Some of the City’s prominent families of the 12th and 13th centuries such as the Bucointes and the Bukerels were probably descended from Italian settlers.

Venetian and Genoese merchants imported silks, velvets and spices to London during the 13th and 14th centuries.

After the expulsion of the Jews from England in 1290, the Lombards played a central part as financiers, still commemorated by Lombard Street in the City. Powerful Florentine companies later assumed this role.

Although Italians had been present in London for centuries, a distinct colony evolved only in the early 19th century, in Clerkenwell.

Skilled craftsmen from northern Italy were the first arrivals. They gathered in this neighbourhood, later nicknamed 'Little Italy', and worked as instrument makers, artists and decorators.

Some political refugees came to Britain in the first half of the 19th century. They included the political revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini and Gabriele Rossetti, father of the poet Christina Rossetti and the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Mazzini set up a free school for Italian children in Hatton Garden in 1841.

The Mazzini Garibaldi club in Red Lion Square was a social club for Italian working men. It was an important venue from its establishment in 1864 until it closed in 2008.

From the 1830s, large numbers of unskilled migrants from the Tosco-Emiliano mountain area in northern Italy left their homes due to land shortages. They came to London and worked as street sellers, musicians and entertainers.

During the later 19th century semi-skilled craftsmen found employment in the capital as figurine sellers and knife grinders.

Carlo Gatti, the Swiss-Italian caterer, introduced ice-cream to the capital in 1850.  Many Italian street vendors went from selling chestnuts to selling ice cream.

St. Peter’s Italian Church in Clerkenwell was founded in 1864 to serve the local community. The annual procession of the Madonna del Carmine is still celebrated in and around the church. The Italian Hospital in Bloomsbury was founded in 1884 to help Italians who could not afford to pay for health care.

At the turn of the 19th century a number of Italians moved to Soho to profit from the growing catering industry. There they established numerous cafes, restaurants and delicatessens.

By the 1920s St. Patrick’s Church in Soho Square served the growing Italian community in the area and St. George’s Cathedral in Southwark was attended by Italians who were beginning to move southwards.

During the 1930s there were eleven schools in London providing Italian language lessons for the children of migrants. However, this period of community growth ended with World War II.

From June 1940 nearly all Italian men, suspected of being fascists, were interned or deported. Tragically, the ‘Arandora Star’, a ship deporting Italian and German internees from Britain, was torpedoed by a U-boat and sank.

After the war, some Italian former prisoners of war remained and were employed in reconstruction work.

There was a mass exodus from poverty-stricken southern Italy at this time and Italian migration to Britain rose throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Many of the migrants went to Bedford and Peterborough as industrial workers.

The catering sector expanded rapidly in London in the 1950s and 1960s. The Italian proprietors of cafes, coffee bars and trattorias sent to Italy for relatives to come and work in these popular establishments. Southern Italians found jobs in horticulture and market gardening in the Lee Valley.

The 1970s saw a large number of homesick Italian expatriates make the return journey from Britain to Italy. From the 1980s, flourishing Italian businesses and banks brought an influx of Italian professionals to the capital.

The 2001 census gave a figure of 34,257 Italians resident in London. However, this does not include the descendants of Italian-born people living there, who are counted as British. Enfield, Haringey and Barnet in North London are where the majority dwells, while Islington and Camden are home to those who moved northwards from Clerkenwell during the interwar period.

The Italian Embassy is in Grosvenor Square. The Cultural Institute in Belgrave Square hosts events and provides a library and Italian language classes.

The growing numbers of Italians in London led to the establishment of the Chiesa del Redentore in Brixton in 1969. Also based here is the Italian fortnightly newspaper ‘La Voce degli Italiani’.

Amongst the best known members of the Italian community were businessman Lord Forte, founder of the hotel and restaurant empire, and artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, whose work decorates Tottenham Court Road tube station.