page_title: Italians in the United Kingdom
section_title: From Napoleon to World War I
hierarchical_section_title: Italians in the United Kingdom / History / From Napoleon to World War I
caption_attribution_description: English: St Peters Italian Church, Clerkenwell, London
context_page_description: Italians in the United Kingdom, also known as British Italians or colloquially Britalians, are citizens or residents of the United Kingdom of Italian heritage. The phrase may refer to someone born in the United Kingdom of Italian descent, someone who has emigrated from Italy to the United Kingdom or someone born elsewhere, who is of Italian descent and has migrated to the UK. More specific terms used to describe Italians in the United Kingdom include: Italian English, Italian Scots, and Italian Welsh.
context_section_description: The Napoleonic wars left northern Italy with a destroyed agriculture and consequently many farmers were forced to emigrate: a few thousand moved to the British isles in the first half of the nineteenth century.
  From the 1820s to 1851...accounts for 4000 Italian immigrants in England, with 50% of them living in London. The regional origins of most were the valleys around Como, and Lucca. The people from Como were skilled artisans, making barometers and other precision instruments. People from Lucca specialized in plaster figure making. By the 1870s the main regional origins of Italian emigration to Britain were the valleys of Parma in the north, and the Liri valley, half way between Rome and Naples. A railway network had been started by this time and this helped the people from the Liri valley to migrate to the North of Italy, and then on to Britain. The people from Parma were predominantly organ grinders, while the Neapolitans from the Liri valley (now under Lazio) made ice cream......the occupational structure of the immigrants, up to the 1870s, remained "substantially the same." After this date all itinerant employment crossed regional demarcations....The centre of the Italian community in Britain throughout the 19th Century, and indeed to the present day, is 'Little Italy' situated in a part of London called Clerkenwell.....description of its existence then, from an 1854 print, is of a "warren of streets around Hatton Garden." Dickens' Oliver Twist and Gustave Dore's prints of London at that time fill in the images. As numbers increased and competition grew fiercer, so Italians spread to the north of England, Wales and Scotland. They were never in great numbers in the northern cities. For example, the Italian Consul General in Liverpool, in 1891, is quoted as saying that the majority of the 80–100 Italians in the city were organ grinders and street sellers of ice-cream and plaster statues. And that the 500–600 Italians in Manchester included mostly Terrazzo specialists, plasterers and modellers working on the prestigious, new town hall. While in Sheffield 100–150 Italians made cutlery.....of the 1000 or so Italians in Wales at the end of the 19th century a third of them worked as seamen on British ships, a third worked in jobs that serviced shipping, such as ships chandlers, seamen's lodgings etc., and most of the rest worked in the coal mines.In 1861,....there were 119 Italians in Scotland, the majority of them in Glasgow. By 1901 the Italian population was 4051. By this time the Italian communities were becoming more affluent. The Italian Scottish community was "…almost all engaged in small food shops – either ice cream shops or fish restaurants."
  Giuseppe Mazzini lived in London for some years and promoted the construction of the Italian church of St. Peter in the "Little Italy" of Clerkenwell (a London neighbourhood) The Italian-style basilica was inaugurated in 1863 and was the main place of reunion for the growing Italian community of London. The Risorgimento hero Mazzini also created an Italian school for poor people, active from November 1841 at Greville Street in London.
  By the time WWI started, the Italian community was well established in London and other areas of the British isles (there were nearly 20,000 Italians in the United Kingdom in 1915).
caption: St Peter's Italian Church in London
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