St George's German Lutheran Church

St George's German Lutheran Church is a church in Alie Street, Aldgate just to the East of the City of London. From its foundation in 1762 until 1995 it was used by German Lutherans. Today the small vestry serves as an office for the Historic Chapels Trust and the church is available for hire for secular events.St George's was the fifth Lutheran church to be built in London. It is now the oldest surviving German Lutheran church in the United Kingdom.Foundation and HistoryThe founder was Dietrich Beckman, a successful sugar boiler who put up half the money required to buy the stie and erect the church. Beckman's cousin, Gustav Anton Wachsel from Halberstadt, became the first pastor. At the time, the street was called "Little Ayliffe Street" and the area was called "Goodman's Fields". The name of the street changed to "Alie Street" about 1800. This area of Whitechapel had many sugar refiners of German descent in the nineteenth century and they constituted most of the congregation. From 1853 the churchyard and crypt were closed, and no longer accepted burials.At its height, there were an estimated 16,000 German Lutherans in Whitechapel and the area was sometimes referred to as Little Germany. St Georges Church is the last remaining physical evidence of this major wave of immigration into East London.The last major influx of Germans to the area was in the 1930s, when, during the Nazi period, the pastor, Julius Rieger, set up a relief centre for Jewish refugees at St Georges. The theologian and anti-Nazi activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached here for a brief period in 1935, following the destruction of his own St Paul's church nearby.