Introduction

Abstract

Until the advent of ‘New Commonwealth’ migration after World War II, the Irish were by far the largest ethnic group in Britain. However, this prominence was not unique to the modern period. Irish sojourners were finding their way to Britain as early as the Middle Ages and had begun to form permanent settlements in London by the Elizabethan period. The eighteenth century saw further developments of this type, with Irish migration mirroring the wider growth of urban and industrial centres. The emergence of the northern towns, and the establishment of the great commercial and industrial cities, prompted the appearance of much larger and more closely observed Irish settlements. The flow of migrants from Ireland reached new heights after the French Wars (1793–1815), with thousands entering British ports each year. By the 1830s, parliamentary commissioners and local observers were expressing concern about this rising rate of Irish settlement. In the 1840s, the impact of the Famine and a pattern of long-lived cultural antagonisms conspired to make the Irish in Britain the ‘largest unassimilable section of society’; ‘a people set apart and everywhere rejected and despised’.¹ Perhaps unsurprisingly, most historians have focused on this key phase; but the influx did not end there. AS late as World War I, a continuing migration meant that even less fashionable Irish centres, such as Whitehaven in Cumberland and Hebburn on Tyneside, bore the cultural and political hallmarks of their long-established Irish communities, whether in the form of thriving Catholic churches or Orange lodges.²