4 février 2010

Jeudi 4 février 2010, 19h30, centre d’art Raven Row, Artillery Lane, Londres. Intérieur récemment restauré d’un immeuble du XVIIIe siècle près de la gare de Liverpool Street dans la City.

56 and 58 Artillery Lane were built around 1690 on land that was previously a weapons practice ground, and in the Middle Ages the site of the monastery of St. Mary Spital, the largest hospital in Europe. In the 1750s the buildings were transformed into luxury shops in the Rococo style by Huguenot silk merchants, Protestant settlers from France. Nonconformist and politically dissenting groups as well as immigrants began settling in Spitalfields, which experienced waves of violent protest, often by journeymen weavers against wage exploitation. In 1827 no. 58 was modernised with a plain Regency front, only a few years before the weaving economy in Spitalfields collapsed and the area became impoverished. In the early twentieth century, 56 and 58 Artillery Lane housed many families who worked in the local food markets.
Texte du site de Raven Row, 2010.