Chapter Twenty-Nine
Brick Lane
The Street That Changed Its Prayers
Why is Brick Lane called Brick Lane?
In brief: Brick Lane is named for the brick and tile manufacture once carried out along the road. It later became a centre of successive migrant communities, industries and places of worship.
Transport context: Brick Lane is a street, not a railway or Underground station.
On 4 May 1978, Altab Ali leaves work in the clothing trade near Brick Lane and begins walking home towards Wapping.
He is twenty-five years old.
The streets around Whitechapel are familiar but not safe. Bengali workers have been insulted, chased and attacked. The National Front distributes propaganda nearby. Young men travel to and from factories in groups when they can. Families learn which routes feel dangerous and which hours make danger more likely.
Ali is attacked in Adler Street, beside the former churchyard of St Mary Matfelon. He does not reach home.1
His murder is sometimes described as the moment Brick Lane changed.
That is too simple. No street changes in a single moment, and racial violence had not begun that evening. But Ali’s death altered what thousands of people were prepared to accept in silence.
Ten days later, around seven thousand Bengalis march from the East End through central London. They walk behind Ali’s coffin. A delegation carries a petition to Downing Street demanding protection and an end to racist violence. The procession turns the death of one garment worker into a public statement that the community around Brick Lane will not be frightened out of the city.2
Brick Lane has always been shaped by people arriving, working and trying to remain.
Its earliest name, however, comes not from migration, religion or food.
It comes from the ground.
Brick Lane began as a path through open land beyond the eastern edge of London.
The road existed by 1510. Bricks were being produced beside it by 1527, and it was known as Brick Lane by 1550.3 The dates matter because a popular explanation claims that its kilns supplied bricks to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666. They may well have contributed to later demand, but the street had carried its name for more than a century before the fire.
The name is older than the story told about it.
Beneath the fields east of the City lay brickearth, a fine deposit suitable for making bricks and tiles. Workers dug it out, mixed and shaped it, allowed the blocks to dry and fired them in kilns. The process required land, fuel, water and space for smoke. It fitted the urban fringe better than the crowded streets within the walls.
The lane took its identity from this work.
There is no celebrated master brickmaker at the beginning of the story. The records preserve leases, production and place names more readily than the people who cut into the earth, carried clay and tended fires. Yet their labour remains embedded in the word.
Brick Lane is named for a manufactured object.
The object began as soil.
During the seventeenth century, London expanded towards the lane.
Houses and workshops followed the road north from Whitechapel. Market activity developed. Trades that needed room or produced noise and smell gathered beyond the City’s jurisdiction. Brick Lane ceased to be merely a route through fields and became a working street.
Beer helped complete the transformation.
Around 1666, Thomas Bucknall established a brewhouse on land west of the lane. Joseph Truman acquired it in 1679. Under the Truman family, the Black Eagle Brewery grew from a local operation into an industrial complex occupying land on both sides of the street.4
Brewing depended upon repetition at an enormous scale.
Malt arrived in bulk. Water rose from wells. Grain was mashed, liquid boiled with hops, beer fermented and stored. Coopers made and repaired casks. Draymen loaded heavy barrels onto horse-drawn wagons. Clerks counted what the labourers moved. The smell of brewing settled over the neighbourhood.
Porter made the brewery rich.
The dark beer could be produced in large quantities, stored and distributed through a growing city. By the nineteenth century, Truman’s had become one of London’s dominant breweries, its buildings, yards, chimneys and stables forming a city within the street.5
Brick Lane was now associated with two furnaces.
One baked clay.
The other boiled beer.
While the brewery expanded, refugees were building another economy nearby.
After the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, French Protestants fled persecution. Many Huguenots settled in Spitalfields, where silk weaving already offered work and where housing outside the City was comparatively cheap. The more affluent established businesses; poorer weavers and families needing support clustered in smaller houses close to their chapels and workshops.6
Their industry changed the buildings.
Silk weaving required light. Houses acquired broad upper windows and attic workrooms where looms could stand beneath the roof. The streets west of Brick Lane filled with people speaking French, preparing silk, winding thread and working at machines whose movement could continue for long hours.
Religion was not separate from survival.
The French churches distributed charity, found doctors and teachers, maintained almshouses and connected newcomers to people who shared a language, trade or place of origin. By 1700, nine Huguenot churches and chapels stood within a small area around Spitalfields.7
In 1743, a new chapel was built at the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street.
La Neuve Église—the New Church—was large, dignified and deliberately visible. Its pediment carried a sundial, the date 1743 and the Latin words UMBRA SUMUS: we are but shadow.8
The motto belonged to classical poetry, but the building would make it feel prophetic.
The worshippers would change.
The walls would remain.
By the nineteenth century, many Huguenot descendants had become English in language and identity or had moved away from Spitalfields. Silk weaving declined under changing fashions, imports and industrial competition.
The chapel changed use.
In the early nineteenth century it was leased by an evangelical society seeking to convert Jews to Christianity. In 1819 it became a Wesleyan Methodist chapel. These years are sometimes compressed into a neat sequence, but the building’s uses were neither effortless nor neutral. Each new congregation entered a structure shaped for someone else’s worship and adapted it to new purposes.
Then Jewish migration transformed the streets around it.
From the 1880s, large numbers of Jews arrived from Eastern Europe, driven by persecution, political restrictions and economic hardship. More than one hundred thousand settled in London’s East End, where cheap rooms, established contacts and work in clothing and small trades could be found.9
Yiddish became common in Whitechapel and Spitalfields.
Tailoring workshops occupied rooms behind shops and above houses. Machiners, pressers, cutters and finishers worked within an industry that could provide a first income but often demanded long hours in cramped conditions. Small synagogues appeared close to homes and workplaces. Some were also friendly societies, meeting rooms and places where a newly arrived man might hear about employment or obtain help during sickness.10
Brick Lane became a public spine through a neighbourhood whose communal life often occupied less visible streets and interiors.
In 1897, the former Huguenot chapel was acquired by Mahzikei Hadas, a Lithuanian Orthodox Jewish congregation whose name means “Strengtheners of the Faith.” The building became the Spitalfields Great Synagogue. Part of the gallery was altered, an ark and bimah installed, and a Torah school placed in the attic.11
The sundial remained over the entrance.
The words did not choose between religions.
We are but shadow.
The brewery continued to dominate the northern stretch of the lane.
Its walls divided industrial space from the street. Horses entered and left. Workers passed through gates according to shifts. Beer moved outward to public houses across London.
The scale could suggest permanence.
It was not permanent.
During the twentieth century, London’s brewing industry consolidated. Consumer tastes changed, large companies merged and old urban production sites became expensive to operate. Truman’s survived as the last major independent London brewer before being absorbed into larger corporate structures. Brewing at Brick Lane ceased in 1989.12
The buildings did not disappear.
The yards and warehouses were reused for shops, markets, studios, offices, events and nightlife. An industrial complex built to control production became a place through which visitors wandered freely.
Once again, Brick Lane kept the shell and changed the activity.
As Jewish families moved towards other parts of London during and after the Second World War, men from Bengal were beginning to settle in the East End.
Some came from Sylhet, a region with long connections to maritime labour and Britain. In the 1950s and 1960s, many arrived as young men expecting to earn money and eventually return. They found work in factories, restaurants, hotels and the clothing trade. Rooms were overcrowded. Housing discrimination was common. Forms, employment systems and public institutions were difficult to navigate in an unfamiliar language.
Cafés and restaurants became more than businesses.
They offered food, addresses, advice and introductions. A man could learn where work might be found, who had a room, how to complete a document or where someone from the same district was living. The Pakistani Welfare Association, later the Bangladeshi Welfare Association, moved to premises at the corner of Fournier Street and Brick Lane in 1964.13
The bachelor settlement gradually became a family community.
Bangladesh became independent in 1971. Women and children joined men who had once imagined their residence in Britain as temporary. Shops changed. Grocers stocked familiar ingredients. Restaurants adapted dishes for British customers while also serving as places of community life.
In 1976, the former Great Synagogue became the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid.14
The building was altered again. A mihrab indicated the direction of Mecca. Ablution facilities and additional prayer spaces were created. Hebrew tablets remained in the attic. Timber columns survived from earlier interiors.
A church had become a synagogue and a synagogue had become a mosque.
This is often presented as a comforting parable of multicultural London. The sequence is extraordinary, but it should not be made too smooth. The communities did not simply exchange keys in a ceremony of mutual understanding. They arrived in different circumstances, faced different hostilities and used the building because existing structures could be adapted more readily than new ones built.
Continuity was practical before it became symbolic.
The Coffin That Crossed London
Altab Ali worked in the same clothing economy that had employed earlier arrivals.
The language around the machines had changed. The work had not entirely changed. Garments still depended on cutting, stitching, pressing, deadlines and people whose names might never appear on the label.
His murder on 4 May 1978 was not the first racist attack in the area. It became the event around which fear turned into organised resistance.
On 14 May, businesses and workshops closed as marchers gathered. Around seven thousand people followed his coffin from Whitechapel towards Hyde Park and Downing Street. The procession was large enough to force the city to see a community that public authorities had often treated as temporary or marginal.15
The march did not end racism.
It changed the balance of response.
Youth organisations, tenant groups and anti-racist campaigners organised patrols, demonstrations and political action. Brick Lane became associated not only with Bengali settlement but with the refusal to surrender that settlement to intimidation.
In 1998, the former St Mary’s Park was renamed Altab Ali Park. Its memorial entrance arch combines Bengali and European decorative forms. The park also contains a replica of the Shaheed Minar, commemorating those killed in the Bengali Language Movement of 1952.16
The place where Ali died became a place where language, memory and belonging are made public.
His name now marks the ground.
Brick Lane still carries the name of bricks.
There is no Brick Lane station.
That fact makes this chapter an exception.
At the southern end, Aldgate East is the nearest Underground station. To the north, Shoreditch High Street opened with the extended East London line in 2010 and carries London Overground trains across a bridge above Brick Lane.17 Whitechapel station lies farther east, now connecting the Underground, Overground and Elizabeth line.
The railway surrounds the street without adopting its name.
Perhaps Brick Lane does not need a roundel.
Its identity was already too dense: kilns, brewery, silk, tailoring, worship, protest, restaurants, markets and migration compressed into one narrow route. A station name would have selected one point. The street’s history depends on movement along its length.
Walk north from Whitechapel Road and the layers appear without arranging themselves politely.
Near the beginning stands Altab Ali Park. Farther on, restaurant signs announce Bangla food to customers from across the world. At Fournier Street, the mosque’s eighteenth-century façade still carries the sundial and its warning about shadow. Hebrew inscriptions survive inside a building where prayers are now spoken in Arabic. Huguenot houses stand nearby with high windows made for looms.
Beyond them rise the walls and chimney of the former Truman brewery. Markets occupy industrial yards. Street art is painted over, photographed and replaced. Fashion is sold in rooms where beer or cloth was once stored.
The visitors change faster than the brickwork.
That is the paradox contained in the name.
Bricks suggest permanence. Brick Lane has survived by changing.
The clay workers disappeared, but their product named the road. The Huguenots moved on, but their chapel remained. Jewish Spitalfields dispersed, but the synagogue left marks in the building. Bangladeshi families converted shops, factories and restaurants into a recognised centre of British Bengali life. Altab Ali did not live to see the community’s resistance alter the street, but the park nearby carries his name.
At the corner of Fournier Street, the sundial continues to measure light across the same wall.
We are but shadow.
The people pass.
The street remembers their shape.
Notes and Sources
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London Borough of Tower Hamlets, “Altab Ali and the Fight for Equality,” for Ali’s murder in 1978 and its role in mobilising the Bangladeshi and wider community: https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/leisure_and_culture/Arts_events_and_information/Altab_Ali_and_The_Fight_for_Equality.aspx. Parliament records him as a twenty-five-year-old textile worker murdered on 4 May 1978: https://edm.parliament.uk/early-day-motion/62219/46th-anniversary-of-the-murder-of-altab-ali. ↩
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Whitechapel Gallery, “Altab Ali 1978 Protests,” for the march of approximately 7,000 people from Brick Lane on 14 May and the petition delivered to Downing Street: https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/altab-ali-1978-protests/. See also Tower Hamlets’ education resource: https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/Documents/Leisure-and-culture/Events/TheFightEqualityResourceTeacherToolkit.pdf. ↩
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A History of the County of Middlesex, “Bethnal Green: Economic History,” records the lane by 1510, brick production by 1527 and the name Brick Lane by 1550: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/middx/vol11/pp168-190. Tower Hamlets’ heritage walk repeats the later association with rebuilding after the Great Fire, but the earlier documentary dates show that this cannot explain the origin of the name: https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/leisure_and_culture/walking/walks/east_end_life_featured_walks/the_heart_of_the_old_east_end.aspx. ↩
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Historic England, list entry for the Directors’ House at Truman’s Brewery, recording a brewhouse built by Thomas Bucknall around 1666 and its purchase by Joseph Truman in 1679: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1252152. ↩
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Survey of London, “The Black Eagle Brewery, Brick Lane,” for the development and buildings of Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Company: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol27/pp116-122. Historic England’s history of brewing notes the later engineering and industrial scale of the site: https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/brewing-industry/bhs-brewing-ind-shier/. ↩
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The National Archives, “Huguenots in England,” for the refugee migration and the Spitalfields silk-weaving community: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/huguenots-in-england/. ↩
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Anne Kershen and Laura Vaughan, “‘There was a Priest, a Rabbi and an Imam…’: an analysis of urban space and religious practice in London’s East End, 1685–2010,” for the clustering of Huguenot chapels, silk weavers, charity and social support in Spitalfields: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1363358/7/Vaughan_Kershen%2526Vaughan_MaterialReligion_pre-pub.pdf. ↩
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Historic England, list entry for Brick Lane Jamme Masjid, for the chapel’s construction in 1743–4, its design and the sundial bearing the motto Umbra sumus: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1240697. ↩
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University College London, “A Memory Map of the Jewish East End,” for the migration of Eastern European Jews from the 1880s and the development of Whitechapel and Spitalfields as the centre of a major Jewish community: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/casa/research/completed-projects/memory-map-jewish-east-end. ↩
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Kershen and Vaughan, “‘There was a Priest, a Rabbi and an Imam…’,” for small synagogues as places of worship, friendly societies, social centres and informal sources of employment information within the tailoring district. ↩
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Historic England, list entry 1240697, for the acquisition by the Lithuanian Orthodox Mahzikei Hadas congregation in 1897, the conversion into the Spitalfields Great Synagogue and the Torah school in the attic: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1240697. ↩
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The National Archives’ catalogue for Truman, Hanbury, Buxton & Co. records that the Black Eagle Brewery continued operating until 1988: https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/0cc5c73c-97e6-4266-89c3-223e05d68932. Brewing is generally recorded as ceasing at the Brick Lane site in 1989. ↩
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Kershen and Vaughan, “‘There was a Priest, a Rabbi and an Imam…’,” for Bengali settlement in the 1950s and 1960s, restaurants as community and advice centres, and the welfare association’s move to the corner of Fournier Street and Brick Lane in 1964. ↩
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Historic England, list entry 1240697, for the synagogue’s conversion into a mosque in 1976 and subsequent alterations, including the retained Hebrew tablets and later prayer facilities: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1240697. ↩
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Whitechapel Gallery, “Altab Ali 1978 Protests”: https://www.whitechapelgallery.org/altab-ali-1978-protests/; Tower Hamlets, The Fight for Equality teacher toolkit: https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/Documents/Leisure-and-culture/Events/TheFightEqualityResourceTeacherToolkit.pdf. ↩
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Tower Hamlets records the renaming of St Mary’s Park in 1998: https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/leisure_and_culture/Arts_events_and_information/Altab_Ali_and_The_Fight_for_Equality.aspx. The borough’s Whitechapel High Street conservation appraisal describes the memorial arch and the replica Shaheed Minar: https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/Documents/Planning-and-building-control/Development-control/Conservation-areas/Whitechapel-High-Street.pdf. ↩
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Transport for London, The New London Overground Lines, for the 2010 opening of the extended route serving Shoreditch High Street and its relationship to Brick Lane: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/the-new-london-overground-lines.pdf. Tower Hamlets identifies Aldgate East as the nearest Underground station for the southern Brick Lane area: https://www.towerhamlets.gov.uk/lgnl/leisure_and_culture/local_attractions/discover_tower_hamlets/eating_and_drinking/spitalfields_and_banglatown.aspx. ↩