Little Italy · Mazzini's London · The Craftsmen of EC1
Heritage guide for Italian descendants
| Location | EC1, Central London — between the City, Islington, and the old Holborn boundary |
| Italian presence | 1700s to present — over three centuries of Italian settlement |
| Peak period | 1890s–1940s, when Clerkenwell was known throughout London as the Italian Quarter |
| Known for | Italian craftsmen, watchmakers, political exiles including Mazzini, the Italian church of St Peter's |
| Today | Italian heritage visible in restaurants, the annual Procession of Our Lady, and the church of St Peter's |
Italian settlement in Clerkenwell predates the 19th century by a full hundred years. The earliest Italian arrivals in London were street traders and itinerant craftsmen: organ grinders who pushed their barrel organs from parish to parish; image-sellers who carried plaster-cast religious figurines and classical busts made in the workshops of Lucca; street musicians and acrobats who moved through London's fairs and markets. These men — and they were almost all men — were predominantly from a handful of towns in the Apennine mountains of north-central Italy, particularly from the Garfagnana valley near Lucca and from the area around Barga.
They settled in Clerkenwell for practical reasons. The area immediately north of the City of London had long been a zone of manufacture and small trades — it housed the Clock and Watchmakers' district, the printing trades, the leather workers. Rents were lower than in the City itself, and the narrow streets around Saffron Hill and Hatton Garden had the kind of lodging-house accommodation that recent immigrants with limited means could afford. By the 1750s, a small but visible Italian community existed in what was then a semi-industrial district on London's northern fringe.
Charles Dickens described this community in Oliver Twist, published in 1837, when he located Fagin's den in the Saffron Hill area. His descriptions of the streets — narrow, crowded, mixed in their populations — capture the neighbourhood as it actually was: a place where recent migrants of various backgrounds lived alongside London's indigenous poor. The Italian street traders Dickens observed were a real presence, recognisable by their barrel organs, their distinctive speech, and the plaster figures they carried on boards on their heads.
Giuseppe Mazzini, the Italian nationalist philosopher and revolutionary, lived in London for a total of over fifteen years between 1837 and 1868 — and his base was Clerkenwell. The area's existing Italian community made it the natural home for Italian political exiles, and the 1830s and 1840s brought a series of Italian radicals to London as the Risorgimento movement for Italian unification was suppressed on the continent. Mazzini was the most famous, but he was part of a broader community of revolutionary Italian intellectuals who found in London — and specifically in Clerkenwell — a place where they could organise, publish, and plot relatively freely.
Mazzini's London years were both productive and miserable. He lived in lodgings in Hatton Garden and in Laystall Street, subsisting on money borrowed from supporters, writing constantly, corresponding with revolutionaries across Europe, and running the school he established for Italian working-class immigrants — a school that combined literacy education with political consciousness-raising. His interception by the British government in 1844, when the Home Office opened his letters at the request of the Austrian government and passed intelligence to Metternich, caused a scandal that was debated in Parliament and made Mazzini briefly famous in Britain.
The Young Italy movement that Mazzini led from Clerkenwell had real consequences. It shaped the political consciousness of the Italian community in London, connected Clerkenwell to the broader European revolutionary movements of 1848, and made the area a node in the international network of liberal nationalism. Garibaldi visited London in 1864 and was received with extraordinary public enthusiasm; his visit to Clerkenwell, where he met the Italian community his movement had inspired, was one of its most emotionally charged moments.
The Italian presence in Clerkenwell was not only political. By the late 19th century, the district had become associated with specific Italian craft trades that gave it a distinctive economic character. The most important of these was the clock and watchmaking trade, centred on Clerkenwell Green and the streets immediately surrounding it. Italian craftsmen — many from the Friuli region in northeastern Italy, which had a long tradition of precision manufacture — found work as finishers, adjusters, and assemblers in the watchmaking workshops that had operated in the area since the 17th century. The Italians brought their own craft traditions, and some established independent workshops that survived into the 20th century.
Hatton Garden, immediately adjacent, was the centre of London's jewellery and gem trade — a trade in which Italian craftsmen also played a significant role, particularly in the goldsmithing and enamelling work that required the kind of fine manual skill that the Italian craft tradition had developed. The mosaic workers who produced decorative floor and wall mosaics for London's new Victorian churches and public buildings were predominantly Italian, many from Friuli, and they constituted a skilled artisan community distinct from the street traders who had come earlier.
Perhaps the most beloved Italian contribution to Clerkenwell's street life was the ice-cream trade. The vendors known as "Hokey-Pokey men" — the name derived from a corruption of the Italian phrase ecco un poco, meaning "here is a little" — were predominantly from the town of Barga in Tuscany and from the surrounding villages. They pushed their tricycle carts through London's streets selling penny ices, and by the 1890s there were hundreds of them operating across the city. In winter they became roasted-chestnut sellers. The ice-cream parlour — the Italian café — that became a fixture of British high streets in the early 20th century grew directly from this Clerkenwell tradition.
The spiritual and social centre of Italian Clerkenwell was — and remains — the church of San Pietro in Clerkenwell, known in English as St Peter's Italian Church. Founded in 1863 on Back Hill, the church was built to serve the Italian community that had by then been established in the area for more than a century. Its foundation was supported by donations from the Italian community in London and by the patronage of Pope Pius IX, who contributed funds. The church building, designed in an Italianate Baroque style, was a deliberate statement of cultural identity in a neighbourhood that was otherwise entirely English in character.
St Peter's served functions that went beyond the purely religious. It maintained registers of Italian births, marriages, and deaths in London — records that are now invaluable to genealogists researching Italian families in Britain. It ran schools for Italian children. It organised the welfare networks that supported Italian immigrants in difficulty. And it anchored the annual Procession of Our Lady of Mount Carmel — a street procession that has been held every July since the 19th century and that continues today, winding through the streets of Clerkenwell behind the statue of the Madonna carried from the church.
The internment of Italian men in Britain during World War Two — Churchill's order to "collar the lot" following Italy's entry into the war in June 1940 — devastated the Clerkenwell Italian community. Men who had lived in England for decades, and whose sons were fighting in the British Army, were rounded up and sent to internment camps on the Isle of Man. Some were on the SS Arandora Star when it was torpedoed in July 1940, and 446 Italian internees died. The community never fully recovered its pre-war size, but St Peter's survived as its anchor.
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