They came as far back as 55 and 54 BC when Julius Caesar (initially landing in Deal) led expeditionary campaigns in the south-east of England,[7] and then again in AD 43 when Emperor Claudius invaded and subsequently conquered the British islands.

Initially, the stable Anglo-British kingdoms of Wessex and then Northumbria followed the practices of Celtic Christianity, however powerful figures such as Alfred the Great, who had been anointed by the Pope in Rome, tended toward Roman Catholicism, especially after the Synod of Whitby, drawing merchants, men of culture, artisans, and educated Catholic clerics from the Latin West including Italy.

The famous 'Lombard Street' in London took its name from the small but powerful community from northern Italy, living there as bankers and merchants after the year 1000.

[14] As bankers, the Frescobaldi financed ventures for numerous members of European royal families, notably their financial conquest of England, which Fernand Braudel has signalled as the greatest achievement of the Florentine firms, "not only in holding the purse-strings of the kings of England, but also in controlling sales of English wool which was vital to continental workshops and in particular to the Arte della Lana of Florence.

"[15] According to historian Michael Wayatt, there was "a small but influential community" of Italians "that took shape in England in the 15th century, initially consisting of ecclesiastics, renaissance humanists, merchants, bankers, and artists.

The fifteenth century also saw the birth of a pivotal Italo-Englishman in the form of John Florio, a famed language teacher, lexicographer, and translator.

Notable was also Alberico Gentili's contribution to the fields of international law, who was a tutor of Elizabeth I and a regius professor of Oxford University.

[18] The Napoleonic wars left northern Italy with a destroyed agriculture, and consequently many farmers were forced to emigrate: a few thousand moved to the British isles in the first half of the nineteenth century.

A railway network had been started by this time, and this helped the people from the Liri valley to migrate to the North of Italy, and then on to Britain.

The people from Parma were predominantly organ grinders, while the Neapolitans from the Liri valley (now under Lazio) made ice cream...... the occupational structure of the immigrants, up to the 1870s, remained 'substantially the same'.

The centre of the Italian community in Britain throughout the 19th Century, and indeed to the present day, is 'Little Italy', situated in a part of London called Clerkenwell..... description of its existence then, from an 1854 print, is of a "warren of streets around Hatton Garden".

And that the 500–600 Italians in Manchester included mostly Terrazzo specialists, plasterers, and modellers working on the prestigious, new town hall.

The Risorgimento hero Mazzini also created an Italian school for poor people, active from November 1841, at Greville Street in London.

All Italian born subjects living in Britain at the time of WW1 were regarded as 'aliens', and forced to register with their local police station.

The Italians were now seen as a national security threat, linked to the feared British Union of Fascists, and Winston Churchill told the police to "collar the lot!"

[24] In one of these transportations, a tragedy occurred: the sinking of the ocean liner Arandora Star on 2 July 1940 resulted in the loss of over 700 lives, including 446 British-Italians being deported as undesirable.

He recognised that the method of selecting 'dangerous' Italians was not satisfactory, and the result was that among those earmarked for deportation were a number of non-fascists and people whose sympathies lay with Britain.

[35] 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.

[37] A new ethnic minority group, nicknamed the Bangla-Italo, consisting of Bangladeshi Italians formed around London, Leicester and Manchester.

Finally, Italian citizens who also hold British citizenship did not need to register for the EU Settlement Scheme, so several people are missing from this statistic.