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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*
Affiliation:
The Open University

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
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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54 An Address to Females on behalf of the London Society for the Promotion of Christianity amongst the Jews (London, 1810).

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.

59 Ibid. 14.

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71 Ibid. 67, 72-4.

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77 Ibid. 79-80.

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80 Ibid. 284-5.

81 London, BL, India Office Records [hereafter: IOR], L/PJ/440/File 346, letters of 22 February, 6 March 1897.

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

87 Dep. CMJ, d.38/5.

88 LCMM 99 (1934), 11-12, 123; 101 (1936), 142; Bugby, J. E., ‘Moslems in London’, MW 28 (1938), 76-9.Google Scholar

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103 LCMM 134 (1970), 261.

104 Wolffe, John, ‘How many Ways to God? Christians and Religious Pluralism’, in Parsons, Gerald, ed., The Growth of Religious Diversity: Britain from 1945, 2: Issues (London, 1994), 2553 Google Scholar; Grimley, Matthew, ‘The Church of England, Race and Multi-Culturalism, 1962-2012’, in Garnett, and Harris, , eds, Rescripting Religion, 207-21Google Scholar. This provisional conclusion is, however, very much open to testing by further research, drawing particularly on oral history and on records relating to the sale of former Christian buildings to other religious groups. For case studies from other parts of the country of the actual or proposed use of Christian buildings by other faiths, see, in this volume, John Maiden,‘“What could be more Christian than to allow the Sikhs to use it?” Church Redundancy and Minority Religion in Bedford, 1977-8’, 399-411; Carver, Gillian, A Place to Meet: The Use of Church Property and the New Religious Minorities in Britain (London, 1978), 2935 Google Scholar; Chandler, Andrew, The Church of England in the Twentieth Century:The Church Commissioners and the Politics of Reform (Woodbridge, 2006), 229-39, 290-4.Google Scholar

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