The East End - The Rough Guide to London - page 191

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Brick Lane
Brick Lane gets its name from the brick kilns situated here after the Great Fire to help
rebuild the City. By 1900, this was the high street of London's uno cial Jewish ghetto,
but from the 1960s, Brick Lane became the heart of the Bangladeshi community.
Racism has been a problem for each wave of immigrants, but nowadays it's City
developers and bohemian gentrification that are changing the face of the street. For
the moment, the southern half of Brick Lane remains pretty staunchly Bangladeshi:
bright-coloured sari fabrics line the clothes-shop windows, and, in the evening, waiters
from the numerous restaurants try to cajole you into their establishments. Along the
northern half of Brick Lane, the pavements are busy with punters heading for the
late-night cafés and clubs that have colonized the area.
The changing ethnic make-up of this part of Brick Lane is most clearly illustrated in the
Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque) on the corner of Fournier Street. Established in 1743 as a
Huguenot church, it became a Wesleyan chapel in 1809, the ultra-Orthodox Spitalfields
Great Synagogue in 1897, and since 1976 has served as a mosque - it's impossible to miss
thanks to the 90ft-high luminous, freestanding metal minaret, topped by a crescent moon,
that was erected in 2009. Another example, a little further south, is Christ Church primary
school , a Church of England school the majority of whose pupils are Muslim; a hundred
years ago they were mainly Jewish, as the Star of David on one of the drainpipes testifies.

LONDON'S JEWS
William the Conqueror invited the first Jews to England in 1066. After a period of relatively
peaceful coexistence and prosperity, the small community increasingly found itself
under attack, financially milked by successive monarchs and forced eventually to wear a
distinguishing mark or tabula on their clothing. The Crusades whipped up further religious
intolerance, the worst recorded incident taking place in 1189, when thirty Jews were killed by
a mob during the coronation of Richard I. In 1278 Edward I imprisoned the entire community
of around six hundred on a charge of “clipping coins” (debasing currency by shaving off bits of
silver from coins), executing 267 at the Tower, and finally in 1290 expelling the rest.
For nearly four centuries thereafter, Judaism was outlawed in England. Sephardic (ie Spanish
or Portuguese) Jews fleeing the Inquisition began arriving from 1540 onwards, though they
had to become, or pretend to be, Christians until 1656, when Oliver Cromwell granted Jews
the right to meet privately and worship in their own homes. The Jews who arrived
immediately following this Readmission were in the main wealthy merchants, bankers and
other businessmen. As a beacon of (relative) tolerance and economic prosperity, London
quickly attracted further Jewish immigration by poorer Sephardi families and, increasingly,
Ashkenazi settlers from eastern and central Europe.
By far the largest influx of Ashkenazi Jews arrived after fleeing pogroms that followed the
assassination of the Russian Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The more fortunate were met by relatives
at the Irongate Stairs by Tower Bridge; the rest were left to the mercy of the boarding-house
keepers or, after 1885, found shelter in the Jewish Temporary Shelter. They found work in the
sweatshops of the East End: cabinetmaking, shoemaking and, of course, tailoring - by 1901,
over 45 percent of London's Jews worked in the garment industry.
Perhaps the greatest moment in Jewish East End history was the Battle of Cable Street ,
which took place on October 4, 1936, when Oswald Mosley and three thousand of his
black-shirted fascists attempted to march through the East End. More than twice that number
of police tried to clear the way for Mosley with baton charges and mounted patrols, but they
were met with a barrage of bricks and stones from some one hundred thousand East Enders
chanting the slogan of the Spanish Republicans: “ No pasaran ” (They shall not pass). Eventually
the police chief halted the march - and another East End legend was born. A mural on the
side of the old Shadwell town hall on Cable Street commemorates the event.
After World War II, more and more Jews moved out to the suburbs of North London, and the
largest Orthodox Jewish communities are now to be found in Golders Green and Stamford Hill,
with two hundred thousand Jews across the city as a whole.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT SPITALFIELDS P.189 ; SUNDAY MARKET STALL; CHRIST CHURCH P.190 ; COLUMBIA ROAD P.434 >