London Irish beyond Kilburn
Róisín Lanigan on where the Irish diaspora live now and the literature that has charted their journey
There are 32 counties in Ireland but there’s a 33rd in northwest London. Or at least, that’s how Kilburn was known until very recently. When people emigrated from the old country, they found a simulacrum of Ireland up the Kilburn High Road. County Kilburn gave them GAA matches, pubs with snugs, and most importantly, other Irish people.
The London Irish diaspora trickled down from this northwest enclave. Throughout the Famine and after the Second World War in particular, Irish navvies and builders streamed into Archway and Islington and Camden, building roads and working mainly in construction and healthcare. In 2017, a public space opposite the underground station was renamed ‘Navigator Square’ in their memory. At one point, the staff at the Whittington Hospital, were estimated to be 85% Irish. When Michael O’Halloran was elected in the 1960s to Islington North – presently occupied by another Irish favourite, Jeremy Corbyn – he called his supporters “the Irish mafia”.
And that freshly emigrated mafia created a cultural life, within and without their community. The London Irish literary canon is vast and rich and as densely populated as the Irish pubs of Ealing, Hammersmith and Sheen (other outposts for the diaspora). The novels arrived, recreating the journey from Ireland to London to ‘make your fortune’ – Dónall Mac Amhlaigh's Schnitzer O'Shea and Joseph O'Connor's Cowboys and Indians – or against your will, expelled from your home country by poverty or politics, as in John B Keane’s aptly-named The Contractors. Other literature – notably Anthony Cronin’s The Life of Riley – explored the so-called ‘diaspora blues’, the feeling of being at home in neither country and trapped between two identities, the past and the present.
The literature changed as the community changed – John Walsh’s memoir The Falling Angels advances the diasporic experience for the second generation, telling the story of a London-Irish boy growing up in Battersea; John Healy’s The Grass Arena does the same for the north of the city,1 chronicling his hard-scrabble life as a second-generation immigrant and boxer in Kentish Town. And Oisín McKenna’s Evenings & Weekends, published last year, takes a multigenerational approach, flitting between the perspective of the first and second generation, mother and son. In recent years too a new generation of Irish women have been dismantling the stereotype that the Irish literary canon is dominated by male writers, like Emma Donoghue’s Going Home and Megan Nolan’s Acts of Desperation. And An Unconsidered People: The Irish in London, a non-fiction exploration of the crowds of Irish who arrived in the city, was written by Catherine Dunne. It makes sense; by 1991, there were over a quarter of a million Irish-born in London and, as had been the case for most of the twentieth century, the majority were women.
Dunne’s book is focused mainly on the 1950s, the wave of immigration that preceded what became known as ‘the Ryanair generation’, mainly millennials who arrived after the 2008 financial crash and the death of the Celtic Tiger. This generation’s experience of emigration was changed thanks to Michael O’Leary and the boom of cheap flights that allowed them to nip back as often as they liked (COVID dependent).
‘All day the area around the park was full of tricolours and Celtic tops and accents from Essex and Dublin and Sydney’
I am part of this generation of ‘London Irish’, definitionally, even though in practice Ryanair doesn’t run flights from Belfast. And I have never lived in Kilburn or Islington. When I first moved here I moved into an empty room in Bethnal Green that a school friend had just left. She was the only person I knew – Irish or otherwise – in London. I immediately got bed-bugs — so when she suggested finding a new place together in Finsbury Park, I respectfully declined. Instead I’ve spent the past 10 years bounding around various neighbourhoods in London where my communities are dictated by price and availability, not choice and kinship. When I wrote my book, I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There, these concerns were at the heart of the novel. I’m not at home, I want to be at home, I am at home, it’s not my real home, my real home doesn’t feel like my real home anymore. This is not just a philosophical diasporic experience, it’s an economic one. Pockets of Irish existed in London because the housing was cheap there. Now, there is no cheap housing in London. The London Irish experience has become that of leaving, not arriving – McKenna’s Evening & Weekends is a meditation on being pushed out of the city, not flown in.
Instead, Irish communities have mushroomed in Greenwich (up 48 per cent), Sheen (39 per cent) and Canning Town (38 per cent), as well as Clapham (33 per cent). Longford artist Bernard Canavan, who’s lived in London since the 1960s and whose work focuses on emigrant life, told The Irish Post recently that: ‘the only explanation I can think of is that accommodation is cheaper and you can get into the city very fast. Irish people traditionally settled in the north west postcodes for work reasons, there was easier access to the motorways to the north so people settled north.’ It’s also true that attitudes to Irish immigrants – once the target of ‘no blacks, no dogs, no Irish’ signs in boarding house windows – have changed over time. Anti-Irish sentiment has fallen in the years following The Troubles and the IRA’s bombing campaign targeting the city. The British xenophobia that once targeted the Irish has not disappeared – sadly, it’s merely found other targets.
And nor has Irish influence disappeared from the haunts it once dominated. In Ealing, Tir Chonaill Park is still home to the Tír Chonaill Gaels Gaelic Football club. In Camden The London Irish Centre still hosts gigs and comedy nights and language classes and outreach programmes, as does the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith. The Claddagh Ring in Hendon has become a cult favourite on TikTok for its traditional stew. In Southwark charities still exist solely focusing on Irish pensioners, reaching the end of their lives in their adopted homelands. Emerald Eats, a stall on Broadway Market selling chicken fillet rolls – a much-memed deli favourite back home – regularly has queues down the street. And last summer, the day after the General Election, the Irish rebel band veterans the Wolfe Tones played their final London gig in Finsbury Park.
The city was hungover and sleep deprived. The rain was torrential. The crowd didn’t mind. All day the area around the park was full of tricolours and Celtic tops and accents from Essex and Dublin and Sydney. At the end of the concert we all peeled off again, to mouldy four bed flats down the road or hotel rooms in King’s Cross or trains to south London or Kent or Luton. Although dispersed to the ends of the city once again, for two hours in the pouring rain everyone was north London Irish.
Roísín's book I Want To Go Home But I'm Already There will be published on 20 February 2025 and has featured on almost every most-anticipated list that the literary press has run in recent weeks
John Healy’s The Glass Cage is set to be unpubllished by Unbound