Post-War Irish Builders · The Hammersmith Palais · Shepherd's Bush Irish
Heritage guide for Irish descendants
| Location | W6 and surrounding areas, West London — bordered by Chiswick, Kensington, and Fulham |
| Irish presence | 1840s to present — Victorian-era roots, massively expanded in the post-war decades |
| Peak period | 1950s–1980s, during and after the post-war construction and hospital recruitment boom |
| Known for | Post-war Irish construction workers, the Hammersmith Palais, Shepherd's Bush market Irish traders |
| Today | Large Irish-descent population; active community organisations and Irish cultural venues |
The Irish presence in Hammersmith and Fulham begins not with the post-war era but a century earlier, in the catastrophe of the Great Famine. Like every accessible part of London, the parishes of Hammersmith, Fulham, and Shepherds Bush received a share of the Famine refugees who crossed to England between 1845 and 1852. These were among the poorest of the emigrants: people who could afford the cheapest possible crossing — often on cattle boats to Liverpool — and who had neither the money nor the connections to travel further.
West London had specific economic attractions for Irish labour. The Thames riverside at Hammersmith and Fulham had industries — boat-building, laundries, market gardening, brick-making in the clay fields of what is now the southern part of the borough — that required unskilled labour. The great Victorian building expansion that was pushing the city's boundaries westward created work for Irish navvies and labourers, who dug the foundations of the terraced houses that now characterise the area. The brickfields of Fulham were worked largely by Irish labour throughout the mid-Victorian period.
The Catholic parish of St Peter, Hammersmith, founded in 1848, served a congregation that was predominantly Irish from its earliest years. The parish records for this period document Irish surnames from Connacht, Munster, and Leinster — the geography of the Famine diaspora written in the registers of a west London church. The parish's schools provided education for Irish children whose parents could not afford the fees of the better-established schools.
The transformation of Hammersmith into a major Irish centre happened in the fifteen years after the Second World War. Britain's post-war reconstruction created an insatiable demand for labour: the bomb-damaged cities needed to be rebuilt, the new housing estates needed to be erected, the roads and power stations and hospitals demanded by the welfare state needed to be constructed. Ireland, with a stagnant economy and high unemployment, supplied the workers.
Irish immigration to Britain peaked in the late 1950s. In some years of that decade, more than 50,000 people left Ireland for Britain — a haemorrhage of population that prompted genuine alarm about the viability of the Irish state. The majority were young, from rural backgrounds, and headed for the cities where the work was. London received the largest share. West London — Hammersmith, Shepherd's Bush, Acton, Southall — was one of the primary landing zones, because the concentration of manufacturing and construction work in the area made it a magnet for newly arrived workers.
Shepherd's Bush in particular became heavily Irish in this period. The market — an outdoor covered street market along Shepherd's Bush Green — was substantially run by Irish traders by the 1960s, and the surrounding streets had a density of Irish lodging houses, Irish pubs, and Irish-owned shops that gave the area a character recognisable to any Irish immigrant. Men from Mayo might arrive at Paddington — the nearest mainline terminus to West London — and walk to Shepherd's Bush within an hour, finding themselves in streets where the accents were familiar and the faces were not threatening.
The Hammersmith Palais — opened in 1919 as a dance hall and operating continuously until its closure in 2007 — was one of London's most famous entertainment venues. For the Irish community of West London, it occupied a role analogous to the National Ballroom in Kilburn: it was the place where the weekly dance created social networks and, frequently, marriages. The Palais hosted the Irish showbands that were the backbone of Irish social entertainment in London, and on the nights when Irish bands were playing, the queues outside extended around the block.
The social function of the dance hall in Irish immigrant life cannot be overstated. In a city where lodging houses were single-sex, where workplaces were predominantly male (construction) or female (nursing), and where the broader social world was unfamiliar and sometimes hostile, the dance hall was the institution that enabled men and women to meet. The Friday or Saturday night dance at the Palais was a structured occasion with understood social rules — rules that came from Ireland and that made the proceedings comprehensible to people who might have arrived from rural County Clare six months previously.
The Palais and its competitors — the Hammersmith Odeon also hosted Irish acts; the Broadway in Hammersmith operated as a dance venue — created a social infrastructure that served tens of thousands of Irish Londoners over three decades. The relationships formed in these venues produced families, and those families produced the second-generation Irish community of West London that by the 1970s and 1980s was a substantial political and social force in the borough.
The physical infrastructure of modern West London was built substantially by Irish labour. This is not a metaphor — it is a measurable historical fact. The post-war housing estates of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, the expansion of the Great West Road industrial corridor, the Westway motorway (the elevated A40 that cuts through North Kensington), the extensions to the Underground, the hospital buildings of Charing Cross and Hammersmith hospitals — all of these required the kind of large-scale manual construction work that Irish contractors and their Irish workers supplied.
The contracting firms that dominated post-war Irish construction in London — Murphy, McNicholas, Mowlem, and the Irish subsidiaries of the major British firms — had direct roots in the Irish labour tradition going back to the navvies of the 19th century. The foremen and gang masters were Irish; the workers they recruited were Irish; the networks through which work was found were Irish. A man who arrived in Hammersmith from Connacht in 1955 with no skills and no contacts could find himself employed on a site within days, working alongside men from his own county, speaking his own dialect.
The physical legacy is invisible in the sense that construction workers leave no plaques and are not commemorated in street names. But the borough of Hammersmith and Fulham that exists today — its housing, its roads, its public buildings — was built on Irish backs. The 2001 census recorded that Hammersmith and Fulham had one of the highest proportions of Irish-born residents of any London borough, a testament to a community whose contribution to the physical city had been immense and whose recognition had been minimal.
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