In 1685. Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes which meant that French Protestants were no longer safe. This resulted in about 200,000 Huguenot refugees leaving France and moving, among other places, to England. One of the places they landed was in Spitalfields. One of the things the Huguenot’s were good at was silk production. They produced silk in Spitalfields for the next 200+ years, with peaks from 1690-1760, and again from 1800-1820, but after that, the industry rapidly declined.