A house of three religions
The building at the north-west corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street has a remarkable history. Today it stands in »Banglatown« – the marketing name for the rows of curry houses at the southern end of Brick Lane. This district, Spitalfields, belongs to Tower Hamlets borough, where almost 40 per cent of the population are of Bangladeshi origin. During the 1970s, as their numbers increased in the East End, they founded several mosques, one of them in an existing place of worship.
Spitalfields was an immigrant quarter 300 years ago. Huguenots, that is Protestants who had been expelled from France, settled here and built a church on Brick Lane in 1743. In time the Huguenot community was assimilated and lost its distinct identity. In 1809 the church was made over to a society for converting Jews to Christianity. This mission was unsuccessful, and after only ten years the building became a Methodist chapel. In the late 19th century, tens of thousands of Jews from eastern Europe moved into the area and converted the old church into the Machzeike Hadass Synagogue in 1898. In the following decades Spitalfields was a poor but lively Jewish quarter. After the Second World War the Jewish community gradually moved away, and the synagogue building was shut up. It reopened in 1976 as the Jamme Masjid Mosque.
Info
Address Brick Lane, E1 6QL | Public Transport Aldgate East (Circle, Hammersmith & City Line) | Tip The few traces of Jewish culture in this area include a 24-hour bagel shop (Beigel Bake, 159 Brick Lane) and a synagogue in Sandy’s Row, an alley south of Spitalfields Market.
A tall, shining cylinder of steel that glows in changing colours at night, a substitute for a minaret, is the outward sign that a third religion has now taken possession. Inside the building, the old church pews were removed, the upper galleries in the prayer hall enlarged, and basins for ritual ablutions installed. A survival from the first church is a sundial on the Fournier Street side, inscribed »umbra summus«: »we are shadows«. This reference to the insubstantiality of human life raises the question: is the mosque the final chapter in this story?
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