The Battle for Brick Lane: Struggle and Solidarity in East London

Few European cities have experienced neoliberalism the way London has in the last few decades. The ongoing battle against galloping gentrification in the eastern part of the city finds a crucial nexus in Brick Lane, a kilometer-long street, home to Bangladeshi and Bengali lives threatened by capital’s predation. Tasnima Uddin and Syma Tariq write about this battle and the Save Brick Lane campaign’s wider significance beyond this one street.

It was a humid afternoon in September 2021, two days before the London Council of Tower Hamlets voted two-to-one for a five-story mall to be built on Brick Lane. Renowned for its rich history and cultural significance for the Bangladeshi community, Brick Lane’s usual bustle turned still that day as a solemn crowd, all dressed in black, emerged. Leading the way was bellman Saif Osmani from the Bengali East End Heritage Society; behind him, stepping to each clang, were activists from the Spitalfields Trust, Assemble, Spitalfields Life, East End Preservation Society, and East End Trades Guild. Members of the eighth group of this diverse coalition, Nijjor Manush, led a crowd of protesters behind them, carrying signs that read, “Save Brick Lane!”

This odd funeral march left from Altab Ali Park, a former churchyard later named after a local Bangladeshi garment worker killed in a racist attack in 1978, its name a clue to working-class, migrant and Bangladeshi presence in the area. In the park stands a smaller version of the Shaheed Minar, the national monument in Dhaka commemorating those murdered by the Pakistani state during the Bengali Language Movement in 1952. A common meeting place and gathering point for protests, the park is opposite the “South Asian” end of Brick Lane. Continuing on, a small bridge that hangs over its strip of curry houses, leather stores, coffee shops, and vintage clothing outlets bears the name of a significant company, the reason for the funeral procession: Truman Brewery.

The largest private landowner in the area is behind a contentious development plan, a sprawling office building and shopping space in the center of Brick Lane with vast corporate offices and coworking spaces above. Towering over the street, the development will literally block out sunlight from people’s homes. Apsana Begum, Labour MP for neighboring Poplar and Limehouse, affirms that it will drive out local people and businesses by rising rents—not the kind of encroachment that London’s already most gentrified borough needs. Such developments have become ubiquitous across our city.

When we started three years ago, amid the Covid lockdown, our “Call to Action” posts against the Truman Brewery mall development galvanized a record 7,500 people to email in objections to the Council, forcing them to organize a Development Committee Meeting group to later vote on it. After the lockdown had ended in early March 2021, the Save Brick Lane coalition, a group of diverse organizations spanning class and racial lines, started building our collective power by rallying and organizing on the ground. Through direct organizing, we rallied objections from 140 local restaurants; canvassed and door-knocked local estates, collected 550 resident signatures by hand; lobbied politicians; conducted protests and fundraising events; undertook (and are undertaking) long legal battles and suffered barrages of abuse targeting the campaign. 

Nijjor Manush translates to “Our own people” in the Sylheti language, spoken by those from the district in Bangladesh who make up the largest diaspora in this part of London. In a political sense, Nijjor Manush is a Bengali/Bangladeshi-led socialist group that works to provide an independent, grassroots-left alternative for this diaspora and allies in Britain. Brick Lane, also named “Bangla Town,” was once referred to as Britain’s Curry Mile. While its cultural significance means our fight has a particularly high profile, the campaign is but one of many struggles that radiate across the capital, defiant against a morphing landscape of food halls, shopping centers, and soulless developments. The Save Nour campaign, for example, successfully opposed the eviction of grocery store Nour Cash and Carry in Brixton by a twenty-story mega-tower built by billionaire Taylor McWilliams this year. The Save Latin Village campaign fought a fifteen-year battle against property developers to preserve the Latin American market in Tottenham, and won their demands for a community plan. Save Ridley Road protected one of east London’s most historic shopping villages from luxury flats, and is still active in the area with traders and against police raids. This is why in this historical present, the work of Nijjor Manush and Save Brick Lane is not just about one mall. Rather, it represents a larger fight against neoliberal policies that breed social inequality and dispossession. 

Given its central location next to the City, London’s finance and banking district, Brick Lane and its surroundings form prime real estate, its beneficiaries contributing to a local (and national) housing crisis. Rent-exploited migrant workers and students are experiencing abject conditions in unfit accommodation a stone’s throw away from £1 million-plus flats. In March 2023, a fatal fire in an overcrowded council flat managed by a local slumlord provoked criticism of Tower Hamlets Council and drew comparisons to the 2017 Grenfell Tower tragedy in the west of the city. After the council’s failure to provide the survivors of the Shadwell fire with adequate, sustainable replacement accommodation, a number of them sought housing in a local autonomous shelter, which was itself illegally evicted by the Metropolitan police thereafter. The Shadwell fire underscored how the struggles that have marked the area’s social fabric for decades (inadequate housing, the precarity of migrant life, and often-invisibilized forms of exploitation) remain very much alive, and have even intensified. Given the historical migrations East London has experienced, our current fight is a part of a continuum of resistance that has been led by racialized and working-class communities. 

In the 17^th century, it was Huguenots escaping religious persecution in France. Fleeing pogroms and economic hardship in the 1880s and the Nazis a few decades later, many eastern European Jews settled here too, and in 1936, a large number of Jewish residents, alongside trade unionists and communists, inflicted a major defeat on an attempted fascist, antisemitic march led by Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts in the Battle of Cable Street. Somali people arrived before World War I, largely made up of dockers from the British-controlled north. Like them, South Asians have long been landing at the docks of the River Thames, many working as lascars on British imperial boats. More migrants arrived before and after the 1971 Liberation of Bangladesh from Pakistan, and Somalia’s civil war in the 1990s. 

These communities experienced rising poverty and discrimination in East London, while also being subjected to violent racist attacks. In the 1970s, white supremacists and supporters of the far-right National Front regularly attacked Bengali, and Bangladeshi homes and businesses around Brick Lane, giving rise to nation-wide solidarity and the emergence of Asian youth movements that has inspired Nijjor Manush’s own fight. South Asian activists, agitators and squatters, including Mala Sen, Vivan Sundaram, and Farrukh Dhondy, were key members of the British Black Panther movement and Bengali Action Housing Group. They later went on to play a role in leading Black Power-influenced formations like the Race Today Collective, who were integral to the fights for housing and racial justice in East London. 

Today racism might not look the same as it did in the 1970–80s, but its ability to evolve with the times remains integral to its survival. Enoch Powell’s incendiary “rivers of blood” speech in 1968, which incited attacks against British (East and West) Pakistanis and other British South Asians, has been followed by other versions of similar incitement.

In 1997, Stuart Hall defined race as a “floating signifier” of systems of meaning that have real effects, not because of some truth about scientific classification, but because of the will to power. The presence of “Bangladeshis” and “South Asians” in East London may reveal a successful defiance against many systemic odds. Today, 24% of Bangladeshis in Britain still live in overcrowded housing, and are officially the country’s poorest ethnic group, on every metric. Rather than signifying an end of understanding, these identity categories are more useful to us as a tool for solidarity and liberation from structural violence, not just a politics that ignores our own will to power. 

In 2022, Save Brick Lane’s judicial review against Truman Brewery was unsuccessful. We were then granted permission to appeal. After organizing two music events, we successfully raised enough funds to challenge the councilor’s approval of the mall application. We are now willing to go to the Supreme Court, and the mall remains as yet unbuilt. The new mayor of Tower Hamlets, Lutfur Rahman, has recently committed to meeting Save Brick Lane’s demands of a community-led masterplan for the site. 

Nijjor Manush, within and beyond Save Brick Lane, have demonstrated that grassroots movements can defy, delay, and push back the forces of property speculation and market gentrification, resisting the pacification of our communities and their spaces. By demanding 100% social housing and advocating for a community-led master plan, the movement has transcended the confines of a single famous street, or a single community.

East London has long been a place of race and class struggle, where communist Jews, tram drivers and aunties stood up to fascists in the 1930s; where poor Bangladeshi families seized homes to squat en masse and create a tenants’ rights movement in the 1970s; where 8,000 mourners joined behind those carrying the coffin of Altab Ali towards the Prime Minister’s house nearly 50 years ago, to protest the state’s and Metropolitan Police’s neglect over the garment worker’s racially motivated murder. Nijjor Manush’s continued presence in East London shows how such traditions are far from being consigned to the past. The privatization of social housing and local services, the breaking up of multigenerational families and racist and anti-poor policy-making and policing were struggles fought long before us. As long as these conditions persist, groups like Nijjor Manush will continue to fight against these violent systems, and for the right to our city. ■