J. M. Barrie
Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and moved to London, where he wrote a number of successful novels and plays. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who inspired him to write about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a "fairy play" about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland. Although he continued to write Peter Pan overshadowed his other work, is credited with popularising the name Wendy. Barrie unofficially adopted the Davies boys following the deaths of their parents. Barrie was made a baronet by George V on 14 June 1913, a member of the Order of Merit in the 1922 New Year Honours. Before his death, he gave the rights to the Peter Pan works to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children in London, which continues to benefit from them.
James Matthew Barrie was born in Angus, to a conservative Calvinist family. His father David Barrie was a modestly successful weaver, his mother Margaret Ogilvy assumed her deceased mother's household responsibilities at the age of eight. Barrie was the ninth child of ten, all of whom were schooled in at least the three Rs in preparation for possible professional careers, his siblings were: Alexander, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, David Ogilvy, Sarah and Margaret. He drew attention to himself with storytelling, he only grew to 5 ft 31⁄2 in. According to his 1934 passport; when he was 6 years old, Barrie's next-older brother David died the day before his 14th birthday in an ice-skating accident. This left his mother devastated, Barrie tried to fill David's place in his mother's attentions wearing David's clothes and whistling in the manner that he did. One time, Barrie entered her room and heard her say, "Is that you?" "I thought it was the dead boy she was speaking to", wrote Barrie in his biographical account of his mother Margaret Ogilvy "and I said in a little lonely voice,'No, it's no' him, it's just me.'"
Barrie's mother found comfort in the fact that her dead son would remain a boy forever, never to grow up and leave her. Barrie and his mother entertained each other with stories of her brief childhood and books such as Robinson Crusoe, works by fellow Scotsman Walter Scott, The Pilgrim's Progress. At the age of 8, Barrie was sent to the Glasgow Academy in the care of his eldest siblings Alexander and Mary Ann, who taught at the school; when he was 10, he continued his education at the Forfar Academy. At 14, he left home for Dumfries Academy, again under the watch of Mary Ann, he became a voracious reader, was fond of Penny Dreadfuls and the works of Robert Michael Ballantyne and James Fenimore Cooper. At Dumfries, he and his friends spent time in the garden of Moat Brae house, playing pirates "in a sort of Odyssey, long afterwards to become the play of Peter Pan", they formed a drama club, producing his first play Bandelero the Bandit, which provoked a minor controversy following a scathing moral denunciation from a clergyman on the school's governing board.
Barrie knew. However, his family attempted to persuade him to choose a profession such as the ministry. With advice from Alexander, he was able to work out a compromise: he would attend a university, but would study literature. Barrie enrolled at the University of Edinburgh where he wrote drama reviews for the Edinburgh Evening Courant, he graduated and obtained an M. A. on 21 April 1882. Following a job advertisement found by his sister in The Scotsman, he worked for a year and a half as a staff journalist on the Nottingham Journal, he returned to Kirriemuir. He submitted a piece to the St. James's Gazette, a London newspaper, using his mother's stories about the town where she grew up; the editor "liked that Scotch thing" so well. They served as the basis for his first novels: Auld Licht Idylls, A Window in Thrums, The Little Minister; the stories depicted the "Auld Lichts", a strict religious sect to which his grandfather had once belonged. Modern literary criticism of these early works has been unfavourable, tending to disparage them as sentimental and nostalgic depictions of a parochial Scotland, far from the realities of the industrialised nineteenth century, seen as characteristic of what became known as the Kailyard School.
Despite, or because of, they were popular enough at the time to establish Barrie as a successful writer. Following that success, he published Better Dead and at his own expense, but it failed to sell, his two "Tommy" novels, Sentimental Tommy and Tommy and Grizel, were about a boy and young man who clings to childish fantasy, with an unhappy ending. The late nineteenth century English novelist George Gissing read the former in November 1896 and wrote that he "thoroughly dislike". Meanwhile, Barrie's attention turned to works for the theatre, beginning with a biography of Richard Savage, written by Barrie and H. B. Marriott Watson, he followed this with Ibsen's Ghost
Denys Lasdun
Sir Denys Louis Lasdun, CH, CBE was an eminent English architect, the son of Nathan Lasdun and Julie. His best known work is the Royal National Theatre, on London's South Bank of the Thames, a Grade II* listed building and one of the most notable examples of Brutalist design in the United Kingdom. Lasdun studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, was a junior in the practice of Wells Coates. Like other Modernist architects, including Sir Basil Spence and Peter and Alison Smithson, Lasdun was much influenced by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but there was a gentler, more classical influence, from the likes of Nicholas Hawksmoor. Lasdun's son is the author James Lasdun. Lasdun's grandfather, the Australia-based tobacconist Louis Abrahams, was an important patron of Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and other artists associated with the Heidelberg School art movement known as Australian Impressionism, his art collection was passed down to Lasdun. Before and after Second World War service in the army, Lasdun worked for a while with Berthold Lubetkin's Tecton practice, becoming a partner.
During this period he completed one private house in Paddington, in Le Corbusier's style. After the war, Lasdun worked with Lindsay Drake on the Hallfield Estate, planned by Lubetkin and Tecton in a similar patterned planned idiom to his Spa Green and Priory Green Estates. Lasdun's Hallfield School was the first clue to his mature style, in its use of bare concrete and angularity, as well as its more human scale. In the 1950s he was a partner with Jane Drew, Maxwell Fry and Lindsay Drake in Fry, Drew and Lasdun, his originality became more evident in his'cluster blocks' in Bethnal Green. These were a response to the critique of much post-war development for creating an isolating environment and discouraging community; the cluster blocks grouped flats around a central tower, tenants were intended to be able to pick out their own flats in the structure. The earlier blocks at Usk Street of 1954 were medium-sized, while the block Keeling House is high-rise. Keeling House was sold to a private developer by the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, is now a block of luxury flats.
Lasdun made an excursion into private housing with his St James' Flats in 1958, the plan of, derived from social housing models such as the Narkomfin Building. Lasdun completed what may be regarded as his breakthrough masterwork in the Royal College of Physicians building in Regents Park. Inserted into a nationally important Nash set-piece terrace of neoclassical form, the RCP projects a raised linear form perpendicular to the terrace to create a series of gardens and spaces around the building, with annexes for lecture hall and an historic timber panelled room preserved from the earlier Colleges. Using modern reinforced concrete technology and expressive structural methods, the volumes are made to'float in space' on the slimmest of supports to dissolve spatial boundaries between inside and out; the work makes implicit references to the work of the'high modernists' from le Corbusier and Mies to the'Scandinavian modernism' of Aalto and Jacobsen as well as the contemporary Brutalist aesthetics of the era, yet developing a personal idiom of opened cantilevered volumes, long perspectives, triangulated form, clarity of concept and structure, Lasdun's own.
This building, however, is finished in luxurious white Sicilian marble, Murano glass mosaic tiles, polished brass and black engineering brick, was one of the first post-War buildings to be awarded Grade I listing for national and international significance and influence on the work of others. Elements of Lasdun's most famous style, which combined cubic towers, bare concrete and jutting foyers, compared by some to Frank Lloyd Wright, can be found in his first educational buildings, the Fitzwilliam College and the Royal College of Physicians in Regent's Park, the latter of which compared favourably to the surrounding buildings by John Nash. More extensive was his design for the University of East Anglia; this consisted of a series of classrooms and laboratories connected by walkways, glazed residential quarters shaped like ziggurats. Following this acclaimed design Lasdun designed two buildings for the University of London, one for SOAS and another for the Institute of Education, controversial in its insertion into the previous street plan of squares and terraces, which it tried to replicate in a more Brutalist manner.
The expressed staircases make references to Wells Coates and Louis Kahn and Lasdun's masterplanning created a new public square. The building is now listed Grade II*; the most famous and disputed of the architect's work is his Royal National Theatre on London's South Bank. Prince Charles compared it to a nuclear power station but it was popular with other traditionalists, with John Betjeman writing Lasdun a letter in praise of its design. Lasdun designed the neighbouring IBM headquarters as a continuity with the theatre, his European Investment Bank in Luxembourg was similar. The last work produced by the firm in London was an office block called Milton Gate near the Barbican Estate, which in its use of green-tinted glazing represented a departure from his familiar bare concrete style. Lasdun was awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 1977, his drawings and papers are available for consultation at the RIBA Drawings & Archives Collections. Despite the controversy of much of his work, most of Lasdun's surviving buildings are listed, although his 1958
English people
The English people are a nation and an ethnic group native to England who speak the English language. The English identity is of early medieval origin, when they were known in Old English as the Angelcynn, their ethnonym is derived from the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Great Britain around the 5th century AD. England is one of the countries of the United Kingdom, the majority of people living there are British citizens; the English descend from two main historical population groups – the earlier Celtic Britons and the Germanic tribes who settled in Britain following the withdrawal of the Romans: the Angles, Saxons and Frisians. Collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons, they founded what was to become the Kingdom of England by the early 10th century, in response to the invasion and minor settlement of Danes beginning in the late 9th century; this was followed by the Norman Conquest and limited settlement of Anglo-Normans in England in the latter 11th century. In the Acts of Union 1707, the Kingdom of England was succeeded by the Kingdom of Great Britain.
Over the years, English customs and identity have become closely aligned with British customs and identity in general. Today many English people have recent forebears from other parts of the United Kingdom, while some are descended from more recent immigrants from other European countries and from the Commonwealth; the English people are the source of the English language, the Westminster system, the common law system and numerous major sports such as cricket, rugby union, rugby league and tennis. These and other English cultural characteristics have spread worldwide, in part as a result of the former British Empire; the concept of an'English nation' has become popular after the devolution process in Scotland and Northern Ireland resulted in the four nations having semi-independent political and legal systems. Although England itself has no devolved government, the 1990s witnessed a rise in English self-consciousness; this is linked to the expressions of national self-awareness of the other British nations of Wales and Scotland – which take their most solid form in the new devolved political arrangements within the United Kingdom – and the waning of a shared British national identity with the growing distance between the end of the British Empire and the present.
Many recent immigrants to England have assumed a British identity, while others have developed dual or mixed identities. Use of the word "English" to describe Britons from ethnic minorities in England is complicated by most non-white people in England identifying as British rather than English. In their 2004 Annual Population Survey, the Office for National Statistics compared the ethnic identities of British people with their perceived national identity, they found that while 58% of white people in England described their nationality as "English", the vast majority of non-white people called themselves "British". It is unclear. In the 2001 UK census, respondents were invited to state their ethnicity, but while there were tick boxes for'Irish' and for'Scottish', there were none for'English', or'Welsh', who were subsumed into the general heading'White British'. Following complaints about this, the 2011 census was changed to "allow respondents to record their English, Scottish, Northern Irish, Irish or other identity."
Another complication in defining the English is a common tendency for the words "English" and "British" to be used interchangeably outside the UK. In his study of English identity, Krishan Kumar describes a common slip of the tongue in which people say "English, I mean British", he notes that this slip is made only by the English themselves and by foreigners: "Non-English members of the United Kingdom say'British' when they mean'English'". Kumar suggests that although this blurring is a sign of England's dominant position with the UK, it is "problematic for the English when it comes to conceiving of their national identity, it tells of the difficulty that most English people have of distinguishing themselves, in a collective way, from the other inhabitants of the British Isles". In 1965, the historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote, "When the Oxford History of England was launched a generation ago, "England" was still an all-embracing word, it meant indiscriminately Wales. Foreigners indeed continue to do so.
Bonar Law, by origin a Scotch Canadian, was not ashamed to describe himself as "Prime Minister of England" Now terms have become more rigorous. The use of "England" except for a geographic area brings protests from the Scotch."However, although Taylor believed this blurring effect was dying out, in his book The Isles, Norman Davies lists numerous examples in history books of "British" still being used to mean "English" and vice versa. In December 2010, Matthew Parris in The Spectator, analysing the use of "English" over "British", argued that English identity, rather than growing, had existed all along but has been unmasked from behind a veneer of Britishness. David Reich's laboratory found that 90% of Britain's Neolithic gene pool was overturned by a population from North Continental Europe characterized by the Bell Beaker culture around 1200BC who carried a large amount of Yamnaya ancestry from the Pontic-Caspian Steppe, including the R1b Haplogroup; this population lacked genetic affinity to other Bell Beaker populations, such as the Iberian Bell Beakers, but appeared to be an offshoot of the Corded Ware single grave people
City of Westminster
The City of Westminster is an Inner London borough that holds city status. It occupies much of the central area of Greater London including most of the West End. In Middlesex, it is to the west of the ancient City of London, directly to the east of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, its southern boundary is the River Thames; the London borough was created with the 1965 establishment of Greater London. Upon its creation, it inherited the city status held by the smaller Metropolitan Borough of Westminster from 1900, first awarded to Westminster in 1540. Aside from a number of large parks and open spaces, the population density of the district is high. Many sites associated with London are in the borough, including St. James's Palace, Buckingham Palace, the Palace of Westminster and 10 Downing Street; the borough is divided into a number of localities including the ancient political district of Westminster. Much of the borough is residential, in 2008 it was estimated to have a population of 236,000.
The local government body is Westminster City Council. A study in 2017 by Trust for London and The New Policy Institute found that Westminster has the third-highest pay inequality of the 32 London boroughs, it has the second-least affordable private rent for low earners in London, behind only Kensington and Chelsea. The borough performs more positively on education, with 82% of adults and 69% of 19-year-olds having Level 3 qualifications; the current Westminster coat of arms were given to the city by an official grant on 2 September 1964. Westminster had other arms before; the symbols in the lower two thirds of the shield stand for former municipalities now merged with the city, Paddington and St. Marylebone; the original arms had a portcullis as the main charge. The origins of the City of Westminster pre-date the Norman Conquest of England. In the mid-11th century, King Edward the Confessor began the construction of an abbey at Westminster, only the foundations of which survive today. Between the abbey and the river he built a palace, thereby guaranteeing that the seat of Government would be fixed at Westminster, drawing power and wealth west out of the old City of London.
For centuries Westminster and the City of London were geographically quite distinct. It was not until the sixteenth century that houses began to be built over the adjoining fields absorbing nearby villages such as Marylebone and Kensington, creating the vast Greater London that exists today. Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries abolished the abbey at Westminster, although the former abbey church is still called Westminster Abbey; the church was the cathedral of the Diocese of Westminster created from part of the Diocese of London in 1540, by letters patent which granted city status to Westminster, a status retained after the diocese was abolished in 1550. The Westminster Court of Burgesses was formed in 1585 to govern the Westminster area under the Abbey's control; the City and Liberties of Westminster were further defined by Letters Patent in 1604, the court of burgesses and liberty continued in existence until 1900, the creation of the Metropolitan Borough of Westminster. The present-day City of Westminster as an administrative entity with its present boundaries dates from 1965, when the City of Westminster was created from the former area of three metropolitan boroughs: St Marylebone and the smaller Metropolitan Borough of Westminster, which included Soho, Mayfair, St. James's, Westminster, Pimlico and Hyde Park.
This restructuring took place under the London Government Act 1963, which reduced the number of local government districts in London, resulting in local authorities responsible for larger geographical areas and greater populations. The Westminster Metropolitan Borough was itself the result of an administrative amalgamation which took place in 1900. Sir John Hunt O. B. E was the First Town Clerk of the City of Westminster, 1900–1928. Prior to 1900, the area occupied by what would become the Metropolitan Borough of Westminster had been administered by five separate local bodies: the Vestry of St George Hanover Square, the Vestry of St Martin in the Fields, Strand District Board of Works, Westminster District Board of Works and the Vestry of Westminster St James; the boundaries of the City of Westminster today, as well as those of the other London boroughs, have remained more or less unchanged since the Act of 1963. The following table shows the ethnic group of respondents in the 2001 and 2011 census in Westminster.
The city is divided into each electing three councillors. Westminster City Council is composed of 41 Conservative Party members and 19 Labour Party members. A Lord Mayor is elected annually to serve as the official representative of the city for one year. See List of Lord Mayors of Westminster for a list of former Mayors and Lord Mayors; the City of Westminster covers all or part of the following areas of London: The City of Westminster is home to a large number of companies. Many leading global corporations have chosen to establish their global or European headquarters in the City of Westminster. Mayfair and St. James's within the City of Westminster have a large concentration of hedge fund and private equity funds; the West End is known as the Theatre District and is home to many of the leading performing arts businesses. Soho and its adjoining areas house a concentration of creative companies. Oxford Street is
Fire services in the United Kingdom
The fire services in the United Kingdom operate under separate legislative and administrative arrangements in England and Wales, Northern Ireland, Scotland. Emergency cover is provided by over fifty agencies; these are known as a fire and rescue service, the term used in modern legislation and by government departments. The older terms of fire brigade and fire service survive in informal usage and in the names of a few organisations. England and Wales have local fire services which are each overseen by a fire authority, made up of representatives of local governments. Fire authorities have the power to raise a Council Tax levy for funding, with the remainder coming from the government. Scotland and Northern Ireland have centralised fire services, so their authorities are committees of the devolved parliaments; the total budget for fire services in 2014-15 was £2.9 billion. Central government maintains national standards and a body of independent advisers through the Chief Fire and Rescue Adviser, created in 2007, while Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services provides direct oversight.
The devolved government in Scotland has HMFSI Scotland. Firefighters in the United Kingdom are allowed to join unions, the main one being the Fire Brigades Union, while chief fire officers are members of the National Fire Chiefs Council, which has some role in national co-ordination; the fire services have undergone significant changes since the beginning of the 21st century, a process, propelled by a devolution of central government powers, new legislation and a change to operational procedures in the light of terrorism attacks and threats. See separate article History of fire safety legislation in the United Kingdom Comprehensive list of recent UK fire and rescue service legislation: Fire services are established and granted their powers under new legislation which has replaced a number of Acts of Parliament dating back more than 60 years, but is still undergoing change. 1938: Fire Brigades Act 1938. This Act provided for centralised co-ordination of fire brigades in Great Britain and made it mandatory for local authorities to arrange an effective fire service.
1947: Fire Services Act 1947 This Act transferred the functions of the National Fire Service to local authorities. Now repealed in England and Wales by Schedule 2 of the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004. 1959: Fire Services Act 1959 This Act amended the 1947 Act. It was repealed in Wales along with the 1947 Act. 1999: Greater London Authority Act 1999 This act was necessary to allow for the formation of the Greater London Authority and in turn the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority. In 2002, there was a series of national fire strikes, with much of the discontent caused by the aforementioned report into the fire service conducted by Prof Sir George Bain. In December 2002, the Independent Review of the Fire Service was published with the industrial action still ongoing. Bain's report led to a change in the laws relating to firefighting. 2002: Independent Review of the Fire Service published 2004: Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 only applying to England and Wales. 2006: The Regulatory Reform Order 2005 This piece of secondary legislation or statutory instrument replaces several other acts that dealt with fire precautions and fire safety in premises, including the now defunct process of issuing fire certificates.
It came into force on 1 October 2006. The DfCLG has published a set of guides for non-domestic premises: 2006: The Government of Wales Act 2006 gave the National Assembly for Wales powers to pass laws on "Fire and rescue services. Promotion of fire safety otherwise than by prohibition or regulation." But does not prevent future legislation being passed by the UK government which applies to two or more constituent countries. There are further plans to modernise the fire service according to the Local Government Association, its website outlines future changes, specific projects: "The aim of the Fire Modernisation Programme is to adopt modern work practices within the Fire & Rescue Service to become more efficient and effective, while strengthening the contingency and resilience of the Service to react to incidents. " The fire service in England and Wales is scrutinised by a House of Commons select committee. In June 2006, the fire and rescue service select committee, under the auspices of the Communities and Local Government Committee, published its latest report.
Committee report The committee's brief is described on its website: The Communities and Local Government Committee is appointed by the House of Commons to examine the expenditure and policy of the Department for Communities and Local Government and its associated bodies. Government response This document, the subsequent government response in September 2006, are important as they outlined progress on the FiReControl, efforts to address diversity and the planned closure of HMFSI in 2007 among many issues. Both documents are interesting as they refer back to Professor Bain's report and the many recommendations it made and continue to put forward the notion that there is an ongoing need to modernise FRSs. For example, where FRSs were inspected by HMFSI, much of this work is now carried out by the National Audit Office. Fire Control On 8 February 2010 the House of Commons Communities and Local Governm
Italians in the United Kingdom
Italians in the United Kingdom known as British Italians or colloquially Britalians, are citizens or residents of the United Kingdom of Italian heritage. The phrase may refer to someone born in the United Kingdom of Italian descent, someone who has emigrated from Italy to the United Kingdom or someone born elsewhere, of Italian descent and has migrated to the UK. More specific terms used to describe Italians in the United Kingdom include: Italian English, Italian Scots, Italian Welsh; the Romans from Italy were the first Italians to settle in the British Isles along with other people from various parts of the Roman Empire. They came as far back as 55 and 54 BC when Julius Caesar led expeditionary campaigns in the south-east of England, again in AD 43 when Emperor Claudius invaded and subsequently conquered the British islands. Historian Theodore Mommsen calculated that in the five centuries of Roman presence in the British isles, more than 50,000 Roman soldiers moved to live permanently in Roman Britain.
Continuous contact with Rome and the Catholic world was restricted to the Celtic Christian, Brittonic-speaking portions of Britain where trading activities continued with the Meditterannean and Italy continuing into the seventh century as non-christian Anglo-Saxon kingdoms began to coalesce into England. The stable Anglo-British kingdoms of Wessex and Northumbria followed the practices of Celtic Christianity however powerful figures such as Alfred the Great, anointed by the Pope in Rome, tended toward Roman Catholicism after the Synod of Whitby drawing merchants, men of culture and educated Catholic clerics from the Latin West including Italy. After the conquest of Anglo-Saxon England in 1066, the first recorded Italian communities in England began from the merchants and sailors living in Southampton; the famous "Lombard Street" in London took its name from the small but powerful community from northern Italy, living there as bankers and merchants after the year 1000. The rebuilding of Westminster Abbey showed significant Italian artistic influence in the construction of the so-called'Cosmati' Pavement completed in 1245 and a unique example of the style unknown outside of Italy, the work of skilled team of Italian craftsmen led by a Roman named Ordoricus.
In 1303, Edward I negotiated an agreement with the Lombard merchant community that secured custom duties and certain rights and privileges. The revenues from the customs duty were handled by the Riccardi, a group of bankers from Lucca in Italy; this was in return for their service as money lenders to the crown, which helped finance the Welsh Wars. When the war with France broke out, the French king confiscated the Riccardi's assets, the bank went bankrupt. After this, the Frescobaldi of Florence took over the role as money lenders to the English crown; as bankers, the Frescobaldi financed ventures for numerous members of European royal families, notably their financial conquest of England, which Fernand Braudel has signalled as the greatest achievement of the Florentine firms, "not only in holding the purse-strings of the kings of England, but in controlling sales of English wool, vital to continental workshops and in particular to the Arte della Lana of Florence." According to historian Michael Wayatt, there was "a small but influential community" of Italians "that took shape in England in the 15th century consisting of ecclesiastics, renaissance humanists, merchants and artists."
Historian Alwyn Ruddock claimed to have found evidence that the navigator Giovanni Caboto who discovered North America in 1497 {received backing from the Italian community in London for his voyage to North America. In particular, she suggested. Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, an Augustinian friar, the deputy to the papal tax collector Adriano Castellesi. Ruddock suggested that it was Carbonariis, who accompanied Cabot's 1498 expedition and, on good terms with the King, who introduced the explorer to Henry VII for the discovery expedition. Beyond this, Ruddock claimed that Cabot received a loan from an Italian banking house in London'to go and discover new lands'. In the aftermath of the English Reformation, amongst other religious refugees from the European continent, many Italian Protestants found Tudor England to be a hospitable haven, brought with them cultural Italian ties; the fifteenth century saw the birth of a pivotal Italo-Englishman in the form of John Florio, a famed language teacher and translator.
The Titus family is another significant group that settled in England in the time of the Renaissance. The arts flourished under the Hanoverian dynasty and this attracted many more Italian artists and musicians to Britain. All of this developed in the United Kingdom a moderate Italophilia during the late Italian Renaissance; the Napoleonic wars left northern Italy with a destroyed agriculture and many farmers were forced to emigrate: a few thousand moved to the British isles in the first half of the nineteenth century. From the 1820s to 1851...accounts for 4000 Italian immigrants in England, with 50% of them living in London. The regional origins of most were the valleys around Como, Lucca; the people from Como were skilled artisans, making other precision instruments. People from Lucca specialized in plaster figure making. By the 1870s the main regional origins of Italian emigration to Britain were the valleys of Parma in the north, the Liri valley, half way between Rome and Naples. A railway network had been started by this time and this helped the people from the Liri valley to migrate to the North of Italy
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