Curry houses, grocery stores, textile shops, and bilingual street signs: All pepper the street known as Banglatown—Brick Lane, East London’s iconic Bangladeshi neighborhood. Wandering among a throng of Bengali locals and international tourists, I sipped frothy pink chai from Rajmahal Sweets and ducked into Taj Stores to stock up on mango pickle and ground cumin.

The supermarket’s co-owner, Jamal Khalique, is a regular presence within the shop, which he tells me his uncle Abdul Jabbar opened—as “Jabber’s Shop”—in 1936. Before that, Abdul Jabbar worked in a textile factory. This was a common occupation for Bengalis at the time, who inherited the East London “rag trade” from their Jewish predecessors. That industry—known in Yiddish as the schmatta trade—had been dominated by Jewish immigrants since the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they had taken over from French Huguenots, who set up the silk-weaving trade in the 17th century. Born in 1971, Khalique grew up just off Brick Lane, which he saw transform from a Jewish enclave into a Bangladeshi one.

“I call it a safe haven,” Khalique explains, thumbing through old photos of the supermarket in his office just above. Perhaps it’s only fitting that Brick Lane Jamme Masjid, the famed mosque at 59 Brick Lane, used to be a Jewish synagogue; before that, a Methodist church; and even before that, a Huguenot chapel. “Jewish people, they found a bit of comfort here,” Khalique explains. “Then Bangladeshis found comfort here.”

Photograph of Jamal Khalique. All photographs by Meena Venkataramanan.

Like with Zadie Smith’s Willesden and Samuel Selvon’s Bayswater, I first encountered Brick Lane on the page. While roaming a vintage bookstore in Camden Market, I thumbed through a worn paperback copy of Brick Lane, Monica Ali’s 2003 novel set in the neighborhood. Centered on a Bangladeshi immigrant seamstress living on the eponymous thoroughfare, the multigenerational tale breathed life into the street before I ever set foot in the neighborhood.

South Asians have called East London home for more than a century. In the 1990s, my own Tamil family lived in Ilford, the East London suburb where I was born. It is known as one of London’s many Little Indias—this one with many South Indian immigrants. And Tower Hamlets, the East London borough encompassing Brick Lane, is almost 35 percent Bangladeshi—by far the largest Bangladeshi community in the UK—and is also home to one of the largest Muslim populations in the country.

Thousands of Bangladeshis left their homeland for the UK during and shortly after the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971. But they started moving there even before the 1970s: In the wake of South Asia’s partition in 1947, Bangladeshi men immigrated to industrial towns in the UK to help rebuild the country after the Second World War, sending remittances home. Long before that, beginning in the 17th century, Sylheti sailors worked as lascar seamen on British ships, and began settling along the East London docks in large numbers in the 1850s.

As Bangladeshis continue to shape Brick Lane and its surroundings in the present, its multicultural history has become all but a footnote. “The Huguenots, fleeing persecution from France, when they first came, they built all these buildings above Brick Lane. Those high rise, big windows, just to get the optimal amount of light to be able to do that weaving work. Then, you know, the Jewish communities took over and the Bangladeshi and so forth,”said Asma Begum, a Brick Lane native. Her mother, Anwara, was herself a Bangladeshi immigrant, who worked as a seamstress in a Jewish-owned textile factory beginning in the 1970s.

Begum and I met at Hichki, a South Asian cafe just south of Brick Lane, on the bustling Whitechapel High Street. She told me that last year, she donated her family’s sewing machine for display at London Museum Docklands. “It’s been in a documentary; we’ve written a book on it,” she explains, referring to a BBC documentary on British Bangladeshis and a community book project on Bengali seamstresses she helped spearhead. “I cannot afford for that machine to just go anywhere, so I donated it.”

Leo Epstein

At first, Anwara Begum and many other Bengali seamstresses were employed by the Ashkenazi Jewish community. These Jewish textile workers began migrating to Brick Lane at the end of the 19th century to escape pogroms in Eastern Europe; by 1900, up to 95 percent of the population in certain areas of the East End—the inner core of East London—was Jewish. During the Second World War, more Jewish refugees moved to Brick Lane, where they opened textile factories (and later began to employ Bangladeshis, who moved to the neighborhood in subsequent decades).

Walking from Brick Lane I found, across from London’s Liverpool Street Station, the Bishopsgate Institute archives. There I unearthed a VHS tape featuring a 1986 documentary called Brick Lane: (Sights & Sounds of the Jewish East End), written and directed by Michael and Aumie Shapiro, Jewish Londoners who produced several volumes of anthologies memorializing the Jewish East End. The documentary features a montage of photos taken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries depicting Brick Lane and nearby streets. The film’s narrator, speaking in a crisp Jewish Cockney accent, acknowledges the neighborhood’s evolution from Jewish to Bengali. “Today, like most other East End synagogues, it no longer exists: It is now a Bangladeshi supermarket,” he explains of a synagogue on Heneage Street. And of a textile factory, he observes: “Sewing machines are whirring away day and night in the workshops, although the suede leather trade of the Bangladeshis has mainly taken over from the rag trade.”

Still, remnants of Brick Lane’s Jewish history sprinkle the street. There are, for example, Brick Lane Beigel Bake, which sells bagels for less than one pound, and its less-loved fraternal twin, Brick Lane Beigel Shop. But these are no longer Jewish-owned.

Brick Lane, while harking back to its past, has evolved into a new kind of enclave that transcends its Huguenot, Jewish, and Bangladeshi origins and welcomes immigrants and tourists of all backgrounds.

The only remaining Jewish business owner is Leo Epstein. He started his business, Epra Fabrics, in 1956, after fleeing the Holocaust just two decades before, when the Second World War erupted. As the neighborhood became heavily Bangladeshi beginning in the 1970s, Epstein, now 92, recalled welcoming his new South Asian neighbors, who were fleeing violence in Bangladesh during its Liberation War. “We were made welcome, so why not make other refugees welcome?” Epstein told me as we sat in his office on a hot August day, while his son and grandson attended to customers.

But not everyone felt that way, he reminded me. Many Jewish business owners packed up and moved out to the suburbs. He is the only one left on Brick Lane.

Altab Ali Park

Just south of Brick Lane, along Whitechapel High Street and across from a Tesco Express and a Lloyd’s Bank, sits a modest green plaza. The little park is frequented by elderly white-haired Bangladeshi men smoking cigarettes, and young mothers dressed in hijab and salwar kameez pushing their toddlers in strollers. Named after a young Bangladeshi man who was stabbed to death in 1978 by white teenagers in an act of racist hate, Altab Ali Park pays homage to the Bengali immigrants who left their homeland for the UK during and shortly after the Bangladesh Liberation War.

I couldn’t help but latch on to the fact that when he was murdered, Altab Ali was almost my age now—25. He worked in a garment factory off Brick Lane.

Exhausted from an afternoon spent ambling in the heat, I sat on a bench along Altab Ali Park’s edge. It felt eerie that I had returned to London during a summer of anti-immigrant riots, so very similar to the ones that plagued London during the rise of the far-right British National Party in the 1980s.

Back at Taj Stores, Jamal Khalique remembered the violence. For him, it was personal: Brick Lane was targeted almost weekly by far-right agitators who spent their Sundays “chucking stones and milk bottles” into local businesses. But Khalique and his family retaliated, collecting their own glass milk bottles in case they were targeted. When he was 11, Khalique was attacked by a dog that far-right agitators sent to chase him. He still has a scar on his leg to prove it, he tells me.

All these years later, Khalique has stayed on Brick Lane, bearing witness to its gradual evolution from a humble Bangladeshi enclave to a hipster’s paradise in Shoreditch, punctuated by artisanal coffee joints, vintage clothing shops, and Upmarket, a global food hall housed in the historic Truman Brewery, now converted into an event space. It is a far cry from what the East End used to be.

Indeed, it’s no wonder that I met Asma Begum, who grew up on Brick Lane, just south of it, at what she describes as a “modern and aesthetic” South Asian cafe. “Normally I would have met on Brick Lane,” she confesses, “but it’s been one of those things where as I’ve grown up, I’ve become less and less familiar with what’s open.”

Some Londoners mourn the loss of Brick Lane’s Bengali character. Nijjor Manush, a Bengali grassroots activist group, has protested the gentrification of Brick Lane. Fatima Rajina, who cofounded the group, pointed to redevelopment of historic spaces on Brick Lane, such as the Truman Brewery, and the Shoreditch area more generally. “No one came to Shoreditch back then, when they were scared of Bengali migrants,” she explained. “Now people are tapping into this weird thing of commodifying a particular working-class culture, but then not wanting anything to do with the very people [who live there].”

When I met the activists behind Nijjor Manush at the group’s office in Bethnal Green, I was somewhat embarrassed to admit that, during that particular week, I’d been staying at an Airbnb flat located in the Boundary Estate, a former social housing development just steps away from Brick Lane. The neighbors across from my unit, which is continuously rented out on Airbnb, were a working-class Bangladeshi family. It made me wonder: Is the main problem facing Brick Lane really a perceived loss of its Bengali culture, or is it the merciless displacement of the working class?

The redevelopment decried by Nijjor Manush isn’t confined to Brick Lane and Shoreditch. Other neighborhoods in London—including the South London neighborhoods of Brixton, Elephant and Castle, and Peckham—are experiencing gentrification too, which has affected the Afro-Caribbean, Latin American, and Nigerian populations that respectively shape each area.

Taj Stores

For those who have lived and worked on Brick Lane, the change is inevitable. “London is a multicultural city,” Begum said, noting the importance of preserving its history through heritage efforts and museums. “I think sometimes we might have to change to reflect that. Maybe you feel out of your depth about it, but actually, if you still want to exist in a place where it’s constantly shifting and changing, you might have to change your business ideas.”

Khalique, of Taj Stores, has embraced the new business brought in by redevelopment. “If development happens, footfall happens, and any footfall in the area is good,” he said. “I’m bound to have some sort of new customers walk in front of our business.” But like Begum, Khalique emphasized the importance of preserving Brick Lane’s Banglatown history through signage, plaques, and other efforts to memorialize Brick Lane’s residents, workers, and martyrs. Altab Ali Park is just one example.

Perhaps the person who can best speculate on the neighborhood’s trajectory is Leo Epstein, who has worked on Brick Lane for the better part of a century, and, at 92, has lived for nearly its entirety. Epstein remains unfazed by the redevelopment and new businesses popping up along Brick Lane, including the Morley’s—the iconic South London chicken shop—that has emerged just next door to Epra Fabrics. “It’s always been changing since the day we got here,” he told me, recalling his first days working in the rag trade on Brick Lane. “People move out; they don’t live here anymore. The owners move out and they want to live in the suburbs. And sometimes they move their businesses as well. It’s sort of a general change, but that happens everywhere.”

Morley’s

I am precisely the new kind of customer to which Khalique alluded. When I first visited Brick Lane on a day trip to London in the winter of 2022, I was a master’s student at the University of Cambridge. I noticed the relative dearth of South Asian supermarkets, so my first order of business on Brick Lane that frigid January was stocking up on Patak’s mango pickle and Maggi Authentic Indian Hot and Sweet Sauce at Taj Stores. Afterward, I patiently waited in line for a £1 beigel at Brick Lane Beigel Bake. Since then, on my many visits to Brick Lane, I’ve patronized a range of restaurants—both its long-standing Bengali curry houses and its newer joints like Damascus Bite, a humble Syrian café along its north end recommended by Vittles, a food and culture newsletter. But I must confess that I’ve also indulged in Shoreditch’s Gen Z scene—yin yoga sessions at triyoga and barre classes at Psycle, two new workout studios just off Brick Lane, and more.

Huguenot graffiti

On the southern edge of Brick Lane, along Quaker Street, I noticed a sign inscribed with the street name’s Bengali transliteration. But next to that, an instance of graffiti read, in white capital letters, “Huguenot.” It’s an inconspicuous reminder of the neighborhood’s Protestant origins, before Jewish and Muslim communities began to call it home. Brick Lane, while harking back to its past, has evolved into a new kind of enclave that transcends its Huguenot, Jewish, and Bangladeshi origins and welcomes immigrants and tourists of all backgrounds. This includes me, a South Asian American student reconnecting with her British roots through frequent sojourns in London. Unlike in the US, where South Asians mostly began to shape the country in the late 20th century and are still making inroads into the country’s political and cultural landscapes, in Britain the sheer depth of South Asian history and culture has always moved me. Brick Lane is just one slice of South Asian Britain. And even in tandem with redevelopment and change, it’s clear—from street signs and parks that share its history, and the history that came long before it—that its unique Bengali character is more than a lingering vestige. It’s here to stay. 

Featured image courtesy of Meena Venkataramanan