On a cold and wet January day, history was tempted to repeat itself. Ukip had planned to march along Bow Road and into Whitechapel. The march was called “Walk with Jesus”, and its route would take it through one of the largest Muslim communities in London. Scotland Yard banned it. Assurances were given to local Muslim community leaders that anyone attempting to stage the march through the area would be arrested. Police said the decision was informed by a predicted “hostile” reaction from the local community. Due to the ban, Ukip marched from Marble Arch to Trafalgar Square instead. Men in newsboy caps and black overcoats clutched crucifixes and read scripture into a mic and shouted about “Muslim invaders”. In front of the National Gallery, Ukip leader Nick Tenconi spoke about political homelessness facing British Christians, about fighting the Holy War against far-left and Islamist aggression. There were about 30 people surrounding Tenconi when he gave that speech, and half were photographers and curious tourists.
The last time Ukip tried to bring its politics into Whitechapel, the response from the local Bangladeshi population had been fierce. On 25 October 2025, a Saturday evening, a procession of young men dressed in black marched through Whitechapel, the traditional heart of east London. Their faces were covered with balaclavas. At the front, one man held aloft a Bangladeshi flag. Women in sequined hijabs stepped aside to let them pass.
They were part of a crowd of around 7,000 people from the area who had gathered to counter a planned Ukip protest. Tenconi had hoped to march through Whitechapel behind a purple banner reading “Islamist Invaders Not Welcome In Britain”, but police intervened, and the march was also moved to Marble Arch. The local population of predominantly Bengali Muslims poured onto the streets of Whitechapel anyway to defend their home. At one point, a line of men prayed across the street. Chants of “Allahu Akbar” filled the air.
The reaction was predictably feverish. For many, this was a display of “religious aggression”. Against that backdrop, the October march – the black clothing, the Bangladeshi flags, the prayer, the sense of discipline and mass – seemed to crystallise what Ukip’s Tenconi was protesting: the Islamisation of London, and the retreat of Christianity under pressure from what he described as aggressive, anti-Christian forces. For Tenconi, and his black-clad crew of crucifix-clutching heavyweights, the enemy was no longer outside the gates – they were already here and living in Whitechapel.
Whitechapel is a knife-edge of the multiculturalism debate, and has been for centuries. The first major wave of migration to the area was the French Huguenot community in the late 1600s and early 1700s. The majority were Huguenot weavers who worked in textiles and built beautiful terraced houses that now sell for over £4m. But even then, despite the natural religious affinity with locals, there was tension. Rev. Richard Welton, Whitechapel’s rector at the time, spurned the Huguenot immigrants. They were “the very offal of the earth… who cannot be content to be safe here… but must needs rob us of our religion too”. A later wave of Irish immigration faced similar hostility. Then came Jews fleeing the Russian pogroms, and later the Holocaust.
The Bangladeshi population is now the largest ethnic group in the borough. Yet their presence here reaches back centuries, beginning with the lascars, South Asian seamen employed by the East India Company, who settled around the docks in the 17th and 18th centuries. Large-scale migration, however, did not begin until after the Second World War, when Britain sought an army of workers to help rebuild the nation from the rubble. Most of them came from the Sylhet region, a rural, tea-growing area in the northeast of Bangladesh.
Between 2011 and 2021, Tower Hamlets’ population grew by over 22 per cent – nearly three times the national average – and in Whitechapel itself the population increased by roughly a third in just a decade. According to the 2021 Census, people of Asian heritage remain the largest broad ethnic group in Whitechapel, with around 56 per cent of residents identifying as Asian or Asian British, compared to around 29 per cent identifying as white. In terms of religious affiliation, 39 per cent of residents identified as Muslim and 22 per cent as Christian in 2021. Across Tower Hamlets as a whole, Islam remains the largest single religion.
This long history of immigration to the area is positively invoked by the liberal left. They see the counter-demonstration by Bangladeshis locals as a vital counter-attack against a resurgent far right and another salvo in Tower Hamlets’ long history of anti-fascist struggle. Abdullah Falliq, 51, tells me he remembered the skinhead gangs of his youth, bricks through mosque windows, death threats. He remembers watching a young Muslim boy have his ear ripped off by a white teacher. He remembers being attacked by National Front men when he was eight. The men who turned out that day in October were standing outside the hospital they were born in, opposite the mosque where they prayed, defending their right to call Whitechapel home. They were channelling decades of disharmony.
“[The counter-protesters] were standing on the spot where Altab Ali was murdered because of his race,” Abdul Shukur Khalisdar, 46, tells me. I am meeting Khalisdar in his office a stone’s throw from East London Mosque. He is immaculately dressed, with a Palestinian flag draped behind him. Khalisdar is a prominent local businessman and former deputy mayor of Tower Hamlets – and a controversial figure. In 2024 he established the Tower Hamlets Community Coalition (THCC), which intended to field its own candidate against Rushanara Ali, the sitting MP for Bethnal Green and Stepney. The coalition mobilised in anger against Ali after she abstained from a parliamentary vote in November 2024 calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
THCC planned to run a local Muslim preacher, Ajmal Masroor. Masroor had previously stood as a Liberal Democrat in elections across the UK, but back in 2005 he withdrew his candidacy after criticism over his association with the Muslim Public Affairs Committee, a group linked to anti-Semitism. Chaos erupted at THCC’s inaugural meeting in May 2024. In one video, from May 2024, men heckle Masroor on stage, accusing him of splitting the vote and misrepresenting the local community. Later, Khalisdar is seen trying to forcibly remove one of the hecklers from the audience. Fighting breaks out. Off camera, another man pleads for calm. “This is the issue with our community,” he says.
Khalisder was there in October, working tirelessly to mobilise the local population onto a defensive footing. He is physically imposing, speaks well and is a natural rallying point for a generationally diverse audience. When I push him on the optics of having young, balaclava-clad men holding Islamic signs and Bangladeshi flags, he said he could see how this might look, but insisted the counter-demonstration was strictly defensive. He described how he single-handedly tore down two flags that day; even though the phrases on them weren’t offensive, they looked like Isis flags. When he saw them flying next to the Bangladeshi red and green, he was incandescent with rage.
“There are extremists in every community,” he tells me. “Judge us on how we deal with those extremists.” He describes the perpetrators as “nutters, idiots.” He speaks about how uninterested the local community is in imposing Islam on the wider British population. “We are supposed to be ambassadors of our religion and part of being ambassadorial means respecting the law of the host nation.” For Khalisdar, it’s inconceivable that a line of men praying in the street could be seen as aggressive. “ My value systems are harmonious with the law of the land. My allegiance to the state or the country that I belong to.”
For Khalisdar, the white, Christian wing of Britain would find closer allies in defending Britain from a foreign invader among the Muslim community than among British youth. “If there was a call for us to take up arms in defence of our country, Islamic law would actually make it obligatory for us to defend our host.”
I meet the writer Tam Hussein in his father’s Brick Lane curry house over dishes of lamb meat. He is a collision of competing cultures – a walking contradiction of some people’s view that Islam and Britishness are fundamentally irreconcilable. He is wearing braces, sleeve garters and a flat cap, and talks about the joy of cigars, of male fraternity and his reverence for Churchill and Kipling. But he tells me he is also, first and foremost, a devout Muslim and proud Bengali, and espouses the value system of his religion. When I spoke to him about the local area, he says he wonders whether immigration from Bangladesh may have occurred too rapidly.
Though many people of an older generation have learned enough English to navigate daily life, their language skills are limited. Whitechapel is linguistically stratified: census data shows thousands speak a main language other than English, and a significant minority report speaking English “not well” or “not at all” – a pattern often concentrated among older women and newer arrivals. 9 per cent of people who completed the census registered not being able to speak English well (Across all London boroughs, the number is around 4 per cent.) In the Bengali shops, and amongst the market-goers, this feels markedly higher. Falliq tells me “this is because the market and shops are frequented by…aunties and uncles and the newly arrived. They shop for fruit and veg, meat and fish. Young people, born and raised here, do not usually hang around in these places.” Where there are burgers and fried chicken, you’ll find English, he tells me.
Many in generations speak in the Multicultural London English (MLE) accents of their favourite drill rappers, reserving Bengali for home and living in the shadow of inherited memories of racial violence. And there’s the graduate class, educated at British universities, some of whom have liberalised. I speak to a man who went to university in the early noughties and relinquished the strictures of his faith to indulge in the usual trappings of university life – booze, drugs, sex – before returning to the local community to resume his piety, a little changed.
Even many locals feel the presence of linguistic barriers across the ward. “When I go to a café, I don’t understand it. They’re speaking local, classical Bangla or another dialect,” Falliq tells me. Communicating with the new Bangladeshi migrants can also be a challenge for Falliq. “If I go to a shop, if I speak English, I have to say two, three times before they understand, can we break it down or try to speak in Bengali.”
Many of the newcomers are Bangladeshis arriving from Italy. Community estimates suggest around 20,000 have moved to the UK in recent years, with a large share located in Whitechapel – forming a distinct new subset within the population. Falliq tells me how entrepreneurial they are, opening cafés and businesses across the ward. But their relative newness has created a divide between people like Falliq, whose family has been in the borough for a generation, and newer arrivals. These divisions can even be seen in the food they consume. “We just can’t really connect with them, you see?… “We have fish and chips, chicken and chips. They like rice and curry. They’re everywhere…but this is their settling-in time.”
Despite these differences, Falliq spent three exhausting weeks before the planned Ukip march, working to mobilise all these factions into a coherent unit. “Some are liberal, some are secular, some are conservative… to strike a balance has been challenging,” he says. There’s a shared sense that this particular moment in British life demands unity and bodies on the street regardless of the geographical and linguistic differences that exist within Whitechapel itself. At the same time, managing the youth, some of whom are adjacent to gang violence, required delicacy. Falliq was strict about abiding by the law, but told them they could respond to the Ukip threat. Falliq of the rebellious youth that ”they listen, mostly they listen to us. We were also careful not to push them too much because we can’t control them. They might turn against us.”
The politics of belonging is far more complicated than slogans, and the online arguments seem strangely out of touch here. People enter Whitechapel to make incendiary videos about the demise of Britain, a scene supposedly paradigmatic of a lost world – of East End mythology. The conservative sense of loss is felt more acutely because of a lingering resonance in the national imagination. This was the Cockney heartland, the soul of working-class London. At the Kray Twins’ favourite boozer you can see bullet holes in the wall, but you’ll pay £7.40 for a pint of watery Staropramen. In the market, women turn over exotic fruits beneath fluorescent lights. The smell of fish hangs in the air as men hose viscera into the drains.
In the summer, conservative commentator-turned Reform candidate Matt Goodwin vox-popped local residents about “British values”. The non-answers, delivered in broken English, added fuel to the nationalist fire that has been building online over the last year. Ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe tweeted a picture of Whitechapel station’s dual-language signs and said “The station name should be in English, and in English only.” Elon Musk tweeted his support.
The left appears to have diminishing support in Whitechapel. When I ask people what they think of the modern left in this country, I hear the phrase “fake friends” a few times. It’s unsurprising, especially in light of the incident at the Your Party conference in which a young delegate publicly called MP Adnan Hussain – a politician who had just resigned from the party citing cultural differences between his social conservatism and the progressive politics of the liberal class – a transphobe.
Indeed, Your Party MP Zarah Sultana’s stock is low here. The term “student politics” comes up a lot. The editor of prominent British-Muslim news site 5Pillars recently said, “Sections of the left hold deeply Islamophobic views. This is the section that seems to support Zarah Sultana.” She recently went on a podcast and said, “There is no room for socially conservative views in a socialist, left-wing party. Period.”
For many of the people I speak to in Tower Hamlets, this statement immediately disqualified Muslims like themselves from participation in left-wing politics. Their social conservatism – often closely tied to their religious values – made certain progressive positions difficult to reconcile. Khalisdar, who has spent most of his adult life in the Labour Party, admitted that Islamic values are sometimes closer to the Conservative Party than to Labour. Falliq echoed this, reflecting the feeling of distance between local Muslims and the national left.: “You come from somewhere else… you are anti-racist but you can’t relate to us.”
Not all Muslims feel alienated from the left: politicians and community leaders exactly like Sultana, herself from a strongly Muslim Birmingham neighbourhood, and Green Party deputy leader Mothin Ali, an Islamic religious teacher, successfully navigate left-wing politics while maintaining their faith. Although controversial in places like Whitechapel this, people like Sultana and Ali show how social conservatism does not automatically preclude engagement with progressive causes.
“Integration” has become a Westminster buzzword. It suggests a reciprocal process: incoming cultures learn the language, contribute economically and engage socially while maintaining their own traditions. This is the multicultural dream. The harder line demands assimilation – the abandonment of foreign customs and full adoption of British values.
Khalisdar is British, Bengali and Muslim, and has lived in the area since he was four. He admits that his faith supersedes any other value system, yet insists this is not incompatible with holding strong British values. In a sense, he argues, British Muslims are some of the most principled British citizens because they have had to work to assert their Britishness. “ We want to eradicate child poverty. We want to lift people out of poverty. We want to reduce unemployment… those are challenges every British person has. And those are the same goals and aspirations I have.” For Khalisdar, his Britishness is qualified most clearly as: “my loyalty to my country, being a law-abiding citizen and respecting others.”
After our long conversation, Khalisdar asks me to be honest about what living in Whitechapel is like for a “white British person”. I find this question tricky. I love the history and the old Huguenot churches. I love the old pubs, although there aren’t many left, and the squat, red-brick terrace houses that suggest a different era of cohesion. I love the cricket in the park. I love Brick Lane’s curry mile.
But the dominant manifestation of this area feels both alien and uniform to me, I tell him. Shops selling rugs, Islamic dress and perfumes seem self-cloning. Ambiguously owned vape and sweet shops dot the high street. The market is a kinetic place filled with a language I can’t speak. Near my house, there are four chicken shops side-by-side, bearing near-identical names: Original Chicken, Original Taste Chicken, Peri-Peri Chicken, KHF Chicken. They are divided by an open-fronted shop called Rahim’s where men haul skinned sheep carcasses out of unrefrigerated vans. Empty vats of vegetable oil collect beside the cycle lane, which is perilous.
I tell Khalisdar that I had tried to buy a poppy from the local Tesco, but they had no idea what I was on about. He hung his head. “You should be able to speak English in your local community… it’s not hostility – it’s unfamiliarity.” He likens my experience of struggling to communicate with people in my local area to the early feeling Bengalis had in Britain – that this was a place not built for them, where they had to live at the edges.
Over the past few weeks of consciously knocking on doors, I’ve found a tight-knit ecosystem where everyone knows each other, where people can identify one another’s regional backgrounds, where strangers stop to shake hands in the street and the elderly are respected above all else. This structure orbits the mosque – community classes, social events, and charity initiatives take place inside. Prayer time in Whitechapel is the busiest the city gets. Shops, cafés, and streets bustle with the collective. In the words of Falliq, “it caters from the cradle to the grave.”
It reminds me of the community my grandparents knew in working-class Scotland: a deeply rooted sense of social cohesion, of national and cultural pride, where the collective often superseded the individual, and life revolved around institutions – the town hall, the pub, the bookies, the Guildry. Issues were settled internally. People went dancing. People knew a lot about each other. Estrangement was rare. And indeed, Falliq and Khalisdar, the two men who mobilised the Ukip counter-demonstration that weekend, said that it was Britishness that taught them coexistence, negotiation and mutual respect. They believe that what happens in Whitechapel is an expression of Britishness, where socially conservative Muslims live harmoniously alongside a large LGBTQ community, and where more than anywhere else in London you can see layers of migration – the Jewish, the Irish and the French. As if to say, “what kind of Brit would I be, if I let people intimidate us in our own home.” Khalisdar tells me: “This place has always offered a home to those seeking a home.”
On my way home I cut across Whitechapel’s main road, bustling after evening prayer, and head up through Brick Lane, shrugging away the men whose job it is to lure passerby into their restaurants for a curry. I stop outside the old Huguenot church, built in 1743, that has been a Methodist Chapel and a Jewish synagogue. Since 1976, it has been a mosque. Its sacred door, stripped of paint and varnish, is a palimpsest of tension and salvation.
This is the legacy of Whitechapel – contested, evolving, built to absorb the margins – and what initially seems like rupture becomes just another layer. So what kind of Britain, what cultural identity, do we want to emerge from this multiculturalism, and who is going to define it?
It cannot be the men standing behind the faux-Medieval banners shouting things about Islamists and Christendom. About how Whitechapel is the Third World.
I understand the grievances – of being made to accommodate foreign communities with a different language and values, and being vilified for voicing concern about the breakdown and dissipation of their social order. But history moves fast, and this is the reality of the new millennia. As Hussain says: “That ship has sailed bruv – if you want to take over half the world you have to accept the consequences.”
[Further reading: The truth about immigrants and sex crime]
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Subscribe here to commentWhat an excellent piece of reportage… More like this, please!