A “foreign” presence in Bideford goes back to at least Roman times, when the Roman army set up camp near Bideford. 

The Grenville family, future Lords of the Manor of Bideford, arrived from Normandy in France in 1066. 

Sir Richard Grenville, naval commander, coloniser and treasure seeker, brought a Native American to Bideford in 1588.

In the 17th century, Protestant settlers fleeing from persecution arrived in Bideford from France and Holland.

Wealthy merchants operating from Bideford Quay profited from the slave trade.

As Bideford’s population expanded in the nineteenth century, migrants from several European countries, including Germany, arrived and settled in Bideford.

Individuals from an Italian background can also be found in Bideford in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They became prominent in local ice cream manufacture as well as music. 

There were also residents from France, including over 30 nuns of French origin living in the Ursuline Convent in Northdown Hall. 

Bideford, like many towns in Devon, provided a temporary home for refugees from Belgium during the First World War.  

The twentieth century brought more settlers. Before the Second World War, there are settlers recorded from a range of countries, including: Denmark, Norway and Belgium, as well as Germany. 

Maurice Myer Greenside Prince founded the Strand Cinema on the Pill in Bideford in 1938, where he later sheltered Jewish refugees fleeing persecution in Nazi Germany. 

The 1939 Register indicates the presence of Pullman and Chensil Singh, from India, working as travelling Drapers. 

Several refugees from the Nazi advance came to live in Bideford.  The Fischer family from Czechoslovakia became well-known glove manufacturers in Bideford.  

In the 1940s and 1950s, Italians, Spanish and residents of several countries in Eastern Europe arrived in Bideford, possibly refugees from the advance of Communism in the post-war period.

A Chinese presence in Bideford goes back to the 1960s, when The Capital Chinese restaurant was opened at 22 Bridgeland Street.

The Ugandan Asian crisis of the 1970s led to several families settling in the North Devon region.

 In the 1980s, Vietnamese refugees came to the wider Bideford / Barnstaple area.