A stroll through Spitalfields, from the Huguenot silk weavers to the shadows of the Victorian East End, with qualified Westminster guide Pat Tuggey.
Spitalfields wears its history in layers, and this walk peels them back one street at a time.
In the late seventeenth century, Huguenot refugees fleeing France settled here and turned Spitalfields into the beating heart of London's silk trade. You still see it today in the tall, elegant weavers' houses of Fournier Street, built with wide attic windows to catch the light for the looms. That is the silk.
The soup comes later, in the waves of migration that followed. Around every corner sits the evidence of communities who arrived with little and built lives here, from the former Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor on Brune Street to the curry houses and sari shops of Brick Lane. And the shadows belong to the darker East End, the poverty and the crime that pressed up against all this industry and faith.
Pat brings it together through the people, not just the landmarks, so you leave seeing Spitalfields the way a local historian does.
A qualified guide with the Westminster Tour Guides and Lectures Association, Pat has spent years learning the streets and stories of London. His walks are warm, unhurried and full of the human detail that brings a place to life.