Religion and riots in Irish Whitechapel: Virginia Street E1
- N16Breda
- Nov 18, 2025
- 8 min read
In May 2023, you might have noticed someone walking around Whitechapel - stopping and looking around then staring intently at their phone, over and over again. That's what it's like to use digital map overlays on your phone when you're trying to pin down the location of something that's no longer there.
On this occasion, I found the location of the eighteenth-century Roman Catholic mission chapel on Virginia Street, London E1, below street level, inside an underground car park. The experience of using historical maps to explore the contemporary city reminds us how much the urban landscape exists as a palimpsest where layers are constantly laid down on top of each other, sometimes erasing the physical traces of what was there before. But historical maps can help us to "see" what is no longer there to be seen.
Virginia Chapel is an example of how little physical evidence remains of one particular aspect of Ireland in 18th century London: the less well-off Irish Catholic workers and destitute poor who had been settling since the 17th century in the parishes of east London, from Whitechapel and St. George-in-the-East to the riverside settlements of Wapping and Limehouse.
Updated 14 Novemeber 2025: This blog post was originally published 22 August 2024 in draft form as part of my MA Public History dissertation submission.
Featured locations:
Rosemary Lane & Irish settlement
As early as 1605, Sir William Waad the Lieutenant of the Tower of London had cause to write to the Secretary of State for England about “the great offence that is taken by occasion of the great number of Irish people that frequent these parts". It's thought that this early Irish settlement east of the Tower reflected the arrival of refugees from Ireland who were fleeing the protracted conflict of the Nine Years War in Ulster.
A century later, there was a strong Irish presence in East London especially in the area south of the notorious Rosemary Lane (subsequently renamed Royal Mint Street).
'Rosemary Lane, a street just east of the City wall and the Tower of London had an impressive reputation for being a "disorderly" neighbourhood...'
Rosemary Lane was considered a 'disorderly' neighbourhood because of the activities and people associated with the selling and buying of old clothes in the daily market (bar Sundays) of Rag Fair. As historian Janice Turner notes, 'This is where the poor of the City shopped and where the victims of crime looked for their lost property', making Rosemary Lane 'the epitome of a neighbourhood where clothes and other goods could be pawned, bought and sold with no questions asked'.
1736: "Down with the Irish" - a riot in Rosemary Lane
But life in the Rosemary Lane area could sometimes be ‘disorderly’ in a more frightening sense for the local Irish population. At the end of July 1736, riots broke out in Shoreditch and Spitalfields in protest at English workers on a church building having been replaced by cheaper Irish labour. Rioting continued for several nights and spread to Rosemary Lane. At the Old Bailey trials of the rioters, witnesses told the court how the cry of the mob was “Down with the Irish” as they attacked Irish-occupied homes around Rosemary Lane and Rag Fair.
"This complaint against the Irish . . . is founded upon greater numbers than ordinary . . . of Irish being here, and not only working at hay and corn harvest, but letting themselves out to all sorts of ordinary labour considerably cheaper than the English labourers have, and numbers of them being employed by the weavers upon like terms."
Catholic & Irish in 18th century London
The association of Catholicism with the Irish immigrant presence was reflected in their attendance at two Catholic mission chapels, the first set up in 1760 on nearby Virginia Street with a second established on Nightingale Lane in 1764. These allowed for clandestine worship at a time when the civil rights of Catholics in England were still severely curtailed.
'The side of the chapel ran along Virginia Street, but the entrance was at the end [of the chapel] nearest the river, in King's Head Alley from which led off a warren of tiny courts - a useful route to take if you wanted to shake off a pursuer. A doorkeeper scrutinised everyone who came in, and when everyone was inside the door was locked. Another man kept watch in the street outside, and after a few moments rapped on the door to indicate that there were no suspicious characters hanging around, so Mass could begin'
1780: The Gordon Riots
In 1778, the Catholic Relief Act (also known as the 1778 Papists Act) was passed with the intention of removing some of the legal discriminations against Catholics in England by allowing Catholics to join the army and buy land, subject to taking an oath of allegiance. But on Friday 2 June 1780, a demonstration opposing the Act led by the virulently anti-Catholic Scottish MP Lord George Gordon precipitated seven days of rioting across London.
In what became one of the most serious outbreaks of civil unrest ever seen in London, the mob attacked private homes, the Irish labouring community in Moorfields, and a wide range of institutions from prisons to pubs, the Bank of England and Catholic places of worship. After six days of violence, martial law was declared and the military used to restore order with lethal force.
1780: The Gordon Riots in Rosemary Lane
On Monday 5 June 1780, rioters attacked the Virginia Street and Nightingale Lane chapels, two of the few public Catholic chapels in London at this time. The Catholic chapels attached to the Sardinian Embassy in Lincolns Inn Fields and the Bavarian Embassy in Soho had already been attacked on Friday 2 June, followed by the Catholic chapel in Moorfields on Sunday 4 June.
'The Irishmen of Wapping had already spoken to their priest about the situation, offering to defend the chapel, and Fr Coen had gone in the morning to see the Home Secretary...However, the Minister discouraged the idea, promising that troops would be sent to Virginia Street, and asked that the priests use their influence to prevent the Irish from fighting the rioters'.
Troops did stand guard at Virginia Chapel but were not given the order to take action when the mob arrived. The influence of the local Catholic priests can be inferred from the fact that Irish community did not resist the rioters as they destroyed the chapel.
Despite the fact that Catholic mission chapels had questionable legal status, they were included in a scheme set up by the government of the day to pay compensation to private property owners for damage caused by the rioters. You can see the exact location of the rebuilt Virginia Street chapel marked up on this extract from the Richard Horwood's 1799 map of London.
From Virginia Chapel to 'Cathedral of the East'
The rebuilt Virginia Chapel remained in use until the mid-1850s. As the London Docks encroached on the building, there was a grand opening on 8 December 1856 for a new Catholic church , St. Mary & St. Michael's on nearby Commercial Road.
The impressive Gothic Revival styling of the building, then the biggest Catholic church in London, earned it the sobriquet 'Cathedral of the East'. For its designer, the English Catholic convert William WIlkinson Wardell, Gothic churches like St. Mary & St. Michael's were an expression of worship in architectural form.
St. Mary & St. Michael's would go on to be at the heart of East End life, with many men and women from Ireland and of Irish descent present in the congregation and religious orders of the parish over the decades.
Standing at the junction of Pennington Street and a truncated Virginia Street today, it takes a real effort of imagination to envisage the eighteenth century Irish community discreetly attending religious services in the space that's now only the entrance to an underground car park. How do we remember and what do we remember when we can no longer see the physical traces of what went before? Does our collective memory 'stop' at what we can see today?
Blog sources & further resources
Catholic parish of St. Mary & St. Michael
The website of the current parish of St. Mary & St. Michael gives a useful overview of the Catholic history of the area and some of the Irishmen who were high-profile priests in the parish.
For a more detailed history which includes how the Sisters of Mercy came from Tullamore in Co. Offaly to this east London parish, second-hand copies of Jean Maynard's A History of St Mary and St Michael's Parish: Commercial Road East London are readily available.
Archival traces of Ireland in the Virginia Chapel
If you visit Tower Hamlets Local History Library & Archives, you can view the transcribed baptismal records from Virginia Chapel for the period 1 January 1832 to 31 December 1840.
While the records are limited to names and dates, the dominance of Irish surnames throughout the baptismal register is striking.
You can see an analysis of these Irish names in a book available to consult in Tower Hamlets Library:
Michael Henderson, Adrian Miles, Don Walker, Brian Connell and Robin Wroe-Brown, 'He Being Dead Yet Speaketh' : Excavations at Three Post-Medieval Burial Grounds in Tower Hamlets East London 2004-10 (London: Museum of London Archaeology, 2013).
This book explores how connections with Ireland were found when the Museum of London Archaeology department excavated a plot of land on Lukin Street, London E1 (near the church of St. Mary & St. Michael) which had originally been a Catholic burial ground .
Tracing Irish coal heavers' work through trade-cards
Historic trade cards are a wonderful way of getting a sense of past occupations.
Some examples in the British Museum's collection of coal merchant trade-cards include illustrations of coal heavers.
For a general overview of eighteenth-century trade cards, see the Spitalfields Life history blog here and the exploration of women-owned businesses here on the All Things Georgian blog.
Rosemary Lane and 'Rag-Fair'
For a general overview of Rosemary Lane and Rag Fair in the eighteenth century, Janice Turner's PhD on the topic is available online:
The Gordon Riots and representations of 'the mob'
One of the many free public education lectures given at Gresham College, in the City of London includes this 2013 lecture by Professor Ian Haywood on The Gordon Riots of 1780: London in Flames, a Nation in Ruins.
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