Employment Patterns and Occupations

Work in Spitalfields and around Brick Lane

Employment helps explain both why immigrants settled in an urban area and how their experiences changed after arrival. In Spitalfields and around Brick Lane in London’s East End, successive immigrant groups found work in textiles and clothing. Later, catering became increasingly important to Bengali livelihoods.

This was not a simple sequence in which one community disappeared and another replaced it. Employers and workers from different backgrounds worked alongside one another. Within each community, experiences also varied: owning a profitable business was very different from depending on poorly paid workshop employment.

Huguenot silk weaving: skills and unequal rewards

French Huguenot refugees helped establish Spitalfields’ silk-weaving industry in the seventeenth century. They brought skills and knowledge of French fashions, enabling them to produce elaborate fabrics for wealthy customers. Some English weavers initially resented the newcomers because they feared losing business, and challenged their qualifications and workmanship. Skilled immigration could therefore create economic opportunities while also provoking competition.

Silk production involved several specialised occupations. Throwsters twisted silk into thread or yarn; dyers coloured the yarn before weaving; and pattern designers prepared designs on squared paper for weavers to follow. James Leman, associated with Leman Street in Spitalfields, was one such designer. Producing complex patterned cloth required these different skills to work together.

The organisation of the trade created sharp differences in income and security. Master weavers attracted customers and employed designers and journeyman weavers. Successful masters became wealthy and lived in fine houses in Fournier Street. Journeyman weavers, by contrast, worked at the looms, often for twelve hours a day and six days a week. Their earnings were low, and when there was no work there was no income.

The important distinction is between the prosperity of an industry and the prosperity of everyone employed in it. Spitalfields could produce luxurious fabrics while some of its skilled workers experienced insecurity and poverty.

Jewish garment manufacture: an established trade changes

From the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe found employment in the East End’s clothing industry, often called the rag trade. Jewish entrepreneurs became important in garment manufacture, leather goods and tailoring.

The area’s earlier textile workplaces were adapted for clothing production. Many operated as sweatshops, producing large quantities of inexpensive clothing through low-paid labour. As with silk weaving, there was a distinction between owning a business and working in it: the success of Jewish entrepreneurs did not mean that all Jewish workers were prosperous.

This established clothing industry also offered employment to later arrivals. Its workshops, employers and demand for labour helped connect successive migrations to the same part of London.

Bengali workers: from seafaring to tailoring

During the 1920s and 1930s, increasing numbers of Sylheti lascars—sailors from the Sylhet region—found themselves ashore and looking for work in the East End. They earned livelihoods as pedlars, kitchen porters, cooks and tailors, including in Jewish-owned clothing businesses.

Bengali migrants arriving after 1947 followed these earlier employment patterns, finding work in East London’s textile and garment workshops. Others settled in places such as Bradford, Oldham and Birmingham to work in textile mills or car and steel factories. Migration to Britain therefore did not lead everyone directly to Brick Lane.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Bengali men formed much of the low-paid workforce in local Jewish- and Pakistani-owned clothing workshops. They worked long hours as machinists, operating sewing machines; pressers, pressing garments; and tailors, making clothing. Some workshops had been taken over by migrants from newly independent West Pakistan. A smaller number of Bengalis established their own leather and suede businesses.

Local recollections underline the insecurity of this work. A business owner who opened his shop in 1956 remembered very poorly paid tailoring jobs and little security. Another person who began in a Brick Lane clothing factory recalled making clothing for Debenhams and Selfridges: East End production supplied West End retail. The location of manufacture was therefore different from the location where customers bought the finished goods.

Why employment shifted towards catering

Two stages of industrial decline reshaped Bengali employment. In the 1970s, closures of cotton, textile and steel mills in northern manufacturing areas caused unemployment. Some Bangladeshis who had previously settled there moved internally to the East End, hoping to find work. They joined a growing Bengali population that also included new arrivals following Bangladeshi independence.

These internal migrants found jobs in clothing production, while some became cooks and waiters in the expanding Bengali-owned restaurant sector around Brick Lane.

In the 1980s, East End clothing manufacturers struggled to compete with cheaper garments imported from abroad, including Bangladesh. Local textile and leather factories closed, and Jewish factory owners moved out of the area. Workers consequently needed alternative livelihoods.

Catering became increasingly important. During the 1970s and 1980s, Bengali-owned cafés developed into curry restaurants seeking customers beyond the Bengali community. Owners adapted their menus to attract a largely non-Bengali clientele. This was both a response to declining manufacturing opportunities and a way of building businesses around a wider customer market.

Using evidence to explain employment patterns

Workplaces provide clues to these changes. A former resident recalled that clothing premises around Brick Lane in the 1970s had ground-floor showrooms, with machining and cutting taking place in basements and on upper floors. This helps explain how commercial and manufacturing activities could occupy different levels of the same urban building.

Remembered accounts reveal tasks, customers and working conditions that a building alone cannot show. However, they are retrospective and reflect particular people’s experiences. Compare several accounts before generalising about an entire community.

Across the period, the strongest pattern is a combination of continuity and change: textiles and clothing linked successive immigrant groups to the East End, but workers’ occupations, business ownership and markets changed. Industrial decline later made catering a more important source of employment.