The London Mosque, Wandsworth

The London Mosque, Wandsworth

Interwar London was a famously white, imperial space, the coordinating hub for a worldwide Empire. However, it was also a cosmopolitan and diverse city. Through the docks to the east passed the people and goods of empire, while international communities settled throughout the city. Muslim migrants to Britain had been increasing since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and in 1889 Britain’s first purpose built mosque was opened in Woking. It was the Imam of this mosque who conducted evening prayers over the body of Maulana Mohammad Ali, a Round Table Conference delegate who died during his work in January 1931. The London Mosque had been completed in 1926, funded by the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in India, and was the first in the capital. During the Round Table Conference it hosted an afternoon tea party for delegates and this image is from a New Year card sent to a government official. It would host visiting Muslim dignitaries, including the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia in 1935. In 2018 the building achieved grade II listed status, down to its ‘gentle and harmonious fusion of formal and decorative traditions of mosque design with restrained 1920s British classicism’ and for its significance for the ‘Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s missionary activities’, reminding us that London was also target for non-western internationalist movements.

© Imperial War Museum (D 24089)