ABSTRACT
The German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote in 1903 how the city functions as an alienating environment that is strikingly different from the village or the town: in the city the individual has to adjust to the "metropolitan rhythm of events." Missing data on the urban built fabric and information on the streets surrounding the plans were completed with historical maps of East London. The object is to assess the exact position of synagogues within their urban setting in order to establish if their location had any systematic relationship with the social and economic context of the streets. Subsequent research has found that the synagogues of the East End were by far more secluded than earlier Huguenot chapels and other churches. An important aspect of the study was a consideration of how the religious buildings in the late nineteenth century communicated their presence to their surroundings, raising the question of how visible the synagogues were to their neighbouring streets.
