Notes: Early Protestant Settlement in Wandsworth
Dutch Refugees, and the Huguenots Who Followed

Dutch brass-founders and the “Frying-pan Houses” Confirmed, independently corroborated

The earliest documented Protestant-refugee trade in Wandsworth is Dutch, not French, and it has nothing to do with hats. The Victoria County History is explicit about both the century and the word "refugees":

“The name of another industry established in the 16th century by Dutch refugees, who kept their manufacture of brass plates for frying-pans and other utensils ‘a mystery,’ still survives in Frying Pan Creek.”

This matches the antiquarian John Aubrey's own account (writing in the late 17th century, of something already well established "before his time"), quoted independently in Old and New London:

“…a manufacture of ‘brass plates for kettles, skellets, frying-pans, &c., by Dutchmen, who kept it a mystery.’”

The works were "long known as the 'Frying-pan Houses,'" and the name outlived them, surviving as the modern Frying Pan Creek. Lysons's 1792 Environs of London repeats the same detail via Aubrey. Three sources of quite different vintage and character — a Victorian antiquarian citation, a Georgian topographer, and a modern peer-reviewed county history — agree on the essentials, which is about as solid as this kind of claim gets.

Whether these Dutch brass-founders were specifically religious refugees, as opposed to economic migrants protecting a trade secret, isn't stated by any source found. "Kept it a mystery" reads more like a guarded trade practice than a persecuted congregation — though the 16th century is exactly the period of the Elizabethan "Stranger" churches (the Dutch Church at Austin Friars foremost among them), so a religious element is entirely plausible. Not proven for Wandsworth specifically.

The French Protestant hatters and their church Confirmed, independently corroborated

The much better-known wave. The Victoria County History dates it precisely relative to the Dutch settlement above:

“About a century after the Dutchmen came a colony of French Protestants, who carried on a flourishing trade in hats.”

Lysons is more specific about the trigger and the trade:

“Towards the close of the last century, when great numbers of French protestants fled from the persecution which prevailed in the reign of Lewis XIV. many of them settled at Wandsworth, where they established a French church. … Among these refugees was a considerable number of hatters, who introduced their manufacture at this place, and carried it on with great success.”

Old and New London agrees: “It was upon the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, towards the end of the seventeenth century, that many of the French Protestants settled at Wandsworth.” The VCH adds that the French church itself “continued until 1787.”

“An already existing small community” Single source, unconfirmed elsewhere

One source — a local walking-tour blog, not an academic one — makes the link between the two waves explicit: “Records show how the Huguenots were attracted to Wandsworth by an already existing small community of French and Dutch emigrees.” That's a plausible bridge between the Dutch brass-founders and the French hatters, and it would explain why the refugees chose Wandsworth specifically — but it's a single, non-academic source making an unreferenced claim ("records show" without citing which records), so it should be treated as a lead worth chasing rather than an established fact.

The “1573” chapel plaque Likely a different story entirely — see Presbyterians page

The old chapel site on the corner carries a plaque reading “Erected 1573, Enlarged 1685.” It's tempting to read this as evidence of an even earlier French congregation, but the "1573" almost certainly has nothing to do with the Huguenots at all — it very likely commemorates the 1572 Puritan "Orders of Wandsworth" Presbytery instead, a separate and unrelated story covered in full on the companion Presbyterians page. London Remembers' own research treats the 1573 date as "more tradition than truth" as a claim about a physical building; the chapel that became the Huguenots' meeting-place was apparently first built by the French refugees themselves, later in the 17th century, on a site that already carried an older memory attached to it.

James Thorne, 1876, on the reputation for hat-making Confirmed, precisely dated

Victorian writer James Thorne, writing in 1876, described Wandsworth as "long famous for hat making" after the French element "became absorbed in the surrounding population" — a durable trade reputation outliving the community that founded it, though this by itself doesn't establish anything about when that community first arrived.

“Around 1780” hatters and dyers Flagged as probably garbled — do not use as-is

One source summary produced the sentence "Around 1780 they settled in Wandsworth and were skilled hatters and dyers." This should be treated with real caution: every other source, without exception, dates the French settlement to shortly after the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, roughly a century earlier. This looks like a garbled or mis-summarised detail rather than a genuine alternative dating, but it hasn't been re-verified against the original source, so it's flagged here rather than silently dropped.