Spitalfields: Irish, Jewish and Bangladeshi communities
Irish Migration to Spitalfields
The Huguenot community’s prosperity gradually declined after the 1770s, as the silk trade faced competition and the Spitalfields Act was eventually repealed. Irish Catholics began settling in Spitalfields and the surrounding Whitechapel area from the late eighteenth century, with larger waves following the Irish Famine (1845–1852). Irish migrants worked as dock labourers, street sellers and in casual labouring trades. They concentrated in the cheapest, most overcrowded parts of Spitalfields, including the courts and alleys off Brick Lane. Their reception was often hostile — anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice was widespread in Victorian England, and Irish workers faced competition with English labourers for scarce casual work in the East End docks.
Irish migrants in Spitalfields: settled from late 18th century, larger waves after the Famine (1845–52). Worked in docks, casual labour, street selling. Faced anti-Irish/anti-Catholic prejudice. Lived in the most overcrowded, poorest courts and alleys. Their experience contrasts with the Huguenots’ relatively skilled and prosperous arrival.
Jewish Migration: Fleeing the Pogroms
The largest single wave of migration to Spitalfields before the twentieth century was the arrival of Eastern European Jewish refugees from the 1880s onwards. Pogroms — organised massacres of Jewish communities — swept through the Russian Empire after 1881. Around 120,000 Jewish migrants arrived in Britain between 1880 and 1914, many settling in Spitalfields and Whitechapel. They worked in the garment trade, furniture-making, cabinet-making and as market traders in Petticoat Lane (Middlesex Street) and Brick Lane markets.
Jewish settlement transformed Spitalfields: Yiddish became the language of the streets, Jewish schools, synagogues and social clubs opened, and Jewish-owned businesses lined Brick Lane. The Huguenot chapel on Brick Lane had already become a Methodist chapel; around 1897 it was converted into the Great Synagogue (the building now known as Brick Lane Jamme Masjid). This conversion — a Huguenot chapel becoming a Jewish synagogue — shows the physical layering of migrant communities in a single building. Jewish migrants also faced hostility: the Aliens Act 1905 was partly a response to anti-Jewish feeling and marked the first major restriction on immigration to Britain.
The Battle of Cable Street (4 October 1936) was one of the most significant events in Spitalfields’ history. Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists planned to march through the Jewish East End. Around 100,000 anti-fascist demonstrators — Jewish, Irish, trade unionists and local residents — blocked the route at Cable Street. Mosley’s march was turned back. The battle demonstrated the solidarity of different working-class communities in Spitalfields against fascism, and remains a symbol of resistance in the area’s history.
Bangladeshi Settlement
Bangladeshi migrants began arriving in Spitalfields in significant numbers from the 1960s and 1970s, following earlier Sylheti sailors who had settled in the area. They worked in the garment trade — echoing the Huguenot weavers three centuries earlier — and opened restaurants on Brick Lane, which became famous as “Banglatown” by the 1980s and 1990s. In 1976, the Brick Lane synagogue was converted into a mosque — the Jamme Masjid — reflecting the new community’s dominance of the street.
Spitalfields migrant succession: Huguenots (from 1685) — Irish (from late 18th century, larger waves 1840s–50s) — Eastern European Jews (1880s–1914) — Bangladeshis (1960s–70s). Each wave settled in the same streets, often the same buildings, and faced a mixed reception from those already established.
Altab Ali, a 25-year-old Bangladeshi textile worker, was murdered in a racist attack in Whitechapel on 4 May 1978. His murder sparked the largest mobilisation of the Bangladeshi community in Britain up to that point: 7,000 people marched through the East End to Downing Street to demand protection. A park near the original attack site was renamed Altab Ali Park. His case shows that the Bangladeshi community in Spitalfields faced serious racist violence in the 1970s, and that their response was organised, political and assertive.
Patterns Across the Migrations
Looking across the four main waves of migration to Spitalfields, several patterns emerge. Each group arrived in response to persecution or economic necessity: Huguenots fled religious violence; the Irish fled famine and colonial poverty; Eastern European Jews fled pogroms; Bangladeshis migrated in search of economic opportunity and as part of post-war Commonwealth migration. Each group settled initially in the cheapest, most overcrowded parts of the area, then gradually built community institutions — churches, synagogues, mosques, community centres — that marked their permanent presence.
Reception by the host community varied but was rarely wholly welcoming. Anti-French feeling was common in the 1680s. Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic prejudice was documented throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Anti-Jewish sentiment was embedded in legislation (Aliens Act 1905) as well as in street violence. Bangladeshi settlers faced both racist violence (the murder of Altab Ali, 1978) and organised fascist threats (the National Front’s activities in the 1970s and early 1980s). Yet all four communities established themselves, built lasting institutions, and contributed to the economic and cultural life of Spitalfields. This pattern of arrival, hostility, institution-building and gradual integration is the defining narrative of Spitalfields as a historic environment.