ABSTRACT

The city is a mosaic of places and people; it is a multi-layered organism, its strata variegated by socio-economic status, race, gender and religion. The city is a tangible entity recognisable by sight, smell and sound. It contains a multiplicity of real and imagined communities and boundaries which coexist within the whole. As Saskia Sassen suggests, ‘each city contains many cities’. 1 Amongst the ‘many’ lies the immigrant quarter(s) which Sassen describes as, ‘third world space’ within a first-world context. The city is a crucible of equality and inequality within which interaction and interface, separation and marginalisation, ceaselessly take place. London is such a city. Its roots deeply embedded in a past created by natives and invaders, immigrants and refugees, citizens and outsiders, the assimilated and the margin-alised. Its present fashioned by the local, national and global. Its future a fusion of all that has gone before and what is yet to come. Within this complex metropolis lies Spitalfields. Frequently viewed as a terminal, it is rarely referred to as a taking-off point, though that is what it has been for the Huguenots and Jews and, in time, may well become for the Bangladeshis who now fill its streets.