INTRODUCTION
Until the mid-17th century, Petticoat Lane was still partly rural in character. The Lane and its immediate surroundings have long been a vibrant melting pot of cultures and a gathering place and market area. As early as 1598 Ben Jonson, in his play Every Man in His Humour, refers to Houndsditch - then still a meandering country path just south of Petticoat Lane – as a resort of old clothes dealers.
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People have come to the Petticoat Lane district to escape persecution or discrimination, or simply wanting to improve their condition in life. However, people haven’t always been welcomed to the area with open arms. It is hard to imagine what the East End would look like without the Brick Lane curry houses, the chicken butchers’ shops and colourful African fabric shops. Migrants have also had to fight for their right to exist and to defend their rights, but at the worst of times, the communities of Petticoat Lane have come together to support one another.
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Below, we explore four of the communities that found a home in Petticoat Lane over the centuries. Of course, they represent only a small slice of the area’s enormous diversity.
THE HUGUENOTS
The Huguenots were French Protestant Christians. From the mid-16th century, they faced oppression in their homeland from the Roman Catholic authorities. Their civil rights and freedom of worship were gradually eroded so that, by the 1670s, many Huguenots chose to abandon their homes and their wealth for their faith and fled as refugees to Protestant nations – notably states in Germany such as Brandenburg, to the Low Countries and, in particular, to England and its American colonies.
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Oppression turned to state persecution 1685 when it became illegal in France to practice openly as a Protestant. This provoked yet more Huguenots to flee, which was a dangerous business since flight was forbidden by law and punishments if caught could be severe. By the very early 18th century it has been calculated that around 30,000 Huguenots had settled in and around London, forming nearly 5 per cent of the capital’s population. From the late 17th century Huguenot refugees established themselves in Spitalfields, then expanding as a merchant enclave of the north-east edge of the City of London, where they rapidly transformed a small-scale fabric trade into a highly valuable silk weaving industry.
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While the British political elite welcomed the new Protestant arrivals, London tradesmen were initially wary of them, fearing they would undercut wages and raise rents. But it soon became clear that the Huguenots were not a threat because they introduced new skills and created new valuable industries that helped to make English manufacturing more competitive on the world market. Huguenots were soon integrated into the Weavers’ Company and other guilds, became Freeman of the City and were thus able to trade within its boundaries and areas of influence.
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John Strype, in the Survey of London and Westminster published in 1720, records the respect with which Huguenots were then held, especially in Spitalfields and the Aldgate area. He noted the good example that they set in the neighbourhood, saying ‘these Strangers may serve for Patterns of Thrift, Honesty, Industry, and Sobriety’.
THE IRISH
The 18th century saw the growth of a large Irish community in the East End. Many were rural and impoverished Roman Catholics and such were the penal laws imposed on Catholics in Ireland by Protestant authorities that many – paradoxical as it might seem – believed they could find better lives in Protestant London. Many were unskilled and desperately poor, so they tended to settle in the poorest London districts.
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Although many Irish Catholics settling on London were mostly unskilled labourers, there were also weavers, revealing significant connections between linen and silk weaving in Ireland and the Spitalfields silk weaving industry. On occasion there were conflicts with London journeymen weavers fearing the Irish would undercut them by working for lower wages.
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This was a time when public Roman Catholic worship was not tolerated in England and Catholics had reduced civil rights and opportunities and were vulnerable to aggression. After 1780 conditions and security slowly improved for Irish Catholics in London. In 1791, by the terms of the Catholic Relied Act, Catholics could build public places of worship in England, with emancipation and improved civil rights for Catholics coming in 1829 when the ‘Catholic Emancipation Act’ was passed.
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During the difficult decades of the late 18th and early 19th centuries Irish Catholics had continued to arrive in London in search or economic opportunities that were far better than those to be found at home. Many worked on the construction of canals, railways and docks in East London.
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Immigration was yet further increased by the Great Potato Famine in 1845-49 which led thousands to leave their homeland and seek lives and employment abroad. By the late 19th century many Irish women worked in East London factories, such as the Bryant and May matchstick company in Bow, while Irish men worked in the docks and on the railways that earlier generations of Irish immigrants had helped to construct.
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Many had to endure poor working and living conditions which, combined with anti-Irish prejudice, helped to fuel East London’s reputation for crime and poverty.​​​​
Click below to hear Steve, Heather and Camille talking about the different communities living and working around Petticoat Lane when they worked in their shop on Wentworth Street​​​​​
THE ASHKENAZI JEWS
Ashkenazi Jews from Tsarist Russia and from Eastern European states controlled by Tsarist Russia started to arrive in large numbers in the East End from the mid-19th century onwards. After the assassination of Alexander II, the Tsar of Russia, in March 1881, antisemitism increased and Jews were targeted and harassed. Riots targeting Jews, often inflamed by the authorities, were called pogroms.
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Anti-Jewish laws in Russia and increased violence led 106,000 Jews to flee to Britain. By 1914, 70% of the European Jewish diaspora in Britain lived in the East End. Initially there was tension, with native Londoners fearing that rents would increase as homes were acquired by the new arrivals and that wages would be undercut and competition for jobs would increase.
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Anticipating these issues, some wealthy Jewish families long established in Britain urged the new arrivals to integrate rapidly to reduce friction. But cultural identity was an issue. Some schools, like the Jews’ Free School in Bell Lane, focused on encouraging assimilation while other schools in the area wanted to preserve the Yiddish language and culture.
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As well as encouraging assimilation the Jewish community donated funds to build housing for the new arrivals. Notably, the Rothschilds partly funded a large housing estate of tall tenement blocks off Commercial Street that opened in 1887.
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Friction gradually reduced as the new arrivals established themselves to form a distinct community that made significant contributions to London’s economic and cultural life.
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Petticoat Lane and Wentworth Street were vital to the life of the East End Jewish community – centres of trade but also of entertainment and places of community. As Israel Zangwill - born in Whitechapel in 1864 - wrote in his 1892 book 'Children of the Ghetto':
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‘The Lane was always the great market-place and every insalubrious street and alley abutting on it was covered with the overflowing of its commerce and its mud. Wentworth Street and Goulston Street were the chief branches, and in festival times the latter was a pandemonium of caged poultry clucking and quaking and cackling and screaming. Fowls and geese and ducks were bought alive, and taken to have their throats cut for a fee by an official slaughterer.’
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This practice continued and until recent times there were numerous butchers in Petticoat Lane and its surrounding streets who slaughtered animals according to Kosher, and later Halal, religious practices. Customers used to come into Petticoat Lane to buy special meat like boiled chicken.
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Others who documented the 19th century East End were drawn to Petticoat Lane and its surrounds and what they recorded can help to bring the history of the area to life. In 1896 an illustrated publication called Round London includes a view of a busy street market that it names Petticoat Lane (in fact the view shows Wentworth Street), and the caption to the image includes a quote from Henry Mayhew, who described the area on the late 1840s. Mayhew noted that Petticoat Lane was at the heart of an old clothes district’ with ‘perhaps between two and three miles of old clothes’ on display. It offered, he wrote, ‘a vista of dinginess’ but in its scale, varied hues and activity presented ‘a scene that could not be matched in any part of the greatest city in the world, nor in any other portion of the world itself.’ Mayhew also recorded that ‘this is the centre of the Jews’ quarter.’
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Another observer – Henry Walker- writing in 1896 developed this theme, describing the area as, ‘like a foreign town, with its own liberties of trade, own segregated peoples, religions, customs and industries.’
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There are now few physical remnants of the once intense Jewish presence in and around Petticoat Lane. But at its north-west end, in Sandys Row that was once part of the Lane- survives the only still functioning synagogue in the Spitalfields area. It was founded in 1867 and housed within chapel or ‘temple’ built in 1766 for the Huguenot community. It is the oldest surviving Ashkenazi synagogue in London. One other synagogue building does survive in the area, but it has not been in use as a place of worship since the late 1960s. Consecrated in. 1870 lies hidden behind 19 Princelet Street, which was built in 1718 and originally housed a Huguenot master weaver.
At that time it was predominantly a Jewish area, most of the shops were owned by Jewish people
THE BANGLADESHIS
According to the Swadhinata Trust, the East India Company was of vital importance to the development of the East End and its links to Bengal. It began to develop trade with Asia in 1600, particularly in spices and by 1608 its first ships had arrived in Surat, India. In 1757 the company took control of Bengal. Its ships brought back precious cargoes of goods to east London, but also immigrant workers – lascars (Asian seamen who had jumped ship) and, later, ayahs (Indian nannies, nurse maids and servants) who accompanied the families of senior officials of the Raj back to Britain. From 1795 lascar hostels and seamen’s homes were set up in Shoreditch, Shadwell and Wapping. The lives of lascars were often poverty stricken and hard.
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In 1858 the British Crown assumed direct control of East India Company territory to form the British Indian Empire. The East India Company was a City of London based institution, with its capacious Cutler Street warehouses stretching along much the south side of the Lane, but although the Company was dissolved in 1874, the connections between east London and Bengal remained strong. This was largely because Bengal remained a centre of trade, manufacture and the arts during the period of British rule in India.
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At the time of partition in 1947 Bengal was divided - amid much tension, violence and suffering - with the new sovereign nation of India acquiring West Bengal with the rest becoming part of newly founded East Pakistan.
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In Bengal, the consequences of partition were immediate and dramatic. Calcutta became detached from the hinterland which many of the raw materials for manufacture had come. This, combined with a huge influx of impoverished refugees from the east, quickly transformed Calcutta into a desperate and stricken city.
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East Pakistan did not prosper and eventually in 1971 separated from West Pakistan to become Bangladesh.
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Many Muslim Bengalis sought refuge in East London in the periods following the Second World War, Partition, and the conflict with Pakistan. It is thought that they may have been drawn to the small existing community in the area. After 1971, many citizens of the new nation of Bangladesh arrived, forming a large Bangladeshi community in the Petticoat Lane area.
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Many families came from Sylhet, the North-Eastern region of the Indian subcontinent, and some settled near the docks, while others worked as servants or cooks.
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In the 20th century many Sylhetis who migrated here in search of work originally planned to go home after a few years in London; however, over time, many decided to stay as they built their lives here. They established what is now known as Banglatown, centred on the central portion of Brick Lane, known for its curry restaurants selling Bengali Muslim food. Bangladeshis today make up 40 per cent of the population in the district and do much to give Spitalfields its distinct and special character. As you walk along is streets you can spot street signs in Bengali/Bangla.
Faces in the Crowd, Jack Torcello, 2011, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0
Researched and written by Eliza