The Spitalfields Walk

‘There is a sense in which London belongs not to England, but to the world.’ ( — Professor Jerry White.)

Join actors, musicians and Dr Matthew Green for an immersive whirlwind tour of Spitalfields, experiencing how ‘that Continent Beyond’ — the East End, ‘the squalid, miserable, dirty, magnificent East End’ — has been shaped and reshaped by waves of immigration, from the French Huguenot silk weavers to Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe and, as the Empire disintegrated, Bengalis repairing to Brick Lane, right up to the its art-fuelled transformation into the chic heart of East London.

• • Ends with a silent tour of Denis Severs’ House, frozen in time since 1724, hot-wiring us into the mental and physical world of the refugee silk-weavers, one of the most stunning historical treasures in the whole of London. (Included in ticket price.)

Originally fields of the hospital of St Mary Spital, Brick Lane then just a field with a track rutted by brick-carrying carts, this no-man’s-land just beyond the City walls underwent an astonishing transformation as overseas trade boomed, bringing a transient and impoverished maritime population, and, because they couldn’t operate within the City proper, waves of French Huguenot silk-weavers set up shop in Fournier Street, Brushfield Street and elsewhere, paving the way for more immigration and establishing the area as a place of fashion, and the portal to the East End.

But in time, it would degenerate into a wasteland of deprivation, depravity and despair, containing some of the most fetid and abominable housing in London — ‘courts, many of which the sun never penetrates, which are never visited by a breath of fresh air . . . dens in which these thousands of beings herd together.’

’ — realm of dosshouses crammed with coffin beds, gin shacks, brothels and slums. And where the poverty that so afflicted Victorian London cast its blackest shadow.

Meet a French Huguenot refugee outside her elegant brick townhouse in the 1720s telling tales of religious persecution in France and how she had found sanctuary in these ‘streets of silk’, building herself a new cocoon just like her beloved silk-spitting worms.

Enjoy a deeply sinister encounter with Jack the Ripper in the 14th-century charnel house, where human remains were stored during the Middle Ages.

Hear the story of Mary Anne Kelly, the final victim of Jack the Ripper, on her murder bed, where she was found a crater of guts, breast pillowing her head, her womb ripped out, and face slashed to naught. Learn her hopes, aspirations and dreams and why she was so much more than the reductive victim history has made her.

Visit the site of the ‘deformito-mania’ booths where curiosities like the ‘African Leopard Boy’, ‘Baboon Woman’ and ‘Elephant Man’ were exhibited for the delight of the paying public and to highlight the ‘racial superiority’ of the colonising whites, with London as fulcrum of empire.

Immerse yourself in Dr Green’s evocative descriptions of the squalid slums — and ‘the people of the abyss’ who lived inside, and, frequently, outside — which gave middle-class reformers such an impetus to alleviate poverty via the gorgeous red-brick New Board Schools that we will walk past, ‘Lighthouses!’ As Sherlock Holmes puts it, ‘capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future.’

Meet, on Brick Lane, a Bengali curry-house proprietor tell you the story of how his family first came to London and helped to transform the area into Banglatown.

See some of the most striking Georgian terraced townhouses in the whole of London, colonised by the Young British Artists from the 1990s, precipitating the gentrification of the area. And marvel at the preponderance of street art (including Banksy) etched into the skein of the city.

At a time when it is routinely questioned by politicians and the media, this honest and unflinching tour explores the roots of multiculturalism — arguably the biggest single factor shaping the unique identity of London today, revealing through Spitalfields’ striking built environment the capacity of London, described as far back as the 8th century as ‘a mart of people and goods from all over the world’ (— Bede), to absorb — not always effortlessly — people from all over the world, and demonstrating how, since the 1950s, multiculturalism is in some ways the corollary of imperialism.