Listen: June and Maureen Orwell, Julie Bloom
Fish and chips is believed to have originated in Britain due to two groups of immigrants. Fried fish were supposedly brought into the country by Jewish immigrants in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, and chips are attributed to Belgian or French immigrants from the seventeenth century. In fact, it is impossible to pin down the origins of the industry in time or in place, though notably Henry Mayhew mentions the fried-fish sellers in his classic London Labour and the London Poor (1851), where he remarked on the odour of the frying making the sellers quite unpopular.1 A number of Jewish people have been named as the originators of the first fried fish and chips restaurant in Whitechapel, while researchers have searched through nineteenth-century business directories and found there to have been dozens of such restaurants with owners with Jewish-sounding names.2
In the case of Johnny Isaacs, whose fish-and-chip shop was situated opposite Whitechapel Station near the London Hospital and close to Vallance Road, it features in the memories of many former Jewish residents as 'a very famous chip shop'. A number of former Brady Club members have mentioned how they went there after club for 'the best chips in London'. Youngsters would congregate outside on the wide pavement and chat and eat their fish and chips wrapped in newspaper.
'The fish was brilliant, the chips were brilliant, it was laughter and fun, run by nice Jewish people. It was always packed in there, they worked really hard.'
Alex Moss interviewed by Rachel Lichtenstein, 2017
Cite This Article
Johnny Isaac's Fish and Chip Shop, jewisheastendmemorymap.org?feature_type=polygon&id=58, accessed December 2025.