| AdminHistory | St George's German Lutheran Church in Alie Street, Whitechapel was founded in 1762 to serve the community of German immigrants in Whitechapel and neighbouring areas, many of whom worked in the sugar baking industry. The church was formally opened and consecrated in 1763, largely thanks to the generosity of the principal benefactor, Dederick Beckmann, a wealthy sugar boiler. At its height, there were an estimated 16,000 German Lutherans in the Whitechapel area and it was sometimes referred to as Little Germany. German immigration to London, much of it by Protestant refugees fleeing religious persecution, had been significant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There were several German churches in London by 1700. Through the first half of the eighteenth century membership of Londons German Lutheran churches doubled to about 4,000. Some of this rise can be attributed to the continuing immigration of those seeking religious asylum, and the additional impact of the arrival of the Hanoverian Court. However, it was economic migration that was the main basis for the establishment of a German settlement in Whitechapel. Sugar refining in London had been in German hands from its introduction in the mid seventeenth century, expertise in processes previously established in the Hanseatic towns being deployed to build up a substantial sugar-baking industry in Whitechapel and other eastern districts close to the Port of London, into which huge quantities of sugar were being imported from the West Indies. By the 1760s there were numerous sugarhouses in the immediate vicinity of Alie Street.
A new school building adjacent to the church was built in 1805 and in 1859 an infant school was built on what had been the burial ground east of the church. The period of the First World War was a difficult time for the church as there was enormous anti-German sentiment. Many of the congregation returned to Germany in 1914, and others were interned. Pastor Mätzold stayed and continued services in the church, also taking on a pastoral role in internment camps In 1917 the school was forced to close and Mätzold was expelled from the country. He was unable to return until 1920, from which date he quietly held together a much-diminished congregation until his death in 1930. Hitlers rise to power in 1933 presented expatriate Germans with difficult questions. Pastor Rieger was an associate of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-45), the leading theologian and opponent of National Socialism, who spent the years 1933 to 1935 serving as pastor to London German congregations in nearby St Paul Goulston Street and in the German Evangelical Church in Sydenham. Riegers parish became a relief centre, providing a base for advice and shelter for German and Jewish refugees, particularly children, also sending off references for travel to England. During the 1939-45 war German churches in Britain were not generally persecuted as they had been in 1914-18. It is nonetheless notable that at St Georges services continued uninterrupted right through the war.
Attendance at St Georges declined in the later decades of the twentieth century. In 1996, when there were only about twenty left attending regularly, Pastor Volkmar Latossek led the congregation into a merger with that of St Marys German Lutheran Church, Bloomsbury. To secure its future St Georges Church was taken into care by the Historic Chapels Trust in 1999, and an extensive restoration programme costing £900,000 was carried out between June 2003 and July 2004. |