London

Karl Blanchet got the idea of photographing London’s mosques after a friend did the same in Berlin. ‘I wanted to find the most beautiful mosque in London,’ he explains. Blanchet rang around London’s mosques to try to find those willing to take part, a process that took four months as some refused and others demanded money – one major central London mosque wanted £500.

‘I spoke to the mosque managers and told them I was interested in finding out about the cultural mosques of Europe. It took a while, but the ones who agreed were very flexible once they understood what I was doing. They were interested in the fact I was concentrating on the architecture of the buildings.’

Blanchet eventually settled on five mosques – Brent, East London, Stoke Newington, Walthamstow and the Suleymaniye Mosque in Shoreditch – each of which represented different areas of London’s Muslim community, something that is captured in their architecture. Feature continues

‘London’s Muslims are very diverse, coming from Asia, North Africa, Europe, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, and that diversity is reflected in the architecture,’ explains Blanchet. ‘What’s also interesting is that the buildings they used weren’t intended to be mosques – Stoke Newington was originally a cinema and Brent used to be a church – so they have had to progressively change them to make them into their own place of worship.’

London’s first mosque was at Campden Hill Gate in Notting Hill. It opened in the 1880s and closed before World War II. During this period Woking Mosque, completed in 1890, was the focus point for London’s Muslims until the 1960s, when increased immigration saw greater demand for places to worship and more mosques opened around the capital. London is now said to have more mosques than any other city in the Western world, bar Turkey.

Photography Karl Blanchet