About this history project: What does it mean to find Ireland in London?
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St. Patrick's Day Parade, London 2012.
Image: garryknight, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
When I moved to this city in the late 1980s, for many Kilburn embodied Ireland in London. A “33rd county” created by waves of migration in the decades following the Second World War - but even then, Kilburn did not represent a universal “Irish London”. The archetypal enclaves of Kilburn, Cricklewood and Camden had long co-existed with the Irish Club in Belgravia. And some people chose living in London over living in “Irish London”.
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Today, Irishness is but one strand within the diverse tapestry of Kilburn life because settlement patterns in a city inevitably shift and change over time. As the oldest and (until the late nineteenth century) largest ‘foreign’ presence in London, people of Ireland have been living, working and moving across the city for centuries
Being "Irish" in London's past
“Muna bhfuil scríobh nó fiú labhairt an Bhéarla agat, tá sé deacair do rian a fhágáil ar an stair” ​
(If you can’t write or even speak English, it’s difficult to leave your mark on history) [1]
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Examining the entangled histories of Ireland and London reveals how collective identities - that shared sense of belonging to a particular group, community or nationality - may change fundamentally over time, all the while 'use of the same term produces a semblance of continuity'.[2] ​Because what did it mean to be “Irish” in London during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when concepts of nationhood were still evolving and geopolitical relations between the islands of Britain and Ireland were in repeated states of flux? How would any or all of class, religion, gender and ethnicity have influenced how a person from Ireland experienced London life? What was the impact of arriving in London speaking Irish instead of, or as well as, English?
​The one thing we can say with certainty is that there has never been a universal “Irish London”. Rather, a heterogeneous group of people kept moving from the island of Ireland to the ever-expanding metropolis, for different reasons and making their presence felt in different ways. Whether they were the Irish weavers, labourers, and street-sellers of East London or Arthur Wellesley of Dublin and Kitty Pakenham of Longford, living as the Duke and Duchess of Wellington in the grandeur of Apsley House, they collectively represented Ireland in London.
Choosing historical subjects
​"Ireland was a political and social system and Ireland formed everyone who lived in it.
They could hate Ireland, love it, hate each other, it mattered not. They were of Ireland: hence Irish" [3]
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This expansive definition of being 'of Ireland' creates space for considering the full range of how Ireland was present in London in a way that a reductive definition of Irish identity and tribal loyalties does not. It allows parallel explorations of two English-born Lord Deputies of Ireland, the 1st Duke of Ormond James Butler and the Cromwellian general Charles Fleetwood, living only a few miles apart in seventeenth-century Restoration London. It helps us to see the island of Ireland not just in a binary relationship with the island of Britain, but as part of a global web of connections and imperial entanglements. It encompasses people of colour like Rachael Baptist, a native of eighteenth-century Ireland, and India-born Sake Dean Mahomet, a long-time sojourner in Ireland who with his Irish-born wife and children made early nineteenth-century London their home.
Finding Ireland past & present
​"I survey the past not only through lenses of memory and history but also through present-day perspectives" [4]
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The multifaceted nature of Ireland in London’s past resonates in our present. Just as there is more than one way of being Irish today, there was more than one way of being Irish in London then. Exploring those diverse experiences and identities makes the history of Ireland in London more complicated than a tale of poor Catholic migration over the centuries - but also more interesting. How might it feel to travel through London today knowing more about the many different peoples of Ireland in whose footsteps we are walking?
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Maybe this project can help us to create together an alternative version of the ancient Irish tradition of dinnseanchas - the lore of places. One which brings back to life the many ways in which Ireland has been present in London over the centuries, especially those people who are outside of our collective memories and where few physical traces remain of how their lives touched the fabric of this city we still live in today.
Footnotes:
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David O’Shaughnessy, 'Introduction: “Tolerably Numerous”: Recovering the London Irish of the Eighteenth Century', Eighteenth-Century Life, 39:1 (2015), 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1215/00982601-2834070
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Christopher Tilley, 'Introduction: Identity, place, landscape and heritage', Journal of material culture, 11:1-2 (2006), 7-32. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183506062990
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Donald H. Akenson, The Irish diaspora: a primer (Toronto : P.D. Meany Co. ; Belfast : Institute of Irish Studies, Queen's University of Belfast, 1993), 7.
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David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country – Revisited (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 1.