Robinson's Quest

Spitalfields: Arrival City

Spitalfields is where four waves of newcomers - each unwelcome everywhere else - arrived, worked, and reused the very same buildings, leaving almost no monuments behind. This is the arrival-and-reuse story of the East End, not the other one you may have heard about. Seven stops, under a kilometre of flat, level streets: a market trading on a 1682 charter, a vast church built with coal-tax money, a street of houses with oversized attic windows built for silk looms, a plain brick corner building that has been four congregations' place of worship across three faiths for nearly 300 years, a merchant's house too fragile now to enter, a former brewery you walk through for free, and a street that still carries the name of the community living on it today. Budget about 1 hour 30 minutes brisk, or 2.5-3 hours with a proper dwell at the market and the brewery. Stop 4 is a working neighbourhood mosque, busiest around Friday midday prayers - the route checks in from the opposite pavement and asks you to keep the pavement clear. Everything on this route solves from free public ground.