Princelet Street is a fairly short and narrow street between Wilkes Street in the west and Spelman Street in the east. At about halfway, it intersects with Brick Lane. Princelet Street features prominently in two non-fiction books about Spitalfields: Rachel Lichtenstein and Ian Sinclair’s Rodinsky’s Room (1999) and Suresh Singh’s A Modest Living: Memoirs of a Cockney Sikh (2018). In the former, the street is home to the Princelet Street synagogue above which the Jewish autodidact David Rodinsky lived, and of which he was the caretaker, until 1969; in the latter, no. 38 Princelet Street is the derelict house that Joginder Singh, the author’s father, purchases in 1951, some two years after his arrival from the Punjab, and that subsequently becomes a first port of call for many Indian immigrants and the family home for more than sixty years.
Philipp Hunnekuhl 