London’s story, pretty much since its founding by a Roman legion in the first century AD, is a story of migrants.
Many of those stories are well told: the communities that shaped London’s cultural and urban landscape, over many centuries. Little known, though, is the story of London’s Victorian and Edwardian German diaspora.
This is largely because of what happened later on in the 20th century. Two World Wars – in particular, the first – put an end to a visible German presence in London.
But nestled between King’s Cross and St Pancras train stations, its colourful brickwork oddly juxtaposed against those cathedrals of iron and glass, is the German Gymnasium.
It’s often crowded. Workers from the shiny glass offices that have been taking over this part of town flock there for steins of beer; as do travellers looking for something a bit more extravagant than a sandwich from Pret before their train. I’ll confess, in all the many times I’ve been past it, I’ve barely given the German Gymnasium a second look.
This is a shame. The German Gymnasium is much more than an expensive bar and restaurant serving (to be fair, delicious) currywurst. It’s a relic to a forgotten community, and a remarkable piece of architecture in its own right.
This blog is part of my Building of the Week series, where I explore a different story each week.
London’s German Connection
To understand where the Gymnasium came from, we have to step back – London’s German connection goes deep.
German London started in earnest with King George I – the first King from the house of Hanover, bringing with him a small community of bankers and merchants. (Funnily enough, at around the time I was researching this post, I began exploring my own family tree and found, to my surprise, that my great, great, great, great, great grandfather was himself a migrant from Hanover to a town south of London in the late 18th century…)
In particular, with the King came sugar refiners. For centuries, this small community would dominate the city’s sugar refining industry, their method a closely guarded secret, preventing British upstarts from competing.
But the new royal family strengthened ties that were already pretty deep. England and Germany, since the reformation, had been Protestant brothers. Even earlier than that, Saxon settlers had come from Germany.
London’s German community snowballed during the 19th century, drawn by better pay and greater opportunities in England. Many came to work in those sugar refineries, still going strong, but they worked in other industries too. Particularly, exploring London in the mid-19th century, you’d have found many German restaurants, bakeries and, all over the place, German waiters – there were even training schemes for becoming a waiter in England back at home.
There were political refugees, too, seeking home in a country with much greater free speech at the time than their own. One of those was none other than Karl Marx, who lived in London for over 30 years.
All of this is to say that, by the 1850s, London’s German community was, by all accounts, huge. They made up the largest group of non-British residents in London. By some accounts, 6/7ths of all immigrants in London were German. Social clubs sprung up to serve this growing community, and there were even several German-language newspapers serving the city, such as London Zeitung, from 1858.
Nor were they all from similar backgrounds. Working class Germans – in particular Jewish Germans – settled in the East End, while wealthier Germans moved to North London, areas around Islington, reflecting the wider socio-economics of the city.
The UK’s first gym, Napoleon & the Olympics
In 1865, six years before Bismarck would officially unify Germany, the German Gymnasium opened. It was the first purpose-built gym in the country, entirely funded by the German community at a cost of around £6,000 (roughly £750,000 today).
Why would a community of immigrants build the country’s first gym, at such considerable cost?
The answer, funnily enough, goes back to Napoleon. When his forces conquered Prussia at the start of the 19th century, Prussian identity took a hit. A period of soul-searching followed.
Out of it emerged a movement, led by a man called Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. Germany’s population was too weak, he believed. They needed to be physically stronger and more unified. He coined the word Turnen, deliberately Germanic rather than the Latin root that gives us our own word “gymnastics,” making physical fitness a point of national pride.
Turnvereins began springing up across German-speaking lands, laying the groundwork for modern gymnastics and, in parallel, for German national liberation.
So when Germans moved to London, a gymnasium – or a Turnverein – was part of their day to day life.
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It was founded by a man named Ernst Ravenstein, a German cartographer who, interestingly, is well known within another circle, as one of the founding fathers of modern migration theory.
Edward Gruning was commissioned to design the building, a London-born architect with German parents, and the first purpose-built gym in the country was formed.
It was an immediate success. In its first year, it had over 900 members, whose fees helped to keep the gym running. Architecturally, it was immense.
The main exercise hall was 57ft from the floor to ceiling; the curved laminated timber roof still awe inspiring. Its exterior is striking, too – colourful brickwork set against the modern Kings’ Cross Station building.
The building is perhaps best known, and most important, for its role in the history of the Olympics. Just a year after opening, in 1866, it hosted the National Olympian Games: a forerunner to the modern Olympics by more than three decades, and a remarkable thing to have happened in what is now a busy restaurant beside King’s Cross.
The violent end of London’s German diaspora
But the German Gymnasium is much more than a piece of sporting history. It’s a window into a community that is largely forgotten – the last, obvious physical trace of a group of people that at its peak numbered around 30,000.
In 1914, Germany and the United Kingdom went to war. Anti-German sentiment spread rapidly, worsened by the sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania in 1915, in which over a thousand civilians died.
Things reached a violent peak in the form of Anti-German riots – riots so violent, and so widespread, they’ve been described as the worst anti-migrant riots in British history. Shops, businesses and homes were torn apart by mobs. Even dachshunds were attacked for being ‘German’.
Many of these took place in the East End, with businesses with German or Jewish sounding names attacked.
But the riots also spread to areas like Islington, Camden and Kentish Town. These were areas which, for the last half a century, had been home to a burgeoning middle-class German population, the same people who founded and exercised in the German Gymnasium.
Thousands of German and other ‘enemy alien’ Londoners were put in internment camps, including one at Alexandra Palace. Many were forcibly repatriated.
When the war was over, Britain’s German population had declined by more than half. Those that did remain kept their heads down. There would be no expressions of Germanic pride, such as in their gymnasiums. Many anglicised their names – most famously, of course, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha turning into the house of Windsor.
The German Gymnasium had a second life as a depot for the Great Northern Railway company, before becoming the restaurant and bar it is today. And still it remains, one of the last physical traces of a pre-war German community that briefly thrived and shaped the city.
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