If you took a resident of Brentfield Road in Neasden from the 1980s and dropped them there today, they’d probably think they’d been teleported halfway across the planet.
Until the early ‘90s, the corner of their street was essentially an urban wasteland. An abandoned warehouse lay there, with a view of the A406.
Now, in this otherwise rather unromantic corner of the city, a monumental building rises: carved in marble, gold-tipped pinnacles and white domes, gloriously ornate just a short stroll from the North Circular. Neasden Temple, one of the so-called Seven Wonders of London. Ancient-looking, but built in 1995.
It’s a very London sort of story. One that spans continents, empire and expulsion, and ends with a masterpiece in the most unlikely of places.
This blog is part of my Building of the Week series, where I explore a different story each week.
Early origins & a church in Islington
The story of how this magnificent temple came to Neasden begins in the 1950s, when a small community first gathered in London. They were followers of BAPS, a movement within Hinduism whose origins lie in Gujarat, on India’s north-western coast. To start with, they met at the home of a man named Prahladbhai near Baker Street.
They were part of a broader wave of Indian immigration to postwar Britain, as people from across the Commonwealth came to fill labour shortages in a recovering economy.
The community grew slowly, and eventually needed a proper base. They found a disused church in Islington, which they converted into a Mandir (a Hindu temple).
The spiritual leader of BAPS, Yogiji Maharaj, came to consecrate it in 1970. And when he did, he spoke of a vision: that London would one day have its own traditional stone Mandir.
The Islington Mandir served the community for years. But it was small. And soon, events far beyond London would change everything.
the East African connection
To understand how a small congregation in a repurposed Islington church became something as monumental as Neasden Temple, we need to travel back in time, and across continents.
Gujaratis had long traded across the Indian Ocean with East Africa. But it was the British Empire that turned a trickle of migration into a flood. In the late 19th century, in the midst of the Scramble for Africa, Britain decided to build a railway from Mombasa on the Kenyan coast all the way to Uganda, to secure its grip on the region.
Rather than training local East Africans, they shipped in labourers from India, mostly from Punjab but with Gujaratis among them too. The conditions were brutal: by the time the line was finished, an estimated four Indian lives had been lost for every mile of track laid.
Most went home when the work was done. But many stayed.
And they were joined by Gujarati traders who came independently, drawn by commercial opportunity.
The British found this growing Indian population was a convenient tool, and a racial hierarchy was formalised around them.
A small number of White rulers were supported by a larger number of Indians, carrying out administrative support to the Empire. They were given, for example, education opportunities, unlike the East Africans themselves, at the very bottom.
All of this meant that when colonialism ended in 1962, there was a sizeable South Asian population in a newly independent Uganda.
They weren’t supremely wealthy like the Europeans, but were on average better off than native Ugandans. They became targets for discrimination and xenophobia.
This reached a terrible peak under the dictator General Idi Amin, who in 1972 expelled Uganda’s entire Asian population from the country. All of their assets, businesses, homes and money were seized.
Many thousands came to the UK. Nowadays, they’re often venerated as one of the most successful examples of migration to the UK. A group that lost everything and rebuilt it in Britain – they and their descendents count business owners, authors, cricketers and even a former Prime Minister among their number.
It’s worth remembering, though, that many aspects of British society tried to prevent them from coming in the first place. In one memorable example, the city of Leicester – concerned by the number of South Asians that had already moved to the city – placed adverts in the Ugandan press, advising them to relocate elsewhere.
This only had the effect of telling Ugandan Asians looking for a new home exactly where they could find a ready-made community.
Many of those that came to the UK were Gujarati Hindus. And the connection to BAPS specifically ran deep: as far back as the 1940s, Nairobi had been home to one of the first Mandirs outside India.
All of this meant that the congregation of that small little building in Islington swelled far beyond what it could hold. A new home was needed.
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Ancient architecture in a modern planning system
First, the congregation moved to an empty warehouse in Neasden. More space, but not quite the spiritual home they were working towards.
What they really wanted was a traditional, stone Mandir. A proper home. They explored many possibilities.
The breakthrough came in 1990, when Pramukh Swami Maharaj, successor to Yogiji Maharaj, visited London and enquired about an obsolete garage and warehouse sitting directly across the road. BAPS acquired it, and the following year Brent Council granted planning permission. On 7 July 1991, Pramukh Swami performed the traditional ground-breaking ceremony on the site.
What they were planning was, quite simply, unlike anything seen in Britain before. A temple built entirely using ancient methods, according to the Shilpa Shastras (ancient Vedic texts on architecture, thousands of years old). This meant only stone and wood, no iron and steel.
And all of this had to meet modern British building codes, and be built using stone that was both malleable enough for intricate carving but strong enough to withstand the harsh British climate.
Quite a challenge. Luckily, the architect appointed to oversee it had a bit of experience: Chandrakant B. Sompura, the 15th generation of a family that has been designing Hindu temples for centuries, with over 200 temples to their name.
The right man to oversee Europe’s first traditional stone Hindu temple, then.
In 1995, just four years after planning permission was granted, it was completed.
A quite astonishing build
I don’t often go into the minutae of how the buildings I write about were actually constructed on this blog. That’s partly because I’m mostly interested in the social history, and partly because it’s not my expertise.
But for Neasden Temple, I feel like it’s a must, because the roll-call of astonishing facts is quite simply ludicrous.
First, there was the stone issue I mentioned. In order to find the right material that could be carved with the intricate delicacy of traditional Hindu temple craft, yet survive in the British climate, many types of stone were tested. Eventually limestone from Bulgaria and marble from Italy and India were decided upon.
All of it was shipped to India, where 1,526 sculptors spent years hand-carving 26,300 individual pieces. Each piece was then shipped back to London and assembled on site, like a giant jigsaw.
No iron or steel was used, a remarkable feat for a major modern building project in Britain. This fact was summed up rather eloquently by the Twentieth Century Society, who wrote that Neasden Temple has:
more in common with a 1,000-year-old cathedral or priory than anything else seen in the 20th century
On completion, it became the largest Hindu temple outside of India (a title later taken by other BAPS temples), and during its building it broke another record – the biggest-ever concrete pour in the UK (at the time), some 4,500 tonnes poured in 24 hours.
All of this would be remarkable in and of itself. But on top of this, the project was entirely built and funded by the Hindu community itself. Alongside the professionals, volunteers worked (many giving up their day jobs) to make it a reality.
Others volunteered their time to fundraise, including children who collected over 7 million drink cans along with 91 tonnes of aluminium foil, raising £75,000 for the temple’s construction.
You can see a series of photos from the build itself here.
Shortly after it opened, Neasden Temple hosted a moment of huge significance. It was visited by President Museveni of Uganda, who came to address London’s Ugandan Asian community, inviting them back to help rebuild the country after years of Idi Amin’s dictatorship.
In the years since, the temple has become a religious and cultural centre for London’s Hindu community, but also a place of learning and cultural exchange: it’s welcoming to visitors, including an exhibition on Hinduism.
And that makeshift home they had, just across the street from the temple, is still there, now home to a vegetarian Indian restaurant.
Hundreds of thousands make the trip each year to this corner of London that even most Londoners have never visited. They come to a building that earns its place among the most remarkable in the city, for its scale, beauty and craftsmanship.
But also for the journey that led it to exist in the first place. Empire and expulsion, community, faith and determination, all ending up, somehow, just off the North Circular.
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