What grew up outside the established church mattered as much as what happened inside it. Bunhill Fields, on the edge of the City, was the burial ground for those who would not use the Prayer Book service, and John Bunyan, Daniel Defoe, Isaac Watts and William Blake all lie there. Across the road stands the chapel John Wesley built in 1778, near the meeting in Aldersgate Street where he described his heart being strangely warmed in 1738, an event Methodists count as the beginning of their movement.
Jews had been expelled from England in 1290. Readmission came informally under Cromwell in the 1650s, and the Bevis Marks synagogue, opened in 1701 by the Spanish and Portuguese congregation, has held services ever since without interruption, the oldest in Britain still in use. Nineteenth and twentieth century migration from eastern Europe made the East End the centre of Jewish London before the community moved north and west.
One building in Brick Lane tells the rest of the story on its own. It was built in 1743 as a chapel for Huguenot refugees, became a Methodist chapel, then in 1898 a synagogue for the Jewish population of the streets around it, and since 1976 has been the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid. The East London Mosque nearby is among the largest in Europe. The Shri Swaminarayan Mandir at Neasden, built in the 1990s from carved Indian stone, and the gurdwara at Southall serve communities that are now several generations old.