When

Where

Summary

Thursday 12 October 2017 | 6.30pm–8.30pm
Assembly point: Outside Aldgate station
Registration free (booking essential)

The first in a series of new guided walks led by literary historian Dr Nadia Valman of Queen Mary, University of London, exploring London through the eyes of migrant writers from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1960s.

This walk unearths the lives of Irish migrants in Whitechapel and Wapping in the mid-nineteenth century.

Hardly any trace remains today of the large population of Irish men and women who once lived in the East End. Fleeing famine in Ireland, they settled around Rosemary Lane, now Royal Mint Street, and played a major role in the workforce of the docks.

Our walk will consider Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew’s meticulous interviews as a source for recovering the lives of Irish Londoners, looking at work and home life, and how links to Ireland and Irish Londoners were sustained through religious practice and mutual support.

Book here

Other walks in this series:

Fragments of Jewish Whitechapel (Sunday 29 October, 2.30pm)

Colonials in the Metropole: Migrant Bloomsbury (Saturday 4 November, 2.30pm)

Left Luggage: Reading Sam Selvon in Waterloo Station (Saturday 18 November, 2.30pm)