Diverse Spitalfields: A Guide to London's Historic Neighbourhood

Spitalfields has been reshaped by wave after wave of newcomers, each leaving an indelible mark on its streets, buildings, and culture. On this walking tour, you'll trace how Huguenots, Jews, Irish, and Bengalis each claimed this corner of East London, transforming it from a medieval hospital's fields into one of the city's most layered neighbourhoods.

The tour starts at Bishop's Square, where you can still see the excavated remains of a medieval charnel house – a storage facility for bones cleared from overflowing graveyards. From here, you'll head into Folgate Street, once an Irish neighbourhood where famine refugees crowded into single rooms around shared cesspits, then wind through Hanbury Street, Princelet Street, and Fournier Street, uncovering stories of silk weavers, music hall legends, union organisers, and a Jack the Ripper victims along the way.

You'll turn onto Brick Lane, the spine of the old Jewish community where Yiddish was the common language, before looping back through Commercial Street and finishing on Whitechapel High Street, close to Aldgate East station and the docks through which so many of these communities first arrived.

On this 90-minute tour, you'll have a chance to:

• See Denis Severs' House on Folgate Street, a candlelit Huguenot townhouse preserved as if its silk-weaving family just stepped out
• Discover how a large Georgian building on Brick Lane has served successively as a Huguenot chapel, a Methodist church, a synagogue, and a mosque.
• Hear how the singer Bud Flanagan – born Chaim Weintrop at 12 Hanbury Street – adopted the name of his anti-Semitic army sergeant as his stage name
• Discover 19 Princelet Street, a Georgian house whose sealed room, reopened in 1980, revealed the mysterious papers of a vanished Jewish scholar
• Learn how Abe Saperstein, who grew up nearby before emigrating to Chicago, went on to found the Harlem Globetrotters
• See the preserved fascia of the Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor on Brune Street, which fed the community from 1854 until 1992 And much more.

This tour rewards the curious – every doorway and painted ghost sign in Spitalfields has a story worth hearing.