Bedford has a high concentration of Italian immigrants, along with Peterborough. 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.