Old Spitalfields Market has been selling things on this spot since sixteen thirty-eight — nearly four hundred years of continuous trading, first in fruit and vegetables, now in flat whites and vintage denim. But look past the market at the Georgian houses on the surrounding streets, and look UP. The top floors are almost all glass. Great wide windows, far bigger than the ones below them, running the whole width of the house.
Those aren't for the view. They're skylights for a factory. Because this whole neighborhood was once the silk-weaving capital of Europe, and the factory floor was the attic.
It started in the sixteen eighties, when tens of thousands of French Protestants — the Huguenots — fled France to escape being killed for their religion. They arrived here with almost nothing except one very valuable thing: they knew how to weave silk, beautifully. Better than almost anyone in England. So they set up their looms in the top rooms of these houses, where the light was best, and
built the windows enormous to catch every possible minute of daylight, because a weaver can't work in the dark and candles near raw silk are how you burn the street down. Whole families worked those attic looms twelve hours a day, dressing the richest people in Europe in fabric they themselves could never afford to wear. Some weavers kept songbirds up there for company, so the lofts clattered with
