Updated 22 August 2024: Just to highlight this blog post is still a work-in-progress, published early in draft form for my MA history project assessment. The post will be completed and re-published in the coming months. Thank you for your patience. Do please get in touch via the Comments section below or Contact me directly if you have any questions or comment about this topic in the meantime.
In May 2023, you might have noticed someone walking around Whitechapel - stopping and looking around then staring intently at their phone, over and over again. That's what it's like to use digital map overlays on your phone when you're trying to pin down the location of something that's no longer there.
On this occasion, I found the location of the eighteenth-century Roman Catholic mission chapel on Virginia Street, London E1, below street level, inside an underground car park. The experience of using historical maps to explore the contemporary city reminds us how much the urban landscape exists as a palimpsest where layers are constantly laid down on top of each other, sometimes erasing the physical traces of what was there before. But historical maps can help us to "see" what is no longer there to be seen.
Virginia Chapel is an example of how little physical evidence remains of one particular form of Ireland in 18th century London: the less well-off Irish Catholic workers and destitute poor who had been settling since the 17th century in the parishes of east London, from Whitechapel and St. George-in-the-East to the riverside settlements of Wapping and Limehouse.
Featured locations:
Rosemary Lane & Irish settlement
‘Rosemary Lane, a street just east of the City wall and the Tower of London had an impressive reputation for being a "disorderly" neighbourhood...' - Janice Turner, An Anatomy of a 'Disorderly' Neighbourhood: Rosemary Lane and Rag Fair c. 1690-1765, PhD Theses Collection, University of Hertfordshire (2015), p. 2.
1736: "Down with the wild Irish" - a riot in Rosemary Lane
"...this complaint against the Irish . . . is founded upon greater numbers than ordinary . . . of Irish being here, and not only working at hay and corn harvest, but letting themselves out to all sorts of ordinary labour considerably cheaper than the English labourers have, and numbers of them being employed by the weavers upon like terms...."
- Sir Robert Walpole, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1736
[quoted in Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1984). Reprint of the 1964 ed. published by Harper & Row, New York, p. 123-124].
Being Catholic in 18th century London
'The Irish also had a large base in East London and particularly on Rosemary Lane and while they did not openly worship, Irish Catholics were evidently a strong presence in this neighbourhood and, while normally accepted as a part of the community, were at other times subject to discrimination by their English protestant neighbours'.
"The side of the chapel ran along Virginia Street, but the entrance was at the end [of the chapel] nearest the river, in King's Head Alley from which led off a warren of tiny courts - a useful route to take if you wanted to shake off a pursuer. A doorkeeper scrutinised everyone who came in, and when everyone was inside the door was locked. Another man kept watch in the street outside, and after a few moments rapped on the door to indicate that there were no suspicious characters hanging around, so Mass could begin"
You can see the exact location of the rebuilt Virginia Street chapel marked up on the extract above from the Richard Horwood's 1799 map of London, a screenshot taken of complete map on Layers of London.
1780: The Gordon Riots & 'the mob'
1778 Catholic Relief Act (also known as 1778 Papists Act) was designed to remove some of the legal discriminations against Catholics in England by allowing Catholics to join the army and buy land, subject to taking an oath of allegiance. Opposition to the Act, led by Scottish MP Lord Gordon, culminated in widespread rioting across London for several days in early June 1780.
On Monday 5 June, the rioters destroyed the Catholic mission chapel just off the Ratcliff Highway on Virginia Street, one of the few public Catholic chapels in London at this time.
The offer made by the Irish men of Wapping, many of whom worked as coal-heavers, to defend the chapel had been declined by the Home Secretary for fear of the violence escalating further. [Jean Maynard, pp 9-10].
The Irish coal-heavers of Wapping
'Coal heaving attracted none of the celebratory epithets written about maritime labour and yet its role in sustaining the economic success of London was no less vital. Coal was the lifeblood of the capital as industrialisation took off in the eighteenth century'
- John Marriott, Beyond the Tower: A History of East London (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 84-85.
Can we trace a line in the formation of a particularly masculine east London Irish identity
from the Irish coal-heavers of 18th century Wapping
to the Irish dockers celebrated for their role in the Battle of Cable Street 1936? https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/heritage/battle-of-cable-street-when-the-irish-helped-beat-back-the-fascists-1.2801873
Coming soon - closing reflection on the closure of Virginia Chapel in the heart of Rosemary Lane followed by the 1856 opening of the Catholic 'Cathedral of the East End', St. Mary & St. Michael's Parish Church on Commercial Road. And the disappearance of the chapel site and surrounding area where Virginia Street ran down to the Thames following the expansion of the London docks.
How do we remember, what do we remember when we can no longer see the physical traces of what went before? Does our collective memory 'stop' at what we can see today?
Blog sources & further resources
Rosemary Lane and 'Rag-Fair'
Representations of 'the mob'
One of the many free public education lectures given at Gresham College, in the City of London includes this 2013 lecture by Professor Ian Haywood on The Gordon Riots of 1780: London in Flames, a Nation in Ruins.
Archival traces of Ireland in Virginia Street
"There is hardly an entry in the [1832-1840] register without at least a hint of an Irish connection"
- Virginia Street Chapel, St. George in the East, E. London : baptisms, 01 Jan. 1832-31 Dec. 1840 / transcribed by [the] Catholic Family History Society.
Available to view at Tower Hamlets Archive LCF00754
[Note re: analysis of Irish names in the surviving Virginia Chapel Baptism Registers
- see summary table in Michael Henderson, Adrian Miles, Don Walker, Brian Connell and Robin Wroe-Brown, 'He Being Dead Yet Speaketh' : Excavations at Three Post-Medieval Burial Grounds in Tower Hamlets East London 2004-10 (London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2013).]
History of work through trade-cards
See for example the British Museum's collection of coal merchant trade-cards
A collection of eighteenth-century London trade-cards on the Spitalfields Life history blog
Another collection of eighteenth-century trade-cards from the All Things Georgian blog with an emphasis on women-owned businesses
More resources - coming soon
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