Historical Evolution and the Modern Multicultural Community

Brick Lane: a place of arrival and settlement

Brick Lane, in London’s East End, shows how continued migration can change a neighbourhood over centuries. Its community did not develop through one arrival of migrants. Different groups settled at different times, established livelihoods and raised families, while later arrivals added further languages, traditions and connections.

The area’s location helped explain this repeated settlement. London’s docks provided a point of arrival and employment, while the nearby City of London offered further opportunities. Cheap housing and low-paid manual jobs made the East End accessible to newcomers with limited money. Migration could therefore lead to lasting settlement, not just a temporary stay.

Successive arrivals changed the community

French Protestant refugees known as Huguenots arrived in the East End from the 1570s, fleeing religious persecution in Catholic France. Some brought experience as silk weavers and textile merchants and established silk-weaving workshops. Their influence lasted well beyond their arrival: in 1914, Bethnal Green and Spitalfields still had 46 silk-weaving workshops. This is an example of continuity within an area that kept changing.

Irish migrants began arriving from the 1700s, with many working in the docks. Numbers increased sharply in the late 1840s as people escaped starvation during the Irish potato famine and sought work. Rural English people also moved into the East End in search of employment. Not all population change therefore resulted from migration across national borders.

Jewish settlement also developed in stages. Small numbers of Sephardi Jews arrived from the 1650s, escaping persecution by the Spanish Inquisition, often travelling through Amsterdam. Ashkenazi Jewish refugees from Germany and Central Europe arrived from the mid-1700s. The largest influx came from Eastern Europe from 1881 onwards.

By 1899, a quarter of Spitalfields’ population was Jewish. Between the 1880s and the Second World War, Brick Lane became known as ‘Little Jerusalem’. Its many businesses served a community in which Yiddish and English were both used. Further Jewish refugees arrived around the beginning of the Second World War, escaping Nazi persecution. These successive arrivals strengthened an established community rather than creating an entirely new one each time.

From a seafaring community to Banglatown

Connections with the Indian subcontinent also had a long history. Seafarers from Sylhet, in what is now Bangladesh, began arriving and settling in the East End as early as the seventeenth century. Their journeys followed East India Company and later imperial trading routes. The small seafaring population also included men from other imperial territories, such as British Somaliland.

After the Second World War, the settled Sylheti community grew rapidly through further migration from what became East Pakistan and, later, Bangladesh. Bengali migrants established and worked in the curry restaurants for which Brick Lane became famous. Over time, the area became strongly associated with Bangladeshi community life and the identity of Banglatown.

Later arrivals included Somali refugees fleeing civil war in the 1990s and migrant workers from Eastern Europe. Brick Lane’s history is therefore not simply a sequence in which one group completely replaced another. New settlement, established families and surviving connections overlapped, although the prominence of particular communities changed.

Understanding the modern multicultural community

A multicultural community includes both migrants and their descendants. Someone born in Britain may still share a Bangladeshi family background, speak Bengali or feel a strong attachment to Brick Lane. Birthplace alone cannot measure the community’s identity.

The 2011 census illustrates this distinction in Tower Hamlets, the borough containing Brick Lane. It recorded 32% of the borough’s population as having Bangladeshi ethnicity, but 15% as having been born in Bangladesh. It also recorded Bengali as the main language of 18% of residents. These are borough-wide figures, not figures for Brick Lane itself, but they demonstrate the importance of a settled Bangladeshi population that includes British-born generations.

Research conducted up to 2020 found that Brick Lane still held strong significance for local Bangladeshis. Some described it as a safe place to meet other Bengalis and as the heart of their community. One restaurant manager also valued the mixing of people from different backgrounds, seeing it as an opportunity for visitors to learn about Muslim religion and Bengali culture. Multiculturalism here involved both maintaining a particular identity and interacting with people outside that community.

Continued change and different views of belonging

Migration is not the only force changing the area. By the research period ending in 2020, a growing student population, middle-class consumers and more expensive businesses were also changing Brick Lane. This process of gentrification affected who could afford to live and work there.

Some Bangladeshi residents welcomed greater variety and the opportunities associated with new businesses. Others felt that Banglatown’s identity was weakening or that rising housing costs were excluding locally born young people. These were different views within the same community: shared ethnicity did not produce a single response to change.

Some Tower Hamlets homeowners moved to more spacious accommodation in Newham and Redbridge. Younger British Bangladeshis growing up in these areas did not necessarily have the same emotional or economic relationship with Brick Lane as their parents. Nevertheless, some business owners continued to regard it as the centre of Bengali community life.

The important distinction is between changes in where people live and continuity in their sense of belonging. A community can spread beyond its original neighbourhood while retaining connections to it. Brick Lane’s modern multicultural character reflects centuries of settlement, newer arrivals and changing relationships between generations.