The ghosts of Huguenots and Jewish tailors
Several rooms in the Victoria and Albert Museum are devoted to 18th-century English arts and crafts. The displays include exquisite silk fabrics, finely woven with floral patterns in delicate colours and superb Rococo embroidery. The skills to make them were brought to London by Huguenots, Protestants who were expelled from France in 1685. Many of these immigrants lived in poverty after their arrival, but hard work and talent made others wealthy. The surviving witnesses to this prosperity are solid, handsome brick houses around Fournier Street in Spitalfields. The long rows of windows in the attic storeys of such houses were installed to admit plenty of daylight for the intricate work of weaving and sewing.
After 1750, competition from Indian and French textile industries increased. Spitalfields became a poor area. The fine residences of Huguenot families were divided up into flats. In the 19th century, a new wave of immigration created a huge demand for housing: 100,000 eastern European Jews, most of them desperately poor, came to the East End, which soon became known for the quality of its Jewish tailors – and the well-lit attics were used again. When the Jewish community dispersed, immigrants from Bangladesh kept up the tradition. Shops that sold colourful saris only 15 years ago have largely given way to restaurants, but Fashion Street is home to a college of textile design, and on Sundays, young clothes designers sell their cutting-edge fashion on the Brick Lane and Spitalfields markets.
Info
Address Between Brick Lane and Commercial Street, E1 6QE | Public Transport Aldgate East (Circle, Hammersmith & City Line) | Tip Dennis Severs’ House (18 Folgate Street, north of Spitalfields Old Market, Sun noon–4pm, Mon, Fri noon–2pm; Mon,Wed 5–9pm by reservation only, tel. 020/72474013, www.dennissevershouse.co.uk) is a captivating recreation of a Huguenot house as it was in the early 18th century.
Today, the houses in Fournier Street are sought-after homes. Residents include the artists Tracy Emin and Gilbert & George. It is still worth looking out for the Huguenots’ attic windows, and traces of the Jewish past remain: a closed synagogue at no. 19 Princelet Street, parallel to Fournier Street, and the lettering »S. Schwarz« on the front of no. 33.
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