A Shoreditch local journalist reads about a father furious at his son taking his bride’s surname and walks to the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, where one building has been a church, a chapel, a synagogue and a mosque
Centuries Of Heritage, Or Not
The London Prat this week asked whether a son should take his fiancee’s last name, through the story of a retired insurance manager from Ealing who threatens to boycott the wedding, withdraw funding and disinherit the family Labrador after his son agrees to take his bride’s surname. The father appeals to centuries of family heritage, which on inspection go back exactly as far as a button maker in Birmingham in 1892.
I read it and walked to the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, on the Tower Hamlets edge of Shoreditch, to look at a building that understands heritage better than any father in Ealing. It has changed its name, its purpose and its congregation several times in less than three centuries, and it is still standing.
Church, Chapel, Synagogue, Mosque
The building at 59 Brick Lane was built in 1743 as a Protestant church for the Huguenots, French refugees who fled religious persecution and settled in Spitalfields, where many worked as silk weavers. As the Huguenot community dispersed, the building became a Methodist chapel in the early nineteenth century. Later in the century, as Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe arrived in large numbers, it became a synagogue. In the 1970s, reflecting the growth of the Bangladeshi community, it became a mosque, today known as the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid. A sundial on its wall carries a Latin inscription often translated as we are shadows.
Few buildings in Britain tell the story of migration so directly. Each community that arrived in this corner of East London found refuge here, worshipped here and, eventually, moved on or changed, leaving the building to the next. The name on the door changed. The building endured.
The building sits at the end of Fournier Street, lined with tall early eighteenth-century houses built for prosperous Huguenot silk merchants and weavers. Many still have the wide upper windows that let light fall on the looms. Later, these houses became workshops, tenements and rag-trade premises, then homes again for a new generation of wealthier residents. Every one of them has, in its own way, changed its name and purpose several times. The whole street is a lesson in how buildings outlive the families who first named them.
What A Name Is For
The Ealing father believes that a name is a fortress, something to be defended against change. Brick Lane suggests a different view. Names here are layers. The street itself is signed in both English and Bengali. The area is known as Banglatown, a name formally recognized in local ward names in the early 2000s, while many older residents still talk about Spitalfields and others remember the Jewish East End of their grandparents. The streets around, Fournier, Princelet, Wilkes, carry Huguenot and Georgian echoes. Nobody here thinks one name cancels another.
Tower Hamlets Council’s cultural trail captures some of this history at points along the street, including the stretch of Brick Lane north of Woodseer Street, where the old breweries and markets meet the modern weekend crowds. Walking it is a lesson in how places absorb new identities without losing their character.
The Surname Question, Locally
In a neighbourhood shaped by so many cultures, the surname question in the Prat piece takes on different shapes. Naming traditions vary enormously. In many Bangladeshi families, for example, surnames have historically been used differently from the English pattern, with family names, titles and given names combined in various ways, and the idea of a single fixed surname passing down the male line is not universal. Jewish families arriving in the East End often anglicized their names to make life easier in a sometimes hostile country. Huguenot families did the same two centuries earlier, turning French names into English ones. In East London, changing your name has frequently been an act of survival, not a betrayal.
Seen from Brick Lane, the Ealing father’s anxiety looks almost quaint. His family name has survived one generation of button-making and three of insurance. The building on the corner has survived four faiths.
Heritage Under Pressure
There is a serious local edge to all this. Brick Lane has changed rapidly in recent years. Many of the curry houses that made it famous have closed, often citing rising rents, falling footfall and changing tastes, while vintage shops, bars, coffee chains and weekend markets have multiplied. Long-standing Bangladeshi businesses and residents have campaigned against developments they fear will accelerate that change. The argument is not unlike the Ealing father’s, but with far more at stake: who gets to define what a place is, and whether its newest arrivals will push out the ones who came before.
The building at 59 Brick Lane suggests that change is inevitable. It does not suggest that every change is equal. The Huguenots, Jewish families and Bangladeshi families who used it all came as communities seeking refuge and work. The pressures on Brick Lane today come as much from money as from migration. That is a different kind of renaming, and many residents are right to question it.
A Note On Shadows
You can follow my reporting on Brick Lane, Spitalfields and Shoreditch on my author page. Standing beneath the sundial on a grey afternoon this week, with the Friday prayers ending and the market stalls packing up across the road, I thought about its inscription. We are shadows. It is a fine motto for anyone worried about the survival of their surname. The names pass. The neighbourhood remains. And the Labrador, wherever it is, has almost certainly never cared.