Germans in the East End of London

Perhaps it is the effect of the Blitz, but whereas the Huguenot French silk weavers of Spitalfields are celebrated, the German community south of Whitechapel High Street are little known now.

St Georg Lutheran Church - see http://www.panoramio.com/photo/76991412

They specialised in the Sugar-baking (sugar making) industry in the 18th century, buying raw cane syrup, boiling it and moulding crystalline sugar loafs and extracting black molasses.
They were notoriously poor in the main, but sugar merchants could become wealthy by exploiting their kinsfolk. One such  Dietrich Beckmann founded the church and his workers provided much of the congregation
We can only speculate how the community may have influenced Thomas Paine, who taught at Mr Noble's Academy, nearby in Mill Court Leman Street, a few years after St Georg's was built. But "No one man is capable, without the aid of society, of supplying his own wants, and those wants, acting upon every individual, impel the whole of them into society" (Rights of Man, Chapter 1) may reflect a desire to include previously pariah people into the broader commonwealth of society.

German immigrants were divided between Lutheran and Catholics

Bell Tower of St Boniface German Catholic Church (right) from the site of St Mary Matfelon (the White Chapel) http://www.panoramio.com/photo/68519554

Local sugar bakers from http://www.mawer.clara.net/white3.html <- original has link to database with names and dates

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The Uncommercial Traveller, created by Charles Dickens in the 1860s, visited the East End of London only a few times. On a walk to Wapping workhouse - "....was in Commercial Rd. Pleasantly wallowing in the abundant mud of that thoroughfare, and greatly enjoying the huge piles of building belonging to the sugar refiners,....". And once accompanying a policeman on his beat...."My beat lying round by Whitechapel Church, and the adjacent sugar-refineries, - great buildings, tier upon tier, that have the appearance of being nearly related to the dock-warehouses at Liverpool,..."
"The Uncommercial Traveller", a series of papers for a periodical, begun in 1860, by Charles Dickens, and edited and corrected by him in 1867-8.

http://www.mawer.clara.net/refineries.html#dick

By the 19th Century, the sugar industry had been concentrated in fewer hands. Instead of outsourcing the work to poor households, merchants had turned it into an industrial process and built large refineries.

19th-century German and English School  http://www.panoramio.com/photo/76991424