Spitalfields and Brick Lane: Outside the City Gate

The full story of Spitalfields and Brick Lane: Outside the City Gate, in words. Prefer to listen? Play it narrated, from home or on location.

1. 1. Liverpool Street: The Edge of the City

   Welcome to Bishopsgate, and to the start of the East End walk. The road beside you is older than anything you can see from it. Its line follows the Roman road north out of London, and when a bomb tore a crater in this road in nineteen ninety-three, archaeologists found Roman layers in the ground beneath it.

   Bishopsgate was the name of a gate in the City wall, farther down this road towards the towers. The gate came down in the eighteenth century, but the idea stayed. Everything on this walk lies beyond it, and Londoners had a word for that: without. The medieval hospital you will meet at the next stops was the priory of Saint Mary without Bishopsgate. Outside the gate.

   The edge of the City was where London put what it did not want inside. Behind the station lay a burial ground, opened after the plague of fifteen sixty-three and used from fifteen sixty-nine to seventeen thirty-nine. About twenty-five thousand people were buried in it, among them migrants and many of the city's poor. It was called Bedlam, after the hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem that stood next to it. When the railway that became the Elizabeth line was dug here, archaeologists excavated more than three thousand of those burials.

   Nothing of the burial ground shows from this pavement. The station opened in the mid eighteen seventies, and the red brick and stone hotel beside it is Victorian. So read this place as a line on a map. The City lies back down the road. The walk goes the other way, out into the ground that took the City's dead, its sick and, later, its refugees.

   Follow the route across Bishopsgate at the lights. Next, a narrow lane the silk trade knew.

2. 2. Artillery Passage: A Lane of Silk Merchants

   Walk on into Artillery Passage and stop partway along it. Look at how narrow it is: brick fronts a couple of steps apart, shopfronts at street level, two or three storeys above. In the sixteen hundreds and seventeen hundreds this lane was commonly known as Smock Alley, and at least one house here survives from a row described in seventeen oh seven as newly built.

   The name you see now comes from the ground just beyond the lane. In the fifteen thirties the priory leased its southern grounds to a guild of archers and gunners, the guild of artillery of longbows, crossbows and handguns, and they drilled there.

   Then came the refugees. Protestants from France, the Huguenots, settled in these streets in numbers, and many brought silk-weaving skills from Nantes, Lyon and other French cities. Round the corner on Artillery Lane, two houses were given new fronts in the seventeen fifties, one of them with a shopfront of that time. The families who lived there had French names, and in seventeen sixty-three they were described as mercers: silk merchants, the people who sold what the weavers made.

   They worshipped in French, too. A few steps from here, on Sandys Row, a French Protestant church opened in seventeen sixty-six. About a century later it was leased to a congregation of Dutch Jews, and in eighteen seventy it was consecrated as a synagogue. It is a synagogue still. Its outside is plain, so there is nothing to see from the street, but keep it in mind: a building that changed faith along with its neighborhood. You will meet a bigger one on Brick Lane.

   Follow the route out of the passage. The next lanes carry a little traffic, so keep to the edge. Next, the street of the old market.

3. 3. Brushfield Street: The Hospital's Fields

   Walk on along Brushfield Street and stop here, beside the market's buildings, with a white stone spire closing the far end of the street.

   This ground gave Spitalfields its name. Spital means hospital. Around eleven ninety-seven two citizens of London, a husband and wife, founded the priory and hospital of Saint Mary here, outside Bishopsgate. It cared for the sick and the poor, and for women giving birth. When it was closed in fifteen thirty-nine, it had about a hundred and eighty beds. Archaeologists working on this ground between nineteen ninety-one and two thousand and seven recorded more than ten thousand five hundred medieval skeletons, among them mass graves that archaeologists link to a famine in the late twelve fifties, after a huge volcanic eruption far away. They also found a Roman woman of the fourth century, buried in a lead coffin inside a stone one, wearing silk damask from China with threads of gold. Silk was here long before the weavers.

   The market came later. The right to hold one here was granted in sixteen eighty-two, and the market's Victorian buildings went up in the eighteen eighties and early nineties. Now look along the street at the Georgian-looking brick fronts. Some of them are not Georgian at all. They belong to the market's extension of the nineteen twenties, and the Survey of London calls them an attempt to recall the vanished house-fronts of a nearby square.

   Behind the buildings across the street ran Dorset Street, a street of common lodging houses. It has gone, built over. Very early on Saturday the eighth of September, eighteen eighty-eight, a lodger named Annie Chapman left number thirty-five, because she did not have the money for her bed. The night watchman saw her go up a narrow passage towards this street. You will hear more about her at Hanbury Street.

   Follow the route on towards the spire. Next, the church itself.

4. 4. Christ Church Spitalfields: Stone in a Street of Brick

   Walk on a little closer and stop, with the church's tower filling the end of the street. Look up. This is Christ Church, Spitalfields, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor.

   In seventeen eleven Parliament passed an act for fifty new churches in and around London, paid for with a tax on coal. The parish of Stepney, which then covered this district, was reckoned to hold eighty-six thousand five hundred people and nineteen meeting-houses of Nonconformists and French Protestants. Hawksmoor was a surveyor to the commissioners who ran the program, and he designed this church and five others. The foundations went in around seventeen fourteen, the upper tower and the spire rose in the late seventeen twenties, and the church was consecrated on the fifth of July, seventeen twenty-nine.

   Now the material. The outside is Portland stone, pale and almost white, and the mason's work alone cost about half the price of the church. The houses on the streets around it are brick. The front is a portico of four giant columns, plain Tuscan ones, laid out like an enormous window with a tall arch in the middle, and above it the tower climbs in stages to a spire more than sixty metres high. The Survey of London speaks of its Roman immensity against the modest scale of the streets around it. You will see that from the side in a moment.

   The church was restored in the early two thousands and reopened in two thousand and four. It usually opens to visitors on Sunday afternoons, outside services.

   On the far corner beside the church stands a tall stucco pub, the Ten Bells. Many retellings put the women of eighteen eighty-eight inside it. The inquest reports of the time do not.

   Follow the route across Commercial Street at the lights, into the narrow street beside the church. Next, the weavers' houses.

5. 5. Fournier Street: The Weavers' Windows

   Walk on along Fournier Street, with the church's long side wall across the narrow street, and stop where Wilkes Street opens off it. From here Christ Church shows its real size: a long wall of stone, with the spire rising above the roof, beside houses built to a domestic…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

6. 6. Hanbury Street: The House That Is Gone

   Walk on to Hanbury Street and stop at the corner. On one side, more eighteenth-century brick houses, like the ones you just left. On the other, the long brick buildings of the old Truman brewery. There was a brewery on Brick Lane by the sixteen eighties, and in the nineteenth…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

7. 7. Brick Lane: One Building, Three Faiths

   Walk on down Brick Lane and stop at the corner of Fournier Street, beside the big brick building on the corner. Brick Lane is named for what was made here. A survey of fifteen fifty records tile yards on its eastern side, and the lane already had its name. Now the building…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

8. 8. Wentworth Street: Five Women, Remembered by Name

   Walk on to the bottom of Brick Lane and stop where you can see along Wentworth Street, with its shops and, on market days, its stalls. In the nineteenth century the streets around here were the center of Spitalfields' common lodging houses. The Survey of London puts it plainly:…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

9. 9. Whitechapel Gallery: Art for the East End

   Cross at the lights to the far pavement, then stop and turn round to face back across the road, to the sandy colored front with the broad arch and two small towers. This is the Whitechapel Gallery. Its displays are free, there is one ticketed exhibition each season, and it is…

   Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

10. 10. Altab Ali Park: The White Chapel's Churchyard

    Walk on into the park and stop on the path. This green space is a churchyard. The church that stood here, Saint Mary Matfelon, was known as the white chapel, and it gave Whitechapel its name. The last church was destroyed by firebombs on the twenty-ninth of December, nineteen…

    Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.

11. 11. Whitechapel Bell Foundry: The Sign Above the Door

    Walk on along Whitechapel Road and stop beside the long Georgian brick front with a shopfront at one end. This is the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and it is the last stop. Read the front. Dark purple-red brick mixed with yellow stock brick, three storeys and an attic, seven…

    Full narration for this stop unlocks with the tour.