The Story of the Huguenots

Another year, another London walk, and always hugely enjoyed and oversubscribed. This time it was a tour round Old Spitalfields, one of those London neighbourhoods where some of the 'tributaries' lead straight into the 17th century. It's one of those London neighbourhoods that’s a palimpsest. In short, it’s reinvented itself many times but, if you know where to look and how to look, you can effectively drill down and sample layer after layer. Its roots are medieval but its great shimmering past, which floats up before us in everything from street names to houses to Hawksmoor’s great church to weavers’ windows, comes to life. We got a taste of the historic centre of the silk industry in London. The industry was established already when the great influx of refugee Huguenots came from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. Their extraordinary weaving skills gave Spitalfields its great 18th-century reputation as a European centre of production of fine-quality silks. The walk chronicled the lives of the silk-weavers from refugee rags to riches and back again, how their early Georgian houses were built and lived in, and the modern-day fight to preserve what’s left of them in a fast-changing multicultural area.

We were delighted that Sue Jackson, one of our regular guides and an expert in so many areas, was our guide again.