LONDON IN THE 18TH CENTURY / SPITALFIELDS

The recovery of London expanded at a rapid pace after the Great Fire. As the city at the heart of the Age of Enlightenment, it was a consumer society par excellence with wealth and squalor side by side. It was a rough and ready time, elegant and refined: a time of passionate preaching and riotous disorder. This is the time of Robert Adam, Canaletto, William Hogarth and the Mob, and the course will illustrate the life that Londoners lived in every stratum of society.

Despite modern changes and wartime bombing much of the 18th century survives with the elegant house-workshops of the Huguenot silk workers. We will explore areas such as Artillery Lane, Folgate Street and Fournier Street. Radical changes were to come after the collapse of the silk industry with waves of immigrant
settlers, Jews and South Asians. You will see the landmarks of Jewish social welfare and of Brick Lane today in the most cosmopolitan area of all London.

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