Spitalfields () is an area in London, England, and is located in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is in East London and situated in the East End. Spitalfields is formed around Commercial Street and Brick Lane. It has several markets, including Spitalfields Market, the historic Old Spitalfields Market, Brick Lane Market and Petticoat Lane Market. The area has long attracted migrants from overseas; in the 19th century this included many Jews, whose presence gained for the area at that time the nickname of Little Jerusalem. Since the second half of the 20th century it has been home to a large Bangladeshi community.
Spitalfields lies just outside the City of London; it was a hamlet (autonomous area) of the large ancient parish of Stepney in Middlesex, and became an independent parish in 1729. It formed part of the County of London from 1889 and was part of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney from 1900. It was abolished as a civil parish in 1921.
The name Spitalfields appears in the form Spittellond in 1399; as The spitel Fyeld on the "Woodcut" map of London of c. 1561; and as Spyttlefeildes, also in 1561. The land belonged to St Mary Spital, a priory or hospital (a lodging for travellers run by a religious order) erected on the east side of the Bishopsgate thoroughfare in 1197, from which its name is thought to derive ("spital" being a corruption of the word "hospital".) An alternative, and possibly earlier, name for the area was Lolsworth.
The area was a part of the manor and ancient parish of Stepney before the Domesday Book of 1086.
Parish areas originally had only ecclesiastical (church) functions; but the monasteries which had provided extensive charitable work on a voluntary basis, were dissolved by Henry VIII, creating increased hardship. The government responded by making parish areas take on civil functions, primarily a new Poor Law intended to fill the gap left by monasteries.
Stepney was a very large and populous parish, and by the late 17th century it had devolved its civil parish functions to autonomous areas called Hamlets (in this context meaning territorial sub-divisions, rather than small villages), of which Spitalfields was one.
In 1729, the Hamlet of Spitalfields became an independent daughter parish. The area's parish church was Christ Church, Spitalfields, with St Stephen Spitalfields (demolished in 1930) added later.
In 1855, the parish became part of the Whitechapel District within the Metropolitan Board of Works area. Spitalfields Vestry nominated twelve members to the Whitechapel District Board of Works. The Board of Works was an unelected body, responsible for certain infrastructure functions.
Spitalfields became part of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney in 1900, and on 1 April 1921 the civil parish was abolished and merged with Whitechapel. At the 1911 census (one of the last before the abolition of the parish), Spitalfields had a population of 19,811. It became part of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in 1965.
The area was part of the historic (or ancient) county of Middlesex, but military and most (or all) civil county functions were managed more locally, by the Tower Division (also known as the Tower Hamlets), a historic ‘county within a county’, under the leadership of the Lord-Lieutenant of the Tower Hamlets (the post was always filled by the Constable of the Tower of London). The military loyalty to the Tower meant local men served in the Tower garrison and Tower Hamlets Militia, rather than the Middlesex Militia.
The role of the Tower Division ended when Spitalfields became part of the new County of London in 1889. The County of London was replaced by Greater London in 1965.
Nearly all (except a tiny area north of the railway, in Weaver's Ward) of the district is part of the Spitalfields & Banglatown ward, which elects two councillors to Tower Hamlets Borough Council. Spitalfields is in the Bethnal Green and Stepney constituency, with the area represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament since 2010 by Rushanara Ali of the Labour Party.
The Spitalfields Neighbourhood Planning Forum, which is constituted of Spitalfields residents, business operators, community organisations and other local interests, is intended to help local people influence neighbourhood planning policies.
The Romans had a cemetery to the east of the Bishopsgate thoroughfare, which roughly follows the line of Ermine Street: the main highway to the north from Londinium. The cemetery was noticed by the antiquarian John Stow in 1576 and was the focus of a major archaeological excavation in the 1990s, following the redevelopment of Spitalfields Market.
In 2013, Janet Montgomery of Durham University undertook lead isotope analysis of tooth enamel, identifying the first person from Rome known to have been buried in Britain. She was a 25-year-old woman, buried in a lead-lined stone sarcophagus around the middle of the 4th century AD, and accompanied by grave goods of jet and glass.
In 1197, a priory, The New Hospital of St Mary without Bishopsgate, latterly known as St Mary Spital, was founded by Walter Brunus and his wife Roisia, and built on the site of the cemetery. It was one of the biggest hospitals in medieval England and had a large cemetery with a mortuary chapel and stone charnel house. The chapel has been uncovered by archaeologists and preserved for public viewing. The priory and hospital were dissolved in 1539 under Henry VIII. At the time of the dissolution, the hospital had beds for 180 sick poor.
The inner precinct of priory hospital was adjacent to the area that later became the Hamlet and parish of Spitalfields, in the tiny extra-parochial area called the Liberty of Norton Folgate. Although the chapel and monastic buildings were mostly demolished in the time of Henry VIII, the Liberty remained an autonomous area outside of any parish. The adjacent outer precincts, to the south, were re-used for artillery practice by the gunners of the Tower of London. The area, known as the Old Artillery Ground was placed under the special jurisdiction of the Tower of London as one of its Tower Liberties.
Other parts of the priory area were used for residential purposes by London dwellers seeking a rural retreat and by the mid-17th century further development extended eastward into the erstwhile open farmland of the Spital Field.