Post War Emigration from Sicily

Post War Emigration

In the 1950s Italian emigration started again to some areas of Great Britain (like Manchester), even if relatively limited in number. It was made mainly of southern Italians. But in the 1960s it tapered off and practically stopped in the 1970s.

The region of the country containing the most Italian Britons is London, where over 50,000 people of Italian birth live. Then there are Manchester, where 25,000 Italians live and Bedford, where there are approximately 20,000 people of Italian origin.

Bedford has the highest concentration of Italian immigrants in the UK, withPeterborough. This is mainly as a result of labour recruitment in the 1950s by the London Brick Company in the southern Italian regions of Puglia and Campania. By 1960 approximately 7,500 Italian men were employed by London Brick in Bedford and a further 3,000 in Peterborough. In 1962 the Scalabrini Fathers, who first arrived in Peterborough in 1956, purchased an old school and converted it into a church named after the patron saint of workers San Giuseppe. By 1991 over 3,000 christenings of second-generation Italians had been carried out there.

In 2007 there were 82 Italian associations in Great Britain, most of them in the metropolitan area of London. Actually more than 350,000 are direct descendants of Italians in the United Kingdom.(Wikipedia, 2012)