Hackney’s Huguenots: the first ‘refugees’

The image shows a family on the seashore: a couple with two children and an older woman seated on one of the rocks. The man looks back towards where they’ve come from and the woman towards the choppy waters from where a boat is heading towards them.

In the 1700s, Hackney welcomed a new population of French refugees seeking shelter from religious persecution. Although more famously associated with nearby Spitalfields, many settled and prospered in the rural villages that now make up the borough of Hackney. Who were the Huguenots? Between 1660 and 1714, around 40,000 ‘Huguenots’ – French Christians who had … Read more