Welsh Journals

THE WELSH IN LONDON IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. EMRYS JONES Jones, Emrys, 1985: The Welsh in London in the Nineteenth Century. Cambria, Vol. 12 (1) pp. 149 to pp. 169. Part I in: Davies, W.K.D. (ed) Human Geography from Wales: Proceedings of the E.G. Bowen Memorial Conference. ISSN 0306-9796. By the nineteenth century Welsh born people living in London were well established in all walks of life; they were soon to dominate the dairy industry and be influential in the drapery business. Although distributed in ubiquitous fashion throughout the area they were relatively more frequent in the north and west, and were fewer in proportion in the east end. The social foci of taverns and coffee houses in the eighteenth century were replaced by churches and chapels in the nineteenth and many congregations served as 'reception points' and 'urban villages' for the thousands who came to live in London each year. Emrys Jones, Dept.of Geography, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London, England. WC2A 2A3. This is in the nature of a progress report. It continues work already completed, and partly published (Jones 1981), on the Welsh in London from the sixteenth tó eighteenth centuries. But, wide though the topic is, data are meagre, fragmentary, and often anecdotal. So what I have to say today amounts to what Paul Wheatley once referred to as proleptic observations, a mere introduction to a prolegomenon, suggesting no more than a framework for the study itself. And even this must be introduced by a brief justification for the work and by a reminder of the story up to the nineteenth century. My aim is to study the Welsh in London as an ethnic group, in the same way as several of my doctoral students have studied the distribution and acculturation of New Commonwealth migrants: and in the same way as I studied a Welsh minority in the United States many years ago (Jones 1957). There are academic studies of Poles in London, of Irish, Cypriots, Chinese, West Indians, Indians and Pakistanis but nothing on the Welsh. Is there an assumption here that to differentiate the Welsh is too nice an academic point ? That their stay has been completely subsumed in the story of London ? Years ago I had an experience which convinced me otherwise. In 1949 my wife and I took a bed-sitter in Swiss Cottage, then known to taxi-drivers as 'passport comer' because of the number and