Mapping London’s South Asian history
London and South Asia are bound together by a shared history dating back four centuries and today around one in five people in the capital have heritage from the region. These connections are often overlooked but an illuminating map aims to brings them to light via a ‘knot of intertwining stories’. Journalist and author Shafik Meghji picked up a copy and set off on an eye-opening tour around his home city.
During the busy lunchtime rush, the Indian YMCA canteen reverberated with students, office workers and tourists speaking a mixture of English, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Punjabi and Malayalam. Brisk and efficient, the white-jacketed staff served up a steady stream of inexpensive dal, vegetable curry, tandoori chicken and thalis. Portable fans stirred the leaves of pot plants and BBC News plays silently on the wall-mounted TV. At 1pm sharp, the unexpected chime of a cuckoo clock sounded above the good-natured din.
Founded in 1920, the Indian YMCA has provided a temporary home for generations of students, as well as serving as a venue for discussions over Indian independence in the first half of the 20th century. It moved to its current location off Fitzroy Square, a stone’s throw from Tottenham Court Road, in 1953. Past visitors include the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nobel Prize-winning poet, author and composer Rabindranath Tagore, and Mahatma Gandhi, a quote from whom greets guests at the entrance: ‘I do not want my house to be walled in on all side and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any.’
The surrounding area is similarly rich in British-South Asian connections, if you know where to look. To the north, hard against the cacophony and chaos of Euston Station and bisected by preparatory works for HS2, lies Drummond Street, a central hub for South Asia cuisine since the 1960s and birthplace of the both the Patak’s food company and the Ambala chain, whose original shop is still stocked with an array of sweets and snacks, from barfi to halwa.
Meanwhile, a 15-minute walk to the west takes you to the former premises of the Hindoostane Coffee House, the first Indian restaurant in the UK. It was opened in 1810 by Patna-born renaissance man Sake Dean Mahomed, who is also credited with introducing shampoo to Europe and being the first Indian to publish a book in English. Yet this trailblazing establishment is easy to miss: there’s no blue plaque to mark its location and the building now houses a Japanese restaurant.
‘Soldiers and suffragettes, singers and spies, authors and artists’
The Indian YMCA, Drummond Street and the Hindoostane Coffee House are among 50 entries on the South Asian History London Map, a creative way of sharing stories that are often neglected or overlooked. Spanning four centuries of history, it features soldiers and suffragettes, singers and spies, authors and artists, as well as places of worship, precious stones, pieces of art and architectural marvels. While some are well known – the former Kensington home of Queen star Freddie Mercury, the Koh-i-Noor diamond, the Parliament Square statue of Mahatma Gandhi – many are not.
‘We’d seen and read other maps in [publisher] Blue Crow’s line-up, and in recent years they’d started to move into social histories, as well as the architectural history maps they’re known for,’ said Krish Nathaniel, who co-wrote and researched the map with Bushra Mohamed. ‘Specifically, the maps preceding ours were on Black history and women’s history, so we both thought there was a clear space for a South Asian history map of London. We always wanted to create something that was accessible and had a very intersectional selection of historical places and spaces to visit.’
On a sunny day in late spring, I used the map to hopscotch across London. From Drummond Street I headed east past Brick Lane, home to long-established Bengali and Bangladeshi communities, and the East London Mosque, one of the largest in Europe, capable of accommodating some 7,000 worshippers. Beyond East India Dock, originally operated by the East India Company, the Docklands Light Railway transported me to the Royal Docks.
City Hall – home of the Greater London Authority – rose like a glass iceberg above the water. On the manicured grass outside teachers corralled a gaggle of primary school pupils in fluorescent yellow vests, as a series of empty cable-cars glided overhead and a plane roared into land at City Airport.
The building sits on Kamal Chunchie Way, which takes its name from a Sri Lankan pastor whose experience of racism in the East End prompted him to found the Coloured Men’s Institute in 1926. Reputedly, the first community organisation of its kind, the institute provided support for destitute sailors, dockers and other local residents, while fighting against prejudice and discrimination more widely. Previously known as Siemens Brothers Way, the road was renamed in 2021 after a public vote.
‘The amount of sites and spaces which related to social justice and independence movements was really noticeable for us,’ said Nathaniel. As well as Kamal Chunchie Way, he highlighted London’s first South Asian MP. ‘Dadabhai Naoroji, who was also an Indian independence leader, was elected in 1892 – much earlier than we’d assumed.’
‘We are the lions’
I continued my journey through the capital’s South Asian heritage in South London. On a quiet residential road near where I grew up in Streatham Hill, I found the former residence of Trinidadian Nobel Prize-winning author VS Naipaul. Here he wrote his seminal novel A House for Mr Biswas in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This period, Naipaul said, was ‘the most consuming, the most fulfilled, the happiest years of my life. They were my Eden’.
Sticking to the literary theme, I travelled on to the Vauxhall site of the Powders laundrette, the setting for the groundbreaking 1985 romantic-comedy My Beautiful Laundrette. Based on author Hanif Kureishi’s Oscar-nominated screenplay, it explored the love story between a British-Pakistani man, Omar, and his childhood friend, and erstwhile racist thug, Johnny.
I finished the day in Herne Hill, passing a gelato shop and a man fixing bikes on the street, until I reached the former home of the Race Today Collective. In the 1970s and 80s, this pioneering Black and Asian anti-racist organisation combined journalism and activism. Members of the collective – many of whom were, or had been, members of the British Black Panthers – included Darcus Howe, Leila Hassan, Olive Morris, Mala Sen and Farrukh Dhondy.
It felt like an appropriate place to end my journey. The South Asian London History Map was published in July 2024, a month before worst racist riots in Britain in a generation. This outbreak violence and prejudice continues to cast a shadow over communities of colour, despite the eagerness of politicians and the media to confine it to the distant past, the causes and implications left unexamined and ignored.
By including entries on the likes of Altab Ali Park, which commemorates the 24-year-old victim of a racially motivated attack in 1978, and student Gurdip Singh Chaggar, who, alongside activist Blair Peach, was killed by racists a year later, the map is a timely reminder that the events of last summer are nothing new.
But it also tells an equally powerful story of resistance, activism, endurance and creativity, from Sophia Duleep Singh, a campaigner for women’s suffrage and against British colonial rule in India, to trade unionist Jayaben Desai. The latter led a strike by 100 mainly South Asian women against poor pay, working conditions and racist treatment at the Grunwick photo processing factory in the 1970s. ‘What you are running here,’ she told the Grunwick manager, ‘is not a factory, it is a zoo. In a zoo, there are many types of animals. Some are monkeys who dance on your fingertips, others are lions who can bite your head off. We are those lions, Mr Manager.’
Nathaniel emphasised that he and Mohamed wanted the map to have a broad appeal, with entries covering ‘modern nations in the subcontinent, and the diaspora, various faiths, women’s histories and queer histories, as well as contemporary culture’. Collectively, they send out a resounding message: ‘It’s clear that the map shows that British history is multi-ethnic, and we want people of South Asian heritage – but also anyone else who reads it – to understand the contribution that has been made by South Asian people to London [and] also to the wider country. We hope the map can, in its small way, counter a reductive narrative of what contributions by ethnic minorities to Britain have been.’
Shafik Meghji is an award-winning journalist, travel writer and author, as well as the Runnymede Trust’s digital editor. His new book, Small Earthquakes: A Journey Through Lost British History in South America, is out on 24 July and is available to pre-order now.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the Runnymede Trust.
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Photo © Shafik Meghji
