The Most Catholic Street in England?
St Giles in the Fields (in blue) and Lewkner Lane (red), from a section of Jacques Rocques, 1746 map of London. If you’ve ever studied the Irish in eighteenth or nineteenth-century London, you’ve...
View ArticleWhipped and deported: England’s historic resistance to free movement of labour
Authorisation to send a vagrant back to her parish, 1784. Powys County Archives For some in the Leave campaign, the right to freedom of movement enshrined in the European Union was a bitter pill to...
View ArticleWhere London’s Vagrants Weren’t From
Vagrants expelled from Middlesex (1777-1786) by parish of origin, using the ‘Vagrant Lives’ dataset[1] and the ‘GIS of the Ancient Parishes of England and Wales 1500-1850’ shapefiles.[2] Parishes...
View ArticleIrish Vagrant ≠ Scottish Vagrant
Figure 1: Zannoni Map of the British Isles, 1771.[1]Scotland and Ireland were both far away from London as far as eighteenth century travellers were concerned. For the Irish, getting to London involved...
View ArticleThe Month That Urban Middlesex Had No Vagrants
Figure 1: The Boundaries of Westminster, Middlesex, the City of London, and Southwark.[1]In the late eighteenth century, ‘London’ meant many things. Technically, ‘London’ was the ‘City of London’, the...
View ArticleUnintentional Migrants to London
This is the slightly-altered text of the paper I delivered at the British Society of Eighteenth Century Studies (BSECS) conference in Oxford, January 2017. Figure 1: Adam Crymble, ‘Depots used by Henry...
View ArticleA Network of Vagrant Gaols
Once declared a vagrant by a magistrate, the person would be taken into custody and would begin their journey back ‘home’. Home in this context meant the parish where they held legal settlement, which...
View ArticleWere the Irish in 19th century London more criminal, or just easier to catch?
Adapted from a section of: Rudolph Ackermann, ‘The Pillory’, Microcosm of London, 1807. The early nineteenth-century Irish in London are often remembered as poor, semi-criminal slum dwellers,...
View ArticleTrue crime: why the Irish counterfeiting wave of the late 18th century was a...
Satirical Bank Note (1820), highlighting how easy it was to be hanged for spending fake money, despite how prevalent it was. George Cruikshank and William Hone. The claim that immigrants or minorities...
View ArticleRudolph Ackermann, I am an Immigrant
Originally posted on the ‘I am an Immigrant‘ Poster Campaign website, hosted by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI). My Story: We must thank a German immigrant named Rudolph...
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