Limehouse:  London's Old Chinatown
Channel: Dixon Kinqade
Date: 2023-03-13

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Limehouse, in Stepney, was London's first Chinatown. A small Chinese community in the East End grew in size and spread eastward, from the original settlement in Limehouse Causeway, into Pennyfields. The earliest Chinese migrants to Britain were employed by the British East India Company. They arrived in the East London docklands in the 1780s, aboard merchant vessels carrying tea, ceramics, and silk.

These ships docked in Limehouse, a thriving, industrious entry port and already the most cosmopolitan district, in the most cosmopolitan city, in London. Among the few first-person accounts that exist from Chinese sailors of the period is an oral one given by Xie Qinggao, from the 1780s or 1790s. He reports being impressed by London’s wealth, its imposing buildings, and, perhaps not surprisingly for a sailor, the ready availability of prostitutes. 

From roughly 1860 to 1945, the Limehouse district of East London was home to a small community of resident and alien Chinese. Centered on Limehouse Causeway, near the West India Docks, Limehouse had been inhabited since the 16th century by successive groups of ethnic immigrants as well as working-class Anglos. Chinese seamen had sojourned there sporadically since the mid-18th century, but it wasn't until after 1900 that Chinese men, women, and children began to form a visible community.

Limehouse Causeway, Pennyfields, Ming Street, Commercial Road, and West India Dock Road

Until the construction of Commercial Road in 1802, access to Poplar and Blackwall from Limehouse and Whitechapel was through the narrow streets of Limehouse itself, and from there along Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields into High Street. Following the completion of the Commercial Road, which abutted the western ends of Pennyfields and Ming Street, later renamed King Street, the approach to Poplar's High Street from the west was much improved. That section of the Commercial Road from its junction with the East India Dock Road to the West India Docks was not referred to as the West India Dock Road until 1828, and the name was not widely used until the later 1830s.

It is more for social and cultural history than architectural history that Pennyfields merits recording. Sited at the western end of Poplar's High Street, Pennyfields, with its low-class housing and shops, formed a "buffer" between the shabby respectability of High Street and the exotic Oriental underworld of Limehouse Causeway to the west. During the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, Pennyfields was a strange mixture of both societies. By 1914, this street had become the center of Chinatown's East End. All the buildings associated with the street's colorful past were demolished, however, replaced by public housing during the 1960s.

The Asian Quarter

From the 1880s the Chinese community in London's East End grew in size and spread eastwards, from the original settlement in Limehouse Causeway, into Pennyfields. This, small and relatively law-abiding, Chinese community expanded into two separate communities. Chinese from Shanghai mostly settled around Pennyfields and Ming Street, whereas the immigrants from Canton and Southern China lived generally around Gill Street and the Limehouse Causeway.

The area provided for the Lascar, Chinese, and Japanese sailors working the Oriental routes into the Port of London. The main attractions for these men were the opium dens, hidden behind shops in Limehouse and Poplar, and also the availability of prostitutes, Chinese grocers, restaurants, and seamen's lodging houses. Hostility from British sailors and the inability of many Chinese to speak English fostered a distinct ethnic segregation and concentrated more Chinese into Pennyfields.

Gradually the drab shops of Pennyfields were transformed into Chinese emporia and their colorful interiors became an exotic contrast to the grey streets of Poplar. "The Chinese shops are the quaintest places imaginable. Their walls decorated with red and orange papers, covered with Chinese writing indicating the "chop" or style of the firm, or some such announcement. There is also sure to be a map of China and a hanging Chinese Almanac."

The heady scent of burning opium, joss-sticks, and tobacco smoked through the air, producing an atmosphere much sought after by the literary and artistic coterie of fin-de-siècle London. Pennyfields became a "sight" for West End society. From the 1890s until the 1930s, parties regularly went east at night, expecting to find the unusual and morally degenerate in Pennyfields. Instead, they found a commonplace street. The Pennyfields of legend was always more exciting than that of reality. But it was different from the rest of Poplar: "In the darkness of Pennyfields dark-faced men are passing. Over the restaurants and shops are Chinese names."

Forgotten History

Apart from census data and one sociological study conducted in 1962, when many of the early...