East London Mosque
— — a green dome that grew up out of the high street.
Not only on a wall.
“The mosque on Whitechapel Road, in the part of east London that has been Bangladeshi since the 1970s. The green dome and twin minarets sit above a long stretch of curry houses, Bengali sweet shops and the Royal London Hospital. Inside the prayer hall on a Friday lunchtime, several thousand fill the carpet and the overflow rooms. Outside the doors the street keeps moving — buses, hospital scrubs, schoolchildren.
East London Mosque, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The East London Mosque stands on Whitechapel Road in the borough of Tower Hamlets, a short walk from Aldgate East station. The community was founded in 1910 and worshipped in rented rooms for decades; the present building, with its green dome and twin minarets, opened in 1985 on the corner of Fieldgate Street. Two later additions enlarged the complex — the London Muslim Centre in 2004 and the Maryam Centre, a women's wing, in 2013. Capacity across the site is now around 7,000 worshippers.
The mosque grew with the Bangladeshi community that settled in Spitalfields and Whitechapel from the 1960s onward, many of them from the Sylhet region. The annual rhythm runs through Ramadan, when iftar meals are served on long rows of tablecloth across the carpet, and through the two Eids, when the prayer hall and centre overflow into Whitechapel Road itself. The Friday jumu'ah draws a steady crowd from across east London — students, taxi drivers, hospital staff, schoolchildren on the late shift.
Non-Muslim visitors are welcome outside prayer times and are asked to dress modestly and remove shoes at the entrance. The main hall, women's wing and bookshop are open most days; group tours can be arranged through the centre's visitor office. Friday lunchtime is the busiest hour of the week and not the moment to drop in. The mosque sits next to the Royal London Hospital and a few minutes from Brick Lane, so most visitors fold it into a longer afternoon in east London.