London’s Italian Renaissance , How Clerkenwell Became the Capital’s Most Bilingual Neighborhood

There is a church at number 136 on Clerkenwell Road that doesn’t seem to belong in London. The facade is a twin-arched loggia and portico in the style of a Roman basilica, with a central statue of Christ surrounded by mosaics and alcoves in an architectural grammar that is completely different from the street surrounding it, which is made up of Georgian terraces, Victorian converted warehouses, and the occasional brutalist block.

An Italian immigrant community that had been constructing itself in this area of EC1 for the preceding thirty years provided funding for the building, which was dedicated in April 1863 and modeled after the Basilica of San Crisogono in Trastevere by an Irish architect working from Roman directions. The idea was aided by Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian nationalist who was then living in exile in London. More than 160 years later, it is still the only Roman basilica-style church in Britain.

An Anglo-Italian community from all across London and beyond still attends Mass there. The surrounding neighborhood has undergone multiple price increases, gentrification, and repurposing. The church remains intact. The first Italians to arrive in Clerkenwell in the 1830s were talented craftspeople who were drawn to the district’s pre-existing trades focused around Hatton Garden, including watchmakers, jewelers, and producers of optical instruments.

The area’s historic townhouses had been transformed into workshops and light manufacturing spaces—basement workshops, ground-floor stores, and living quarters above—because they were no longer desirable as residences. This physical arrangement was appropriate for the unique blend of household life and craft production that the early northern Italian immigrants brought with them. Organ grinders, knife grinders, and plaster statuette makers, many of whom were from Lucca in Tuscany, were among the poorer immigrants brought in by the Napoleonic Wars.

The neighborhood welcomed them into a community that was already developing its own commercial and linguistic infrastructure. The 1840s and 1850s saw the introduction of ice cream. Italian street sellers became a mainstay of Victorian London’s street life after Carlo Gatti, a Swiss-Italian immigrant in 1847, founded the commercial ice trade. He collected ice from the Regent’s Canal at King’s Cross and sold it from carts throughout Clerkenwell and beyond. By the time the church opened in 1863, the Italian language was widely used in commerce across what English-speaking Londoners had come to refer to as Little Italy.

The community, which was encompassed by Clerkenwell Road, Farringdon Road, and Rosebery Avenue, had about 12,000 Italian-born residents during its height, which occurred between the 1880s and the first decade of the 20th century. The streets of Saffron Hill, which Charles Dickens had used as a backdrop for Oliver Twist a generation before, were now a bilingual community where Italian dialects and English overlapped in the same way that the community’s trades overlapped—not neatly divided but deeply interwoven.

The most obvious connection between that world and this one is the yearly July procession of the Madonna del Carmine, which has ringed St. Peter’s Church since the 1880s with the exception of times of war. In July, thousands of people still wait in line along Clerkenwell Road to see the sculptures pass, and the audience responds with warm, timely applause that is very Italian.

Decades separated the two primary rounds of the community’s downfall. The first occurred during the war: Italian citizens in Britain were subject to detention orders after Italy sided with Germany in 1940, and the Clerkenwell community disintegrated as families were split up, deported, or moved. Many never came back.

The second dispersal was gentrification, a slower, more subdued process that gained momentum in the 1980s and picked up speed in the 1990s as Clerkenwell changed from a light industrial and working-class residential area to one of London’s most expensive design districts, with advertising agencies and architecture firms taking up residence in the very workshops where Italian craftsmen had established their businesses. The surviving Italian-speaking community was priced out by the rents associated with that change, which also completed the wartime disruption’s geographic distribution into Soho, Islington, and suburban London.

The church, the annual procession, and a few businesses with names that have endured through several incarnations are some of the most enduring examples of the Italian presence that can be seen in Clerkenwell today. The everyday bilingual life that made Saffron Hill unique has been replaced by something sleeker and far less interesting. The congregation is still served by St. Peter’s. Thousands of people still attend the July procession.

One of London’s oldest Italian supply stores, Terroni of Clerkenwell, has persisted over the years in a number of different formats. However, the neighborhood’s “Italian soul,” as the Italian community itself sometimes refers to it, is now more of a meeting spot than a place where the diaspora lives on a regular basis. This type of bilingualism is very different from what Saffron Hill originally carried; it is one in which the second language is used in ceremonies rather than in everyday interactions.