LONDON, ENGLAND, July 23, 2019 (City Lab by Erica X Eisen): Ranging from adapted historic buildings to ornate cultural centers, London’s Hindu temples tell of waves of immigration to Britain and increasing visibility. Completed in 1995 in Neasden, a district of London, the BAPS Sri Swaminarayan Temple is the first purpose-built Hindu temple in the U.K. and describes itself as the first “authentic” Hindu temple in all of Europe. At the time of its construction, it was also the largest Hindu temple outside of India, requiring almost 5,000 tons of limestone and marble for its ornate carvings. Today, over half of the United Kingdom’s more than 800,000 Hindus live in London, and there are especially sizable communities in the northwest of the city (where the BAPS Sri Swaminarayan Temple is located). Walking or taking the bus around my neighborhood there, it’s not uncommon to come upon a temple unexpectedly. They range from plain brick buildings to lofty-towered structures in traditional Indian architectural idioms.
In examining the history of these temples–and why their appearances can differ so radically–we can also trace the history of Hindus in the U.K. Although the Indian community in Britain dates back to the 1600s, the first major wave of South Asian immigration to the U.K. did not come until after World War II. Between the peak immigration years of 1955 and 1975, tens of thousands of people from the subcontinent, especially the Punjab and Gujarat, traveled to Britain to pursue economic opportunity at a time when the U.K. was facing major labor shortages. Hindu immigrants to Britain at this time would have been hard-pressed to find a place to worship. London in the 1950s had no official Hindu temples, and prejudices against South Asian art and architectural styles remained. Today, the BAPS Temple, which was named one of London’s “seven wonders” by Time Out, attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors a year–a figure that would probably be unthinkable to the small congregations meeting in the living rooms of crowded flats a century ago.
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