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Plurality in the Capital: The Christian Responses to London’s Religious Minorities since 1800

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

John Wolffe
John Wolffe*
Affiliation:
The Open University
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Extract

On a late spring day in 1856 Prince Albert carried out one of the less routine royal engagements of the Victorian era, by laying the foundation stone of what was to become ‘The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders’, located at Limehouse in the London docklands. The deputation receiving the prince was headed by the earl of Chichester, who was the First Church Estates Commissioner and president of the Church Missionary Society, and included Thomas Carr, formerly bishop of Bombay, Maharajah Duleep Singh, a Sikh convert to Christianity and a favourite of Queen Victoria, and William Henry Sykes, MP and chairman of the East India Company.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 51: Christianity and Religious Plurality , 2015 , pp. 232 - 258
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2015

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References

1 The Times, 2 June 1856, 10.

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27 In Four Sermons Preached in London at the Twelfth Anniversary of the Missionary Society (London, 1806).

28 Bogue, ‘Duty of Christians’, in Four Sermons, 84-5.

29 Ibid. 91.

30 Ibid. 95.

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55 Lascars and Chinese: A Short Address to Young Men of the several Orthodox Denominations of Christians (London, 1814), 4—5.

56 Ibid. 18-19.

57 Ibid. 3, 9.

58 Ibid. 11.

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82 Ibid. L/PJ/6/861/File 1297.

83 The Times, 3 December 1868, 3. This advertisement, claiming the home was set up in 1825, is widely cited on websites relating to the history of Muslim and Asian communities, but I have not found any further evidence of its existence prior to 1879, when Salter reported visiting it: The Times, 2 June 1879, 6. Visram notes the ‘disreputable’ living conditions experienced by ayahs in London in the 1850s: Asians in Britain, 51.

84 Salter, East in the West, 165; <http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/ayahs-home>, accessed 15 July 2014; Visram, , Asians in Britain, 51-4.Google Scholar

85 Ibid. 61-2.

86 Brierley, Peter, Capital Growth: What the 2012 London Church Census Reveals (Tonbridge, 2013), 41.Google Scholar

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109 Torry, Malcolm and Thorley, Sarah, eds, Together and Different: Christians Engaging with People of Other Faiths (Norwich, 2008), 21 Google Scholar. There are further such case studies on the London Presence and Engagement Network website, <http://www.londonpen.org/?page_id=276>, accessed 19 May 2014.

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