On the corner here is a plain brick building that is, quietly, the best history lesson in London. It's a mosque now — the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid, and on a Friday it fills with thousands of worshippers. But look up at the sundial set high on the Fournier Street corner, with two Latin words carved beneath it: Umbra Sumus. "We are shadows." It's a line lifted from the Roman poet Horace — we are but dust and shadow — and it was put up there in seventeen forty-three, the year this building opened. That sundial has now watched the building change its entire religion four separate times, and it has been right about all of them.
It started as a French Protestant church. When tens of thousands of Huguenots — those same silk weavers, the ones with the giant attic windows — fled here from France to escape being killed for their faith, they needed somewhere to worship, and in seventeen forty-three they built this. A New Church. Then, as the Huguenots prospered and dissolved into the wider city o
ver a couple of generations, the building emptied out. It became a Methodist chapel — and, for a spell, a mission whose entire purpose was converting the local Jews to Christianity. Hold onto that detail, because of what happens next.
Because in the eighteen nineties, a vast new wave of refugees arrived — Jewish families fleeing pogroms and violence in Eastern Europe — and they poured into these
