A street with a fascinating history

Fournier Street is an attractive street of early 18th-century townhouses in Spitalfields running between Commercial Street and Brick Lane. It’s named after a man of Huguenot extraction, George Fournier, and many of the houses were originally occupied by wealthy French Huguenots who brought silk-weaving skills from Nantes, Lyons and other cities to London. The houses are notable for fine wooden panelling and elaborate joinery. Silk-weaving was carried out in the uppermost floors to gain the best light for the looms – you can see some of the glazed lofts on the left hand side of the collage. The ground floor rooms commonly served as elaborate showrooms for the finished products.

After the decline of London's silk weaving industry at the end of the Georgian period, both Fournier Street and Brick Lane became established as the heart of the Jewish East End, with a large number of Jews from Eastern Europe and Russia moving here in the 19th century to establish a thriving community. The Jewish Chronicle newspaper (the oldest Jewish English language weekly in the world) was founded here. Later the area became popular with the Bengali community, and nowadays it’s also home to artists and craft markets. The artists Gilbert and George lived in Fournier Street at one point. The famous Petticoat Lane fabric and clothing market is near here, nowadays selling, among other things, sari fabric and fabulous waxed fabrics from west Africa.

At the end of Fournier Street a Huguenot Chapel was built in the 1740s. It later became a Protestant church, then a synagogue at the end of the 19th century, and is now the London Jamme Masjid (Great Mosque) – both the building, and the street itself, are symbolic of the east end as a place of refuge and community for different people over the centuries.