK and in the New World. Second, the growing spaces and open areas behind terraces of housing were transformed into narrow alleyways crammed with very poor quality housing accessed via passages from the main street. In many parts of Spitalfields, the view along the streets may have seemed little changed, but behind them was a whole other world, with damp, cramped and filthy conditions created by overcrowding, poor building, inadequate water supplies and inability to pay for removal of ‘night soil’. Finally, to return to the weavers’ love of flowers, many of them had taken small plots of land where they could enjoy their hobby and relax in the sunshine. Often they erected small sheds or cabins on these plots. As conditions worsened for the weavers and other inhabitants of Spitalfields, these sheds were used as dwellings.

Interior of Weavers’ Cottage. Image dated 1894. Original: © Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive

The Industrial Revolution
The severity of conditions in Spitalfields after the repeal of the Spitalfields Acts and onwards throughout the nineteenth century were just one half of a double whammy impacting the area. Alongside the collapse of the Spitalfields silk industry and consequential reduced income and unemployment, the population of the area continued to grow. While the population of the civil parish of Spitalfields (Christ Church) at the time of the 1831 census was 16,200, in 1834 the Poor Law authorities calculated the total population of the area of Spitalfields in its wider sense (that is, including the parishes of Bishopsgate-without-the-wall, St Dunstan Stepney, St Mary Whitechapel, St Leonard Shoreditch, and St Botolph Bishopsgate plus the Liberties of Norton Folgate and the Old Artillery Ground) at 64,141. This represented a doubling of the population in around three decades.

Of course, Spitalfields was not alone in experiencing such sudden population growth and extreme deprivation. As elsewhere, this was a time of push and pull factors, away from the rural areas and sucked into the large towns and cities where by now the Industrial Revolution was well underway and it was hoped work would be available. The additional issue for Spitalfields was that the work for the existing population had collapsed. Weavers without work went to work at the docks or tried to find other employment, or indeed ended up at the workhouse. The situation compares to that in Norwich where my own 3x great grandfather, also a silk weaver, found himself unable to secure work. More recently, we might compare it to the deep, generational unemployment and economic loss of people in the mining communities after the mass pit closures of the 1980s.

The gap has been bridged
The events and reasons behind the downward spiral of this once elegant and prosperous community into abject poverty and despair are now clear. It was into this new incarnation of Spitalfields that thousands of Jews fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe would arrive towards the end of the nineteenth century. Here, they would make their home while establishing themselves in their new country. That will be the topic of my next post.

Time travelling in Spitalfields: the Huguenots

Posted on 10th Sep 2026 by English Ancestors

Spitalfields lies just to the north-east of the the financial centre of the City of London. In the map below, it’s the area outlined with the dotted red line: east of Liverpool Street Station, south of Shoreditch and north of Aldgate East tube stations. It forms part of the western border of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, and it was while working in that area many years ago that I first heard of Spitalfields. I didn’t know back then, but Spitalfields has an absolutely fascinating history. It is only in the intervening years that this has gradually revealed itself to me. This post is the result of some research into the area over the last few weeks as I tried, finally, to make sense of the snippets of information I had gleaned over the years.

It’s a long read. You might want to get coffee!

Google: Map of Spitalfields, London, UK and surrounding area. Retrieved July 27, 2026, from https://maps.app.goo.gl/…

What I wanted to know and understand
Spitalfields is the place where many Huguenots settled when they fled persecution in France, most intensively following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. When I first heard about them I assumed that migrants fleeing persecution would be in poverty. That was not necessarily the case. The Huguenots were French Protestants who, amongst other skills, excelled as silk weavers. I knew they were connected to streets of fine Georgian houses, but I didn’t know where those Georgian houses were.

This also connected to some of my own ancestors who were silk weavers in Norwich, where an earlier wave of Flemish Dissenters had settled in the sixteenth century, followed by Huguenots in the seventeenth. It seems unlikely that my ancestors were Huguenot or Flemish Dissenters. They were more likely journeymen, providing finished cloth to the merchants.

After the Huguenots, Spitalfields became home to more waves of migrants: Irish, Jewish and then, from the mid twentieth century, the British Bangladeshi community. I’ve researched a number of Jewish families in and around Brick Lane at the turn of the twentieth century, and had been a fairly regular visitor to the curry houses in Brick Lane when I worked in the area, but couldn’t make sense of the geography of the place, and where the Georgian houses were in relation to the parts I knew.

Then a few years ago, when researching an ancestral line for a client, I found a successful broker living in Spitalfields from 1729-1760. It didn’t fit with my understanding of the East End of London as a place to get a foothold in society, and I was intrigued.

I love the history of the old City of London: the hidden places, the old buildings and little alleyways, the ancient parishes and Liberties. And so, a few weeks ago, having a whole day to spare during a trip to London, we decided to spend it exploring Spitalfields. Before setting off, I researched online what there was to see. Some of the websites I used are linked at the end of this post.

I also found Dan Cruickshank’s fantastic book: Spitalfields: The history of a nation in a handful of streets (2016). It is aptly named, drawing in so much more than simply the area known as Spitalfields. Indeed, as Cruickshank writes, ‘Virtually everything of significance that happened in London in the centuries after 1530 had a profound influence upon life and architecture in Spitalfields – in some cases, indeed, these epoch-making events had their origin in the area.’ Although I bought the book specifically to learn more about Spitalfields, it has also helped me to join some dots regarding one of my own ancestral families who lived in the area to the south of Spitalfields: Whitechapel and St Katherine’s Docks. If this part of London interests you and you enjoy a long, in-depth read, I heartily recommend this book.

*****

The history of Spitalfields before the arrival of the Huguenots
Being outside the walls of the City of London was, for centuries, emblematic of not being fully accepted within. The name ‘Spitalfields’ refers to the Hospital (‘Spital’) of the Augustinian Priory of St Mary that had stood on the spot since 1197, providing care for the sick, the dying, and for women in childbirth and their babies. Clearly, it would be considered safer to keep sick people outside the crowded area within the walls. The Spital Fields were literally the fields around and belonging to the Priory. You can see them on the map reproduced from an original by Ralph Agas, c.1560. The cluster of buildings immediately to the left (west) of the Spitel Fyeld on the map, and the laid-out gardens, are the remaining Priory buildings, by this time destroyed or used as dwelling houses. The long road running north-south to the west of the map is Bishopsgate, and the lower part of the map is the north-eastern edge of the City of London.

‘The Spitel Fyeld on the ‘Agas’ map of London, c.1560. Public domain. Source: Wikipedia Commons. See upper right of full map at that link.

Cruickshank writes of Spitalfields as historically a sort of ‘border territory – a place on the fringes of society’; and this ties to my own original puzzlement surrounding the location here of the finer folk alongside, eventually, the incoming Dissenting Huguenot migrants and the poorer people. As a Priory, St Mary’s Spital had been a place of refuge, yet the area continued long after the Reformation as a place welcoming of those living in ways that did not conform to religious or social norms. Geographically it straddled several parish and other administrative borders: Bishopsgate-without-the-wall, which was part of the City of London; the parishes of St Dunstan Stepney, St Mary Whitechapel, St Leonard Shoreditch, and St Botolph Bishopsgate; plus two Liberties: Norton Folgate and the Liberty of the Old Artillery Ground. All of this meant that, despite being a stone’s throw from the City of London, it was largely outside its control. It does also extend the concept of ‘Spitalfields’ beyond the land within the dotted red line on the map at the top of this post, which does in fact correspond more closely with the boundary of the parish of Christ Church Spitalfields, which was extracted from the larger parish of St Dunstan Stepney in 1729.

After the Dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s and 1540s, Catholics might find a reasonably safe home here, provided they were not too open about clinging to the old religion. Often, these people were wealthy – some of them were foreign Ambassadors; and indeed the area just outside the City walls and along Bishopsgate included fine houses. However, not all the dwellings were for the well-to-do. Spitalfields was refuge for others who preferred that their lives were not under the scrutiny of the authorities. At various times this included those Catholics but also Protestant Dissenters, those who lived ‘outside’ the law, and creative, free thinkers including herbalist and astrologer Nicholas Culpeper, astrologer, seer, alchemist and occultist John Heydon and astrologer, mathematician and visionary John Holwell. It also attracted William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, possibly Ben Johnson (who certainly spent a lot of time there even if his residence was not in Spitalfields) and their acting troupes. The first two purpose-built playhouses – The Theatre (built 1576) and The Curtain (built 1577) – were in the north of Spitalfields. Indeed such is the history of creative energy and the impact of the place on important events, that one might be forgiven for thinking that ‘Spitalfields’ is more a state of mind than a place confined by fixed borders!

Yet by the end of the seventeenth century Spitalfields would have been unrecognisable to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Overcrowding within the City walls, and concerns about the spread of fire had previously resulted in restrictions on new building and on building materials – preferring brick to timber. These restrictions applied to the areas immediately outside the walls too. However, the Great Fire of London of 1666 brought about new attitudes on expanding outside the walls. The result was that, in a very short space of time, Spitalfields was transformed from being ‘essentially rural’ to ‘essentially urban’. This was achieved largely through agreements between landowners and speculative builders, the resulting houses then being let on leases of between sixty-one and ninety-one years. However, as was often the case, such arrangements resulted in corner-cutting, poor materials and cramming extra houses into the available space. In consequence, although the layout of streets within which these apparently elegant houses were erected has largely survived (even if, confusingly, quite a few of the street names have changed) the houses themselves have mostly not.

It’s clear that, despite their shortcomings, these houses were intended for the more prosperous folk of Spitalfields. What isn’t clear from earlier maps is – where did the poorer people live? We know they were were there. The Great Plague of 1665 had hit poorer areas particularly hard, where housing was overcrowded and sanitation at its worst. Daniel Defoe noted in his Journal of the Plague Year (published 1722) that mortality figures were high in the north of Spitalfields, where it borders Shoreditch. We also know that there was a long tradition of humble weavers and silk ribbon makers in and around this area. In fact the large ‘Tenter Fields’, seen on the map below, evidence the presence of the weavers.

The map is a snapshot of what part of Spitalfields looked like just ten years after the Great Fire of London. This is the southern part, bordering Whitechapel. Spitalfields is now an extension of the City, no longer separated from it other than by the presence of the wall. We see what seem to be more substantial houses on George Street and Winsford Street (along the bottom of the map) and also on the south side of Throll Street (recorded as Thrawl Street on most maps) but it’s difficult to be sure since, amongst other features, we can’t see how many storeys the various houses have. Regardless of the intended residents, most houses have a private garden, and there is also plenty of open space for communal growing.

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The arrival of the Huguenots
By the end of 1687 more than 13,000 Huguenots had settled in London, most of them in Spitalfields. There was much to attract them to this area: the already established French Protestant church in Threadneedle Street; the building development that was already under way; the history of a certain tolerance there of thought and belief; and the fact that there were many weavers and silk ribbon makers already in the area. The Huguenots were welcomed and encouraged to settle by the king James II & VII; and after initial concerns from local weavers that they would take their jobs and work for lower rates, it became clear that the newcomers had much to offer in terms of skill, technique, entrepreneurship and financial resources. Ultimately, the Huguenots brought great advantages to the nation, creating a new silk industry, and with it new markets, employment, skills and wealth.

Homes for the prosperous Huguenots
Not all Huguenots were wealthy. Many were journeyman silk weavers, producing cloth for the master weavers and merchants. However, it is the fine homes of the wealthy families that have survived, and which today we think of as Huguenot Spitalfields. Although, as we have seen, development of Spitalfields had been under way since the 1660s, the building of these early Georgian domestic terraces for which Spitalfields is known began around 1711.

Rather horrifyingly, in the 1970s all of these streets were in danger of being lost to the bulldozer. Proximity to the City of London financial district (as evidenced in the above image) meant this land was on the radar of property developers. In 1977 The Spitalfields Trust was formed to rescue these Georgian streets. Their activities included campaigning, squatting, buying up properties and active restoration. One of their members was TV presenter and author of Spitalfields Dan Cruickshank, who lives there still.

Spitalfields now has four overlapping conservation areas. The photo above was taken in the Elder Street Conservation area, and those below are from the Brick Lane and Fournier Street Conservation Area. The other two areas are Artillery Passage and Wentworth Street. Conservation Area status provides legal protections for the streets, houses and communities. In addition, many of the individual houses have ‘Listed’ status, ensuring that any demolition, alteration, or extension is strictly controlled through a special planning system.

Perhaps the best place to imagine what Spitalfields was like for the master silk weavers and merchants of this time (and my favourite part of Spitalfields) is the houses in Wilkes Street, Princelet Street and Fournier Street. These were constructed between 1717 and 1730 – when the streets were called, respectively, Wood, Princes and Church Street, as per the map. The map is an updated edition of Richard Horwood’s PLAN of the Cities of LONDON and WESTMINSTER the Borough of SOUTHWARK, and PARTS adjoining Shewing every HOUSE. It shows the area as it was in 1819, but has the advantage of being very large scale, and there are no significant changes to this part of Spitalfields during the intervening years.

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The houses have typical early Georgian features, including beautifully carved door casings, but many also have shutters. Each was built with a wide window on the upper floor of the rear elevation. These long ‘weaver’s windows’ were intended to maximise natural daylight, because this is where the loom would have been located. The additional windows now seen at roof level at the front of many of the houses were late eighteenth century additions, enabling greater workspace, and thereby the ability to generate more rental income, as the area declined in status and wealth.

At the same time as the houses in these streets were being built, a new parish church was under construction. Until this time, Spitalfields had been part of the large ancient parish of St Dunstan’s, Stepney. The increased population of Spitalfields had highlighted the need for the creation of a separate parish. Constructed between 1714 and 1729, Christ Church, seen below, would not have most of its prosperous neighbours among its congregation.

The Huguenots retained a certain distance. Wishing to preserve their cultural and religious heritage, they worshipped initially at the French Church in Threadneedle Street but would go on to build several churches within Spitalfields. One of these is marked on the map above: the ‘French Church’ or ‘Église Neuve’ at the corner of Church Street (now Fournier Street) and Brick Lane, which was constructed in 1743-4. In these churches the prosperous would worship alongside their less wealthy fellow Huguenots, and it was perfectly normal to hear various dialects of French spoken throughout the area, on the streets and in the local markets.

Despite this, according to Sir John Vanbrugh, one of the Commissioners for the ‘Fifty New Churches’ of which Christ Church was one, the church was to be ‘a monument to posterity’, proclaiming the power and presence of the Church of England even though Huguenot Dissenters held sway in the area.

One of the regular worshippers at Christ Church was my client’s ancestor – the abovementioned successful broker whose residence here had intrigued me since he was not a pauper, a Catholic, a Dissenter, an immigrant, a weaver; nor, seemingly, has any of the other characteristics that seemed to attract people to live in Spitalfields in these times. His youngest child was baptised at the church in 1729. Initially, since his older children were baptised at St Dunstan’s in Stepney, I assumed he had just moved to the area, perhaps to occupy one of the adjacent newly-built fine houses; but this was not the case. It was the church that was new, not his place of residence. He was, in fact, living in Thrawl Street, and we know from John Ogilby’s map of 1676, above, that the houses in Thrawl Street (Throll Street on the earlier map) had been there at least since then. The reason for the first baptism at Christ Church in 1729, then, was simply that Thrawl Street now came within the parish of Spitalfields Christ Church rather than Stepney St Dunstan.

The map below shows the proximity of Thrawl Street to the church. The houses occupied by the prosperous merchants and master weavers are on Church Street and the streets immediately north of that.

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Were those streets to the north of the church effectively an ‘enclave’ for the Huguenots? It seems not – it was just that they seem to have been the people with the financial resources to live in them.

Anna Maria Garthwaite, below, was also not a Huguenot but she had a skill that enhanced those of the master weavers. Moving from Lincolnshire to Spitalfields in 1728, she lived at 2 Princes Street, now Princelet Street where, despite having no formal training, she set herself up as a silk designer, working in watercolour to create floral designs for master weavers to create in hand woven silk. So successful did she become – and so unusual for a single woman who was already almost forty years old when she relocated to Spitalfields – that her former house now bears a blue plaque.

The silk weaving industry required more than wealthy master weavers, designers and merchants. There were also journeymen. Together with the pre-existing workforce, there were thousands of the humbler journeymen weavers throughout the City of London, Spitalfields and Bethnal Green; and they were accommodated in weaver’s cottages. Very few of these have survived. The poor building standards and materials meant they were less likely to do so, while the sheer number of them meant that they were not valued. More humble jobbing weavers were accommodated in two-room weavers’ cottages in Whitechapel or Bethnal Green. Others lived where they worked in garrets at the upper floors of buildings with the essential weaver’s windows. (See some sketches here.) Over the following decades they were the first to deteriorate and become slums. Of course, no physical traces of their former existence remain.

The image below shows a terrace of three more modest but better quality homes on Brick Lane. The weaver’s windows on the top floor are the give-away feature.

By 1800 a further wave of Huguenot refugees settled further east in a part of Bethnal Green known as Globe Town. There, weavers operated around 20,000 home based looms. It was also in Globe Town that mulberry tree orchards were planted for breeding silkworms.

Find out more about Spitalfields and its Huguenot history
My research has focused purely on answering some questions I had about the origin of Spitalfields and the coexistence of such different groups of people on the same small area of land: on the place rather than the people, even though some specific people have been in mind. Whether your interest is local history, present-day Spitalfields or family history, there are lots of online resources with information about Spitalfields and the Huguenots. To access specific records about ancestors you would have to visit the appropriate archives as signposted in some of these links.

First, Dan Cruickshank’s excellent book:
Spitalfields: The history of a nation in a handful of streets (2016) London, Penguin Books

The Spitalfields Trust, initially set up as a charity in 1977 as part of the above-mentioned campaign by a group of architects, architectural historians and journalists to save the early Georgian buildings of Spitalfields, is still going and they are now the guardians of two important buildings in the area: 19 Princelet Street, which is not yet open to the public; and Denis Severs’ House, which is open at pre-advertised times for tours and other events.

The Huguenots of Spitalfields website has a huge amount of introductory-level information covering the history of the Huguenots in Spitalfields and other parts of this country – just enough to get you started and to point you in the direction of where you might look for more.

Spitalfields Life is a daily blog written since 2009 by David Hoffman, about ‘the exuberant richness and multiplicity of culture’ of life in Spitalfields. He also offers tours. There are thousands of blog posts. A search bar towards the top of the page should guide you to what you’re looking for. This was the result of my search for “huguenot”.

The Huguenot Society of Great Britain & Ireland has, as its principal object, ‘the interchange and publication of knowledge relating to the history of the Huguenots in France and adjoining countries’. For people researching Huguenot family history, they have a page signposting sources of information, and can provide further support and information if you become a member. There is a page with advice for Tracing your poor Huguenot ancestors in London Huguenot records that would be very useful for many researchers.

The Huguenot Library is, at the time of writing, temporarily located at The National Archives. Its usual location is at University College London in Gower Street.
Amongst other treasures, they have a List of family names for which research files are available. It’s a huge list of surnames that, if you find them in your own family research, could suggest Huguenot ancestry. It’s not exhaustive, of course: other typical Huguenot surnames may simply not have been researched, or the research not lodged with the Huguenot Library; and in any case the origin of the version of the surname in your family may be elsewhere/ not Huguenot.

The Huguenot Map of Spitalfields, the brainchild of Fiona Atkins, proprietor of Townhouse, and hand drawn by Adam Dant. The map includes names of 300 historic Huguenot residents of Spitalfields, each appended to their former house, as submitted by their descendants. The above link is to a review of the unveiling of the map, with an enlargeable version of the map itself lower down the page. You might still need a magnifying glass!

If you’d like to see inside two of the fine Huguenot houses, I found these two videos, made by an estate agent specialising in ‘unique properties’. (Who knew they had coal bunkers under the street?!)

This next one has been styled as it might have been back in 1730. Look out in both these houses for the weaver’s lofts.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this quick tour of Georgian Spitalfields, as it was when the Huguenots lived there. My next post will fast-forward to the late nineteenth century, and the massive Jewish migration into the area.