Shahed Saleem’s curated Open House Festival collection.

For the Open House Festival’s 30th anniversary, we have brought on three different Londoners to work on the programming of the festival. Janet Street Porter, Harriet Thorpe and Shahed Saleem have work worked with the festival team each curating a collection. These collections are their chance to share with others the buildings and places they see as being worthy of celebrating and exploring.

Shahed Saleem is an architect, author and Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster. His research and practice explore the architecture of diaspora communities, in particular their relationship to heritage, belonging and nationhood. Saleem’s design and research has been recognised widely. His book, ‘The British Mosque, an architectural and social history’, was published by Historic England in 2018 and is the first comprehensive account of Muslim architecture in Britain. He co-curated the V&A Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2021.

Click here to go to the programme.

Join Shahed as he shares his favourite walking tour of the neighbourhood, from Toynbee Hall to Idea Store Whitechapel…

1. Brick Lane mosque

This building on the other end of Fournier Street to Christ Church has come to symbolise the overlapping migration histories of the East End. Built in 1743 by French Huguenots fleeing persecution in France, it has been re-used by successive waves of immigrant communities. After the Huguenots it became a Methodist chapel, then a synagogue, then since 1976 a mosque.

There were some internal alterations with each religious re-use, but many original features have been retained and can still be seen, such as the rich timber panelling and elaborate door surrounds. Classrooms that were built in the roof space when it was a synagogue are now used for Islamic teaching, and these layers of religious history seem to somehow seep through its walls.

In 2013 a stunning stainless steel minaret was added, designed by DGA Architects. Cleverly placed independently of the historic fabric, I’ve always appreciated how this structure speaks both to the mosque, as a signifier of religious architecture, and concurrently serves as a symbol of the multicultural history of Brick Lane.

A sun dial on the south-facing pediment connects these histories, communities and religions together. Marking time since 1743, a Latin inscription reads Umbra Summus, meaning ‘we are shadows’; a reminder that everyone, eventually, comes and goes.

2. Toynbee Hall

Like an octopus, the East End has many hearts, and this must be one of them. The history of Toynbee Hall reaches right into the dark past of poverty and redemption that was the Victorian city.

It was established at the end of the 19th century as the first University Settlement project, to bring alleviation to the East End poor, founded by social reformers Samuel Barnett, vicar of the then neighbouring St Jude’s, and this wife Henrietta.

Designed by Elijah Hoole on the foundations of a former boys’ school, it is built in a Tudoresque style that evokes an Oxford college, with all of the aspiration for the poor that that entailed. Indeed, stepping into the rooms of Toynbee Hall is a bit like stepping off the busy Commercial Street into a medieval fantasy, with the wood panelling, leaded windows and coats of arms.

Over the last few years the Toynbee Hall estate has been extensively redeveloped with restorations of the historic buildings, extensions and new residential and commercial developments. The front of the site has been opened up to the street to generously create a new public space and provide a setting for the historic buildings.

3. Altab Ali Park

This park is a layered palimpsest of Whitechapel’s rich history. It is the original location of the 13th century Church of St Mary Matfelon, built of white chalk this was the white chapel which gave this area its name. There were subsequent rebuildings of the church over the centuries with the last iteration built in the 1880s, and fire bombed in the blitz in 1940 it remained a ruin until it was finally cleared in 1952.

As a testimony to the painful racial history of post-war Britain and the East End, in 1994 the park was renamed in memory of a young Bangladeshi textile worker, Altab Ali, who was murdered on an adjacent street in 1978. By the end of the 1990s the Shaheed Minar (Martyr’s Monument) was built in the corner of the park to commemorate activists killed in the 1952 Bengali language movement. Gravestones and a family tomb remain from when the park was the churchyard, evidence of the layers of historical change.

Whenever I pass Altab Ali Park I am struck by how well used it is, with people spending time alone, or chatting, or sleeping. Different times of day have different patterns of use, and the park adapts to who is using it and when. This is a testament to the landscaping of the park by muf architecture/art, who evoked the site’s history by placing stone and tile fragments as well as a plinth that follows the plan of the Victorian church. This has created a decentered and multivocal public space, avoiding spatial and symbolic hierarchies that can exclude and unsettle. Here is a public space that resonates with its place and history.

4. St Boniface RC Church

You can easily miss this building nestled off the corner of Altab Ali Park, but once you look you’ll find a fascinating example of post-war religious architecture. For me the bell tower signals the most confident assertion of its modern aspirations, rising like a vertical slab with a series of bells (salvaged from the previous church on this site) suspended in its structure at the top, really quite a unique addition to the Whitechapel skyline.

From the early 19th century there were thousands of Germans in the area, mostly employed in sugar refining which was a significant local industry. The community had a church on this site from 1875, which was damaged by a Zepplin raid in 1917 and then destroyed by bombing in 1940.

Redesigns were prepared by a German architect Toni Hermanns which were adapted and realised by a local firm Plaskett Marshall & Partners who seem to have endeavoured to realise Hermanns’ original vision of a contemporary 1950s approach.

5. The Former Bell Foundry

** Please note this building can only be accessed from the outside. **

Until it closed in 2017 the Bell Foundry was one most remarkable survivals of the industrial history of Whitechapel and indeed of Britain. Bells had been made on this site for 250 years, and the foundry itself was the longest running manufacturing business in the country having started in 1570.

The front buildings appear as refined historic shopfronts with residential upper parts, as you might see anywhere in London. But once inside a courtyard would lead you to the manufacturing areas where molten metal was being heated in furnaces and poured into casts, and an age old process, hidden behind it’s nondescript side walls.

There is little to see now except the exterior of the workshops and the Whitechapel Road frontage, but it is worth pausing for a moment to connect here with the East End’s long industrial history.

6. East London Mosque

This mosque started as the adaptation of a terraced house a little further east along Commercial Road back in the 1940s. It has since had a remarkable history that has seen it grow into one of the most significant Muslim institutions in the country. As well as it being a mosque, it is now a major cultural complex with a school, gym, offices, community services, and even beehives. It has been on its current site since 1975, when it started as a temporary building, and has since been continuously expanding until it now forms its own urban block.

When the first new mosque building was built in 1984 it was one of the largest post-war mosques in the country, and an early landmark of Islamic architecture. In the early 2000s a major expansion saw the construction of the London Muslim Centre, which was linked to the mosque with a large foyer. And by 2014 the next major addition to the complex came with the construction of the Maryam Centre on the Fieldgate Street side, which was a dedicated women’s facility.

This mosque and complex has served as a cultural anchor for a large Muslim population, predominantly of Bangladeshi origin but made up of many ethnicities and heritages, reflecting the rapid and continuous diversification of Whitechapel. The Centre demonstrates an incredible story if institution building, from the ground up and through determined community endeavour, and its architecture of incremental growth and layering reflects this.

7. The Former Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue

** Please note this building can only be accessed from the outside. **

In the late 19th century to the mid 20th Whitechapel was the heart of the Jewish community and many synagogues had been created in adapted buildings, rooms in houses, above shops and so on. The Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue was one of a handful of built synagogues, hence its designation as ‘great’ despite it being a fairly modest building. The original building dating from 1899 was bombed in the war and it was then rebuilt in a fairly rudimentary way, albeit with a rather beautiful timber panelled prayer hall.

Gradually, as the population changed, the East London Mosque mosque expanded around the synagogue and they remained supportive neighbours, so much so that the mosque installed a roof light in its own new building so that daylight could reach a Star of David rose window in the synagogue’s end wall.

Eventually, with there being not enough congregants, the synagogue closed in 2009 and was sold to the mosque in 2015.

8. Idea Store Whitechapel

** Please note that this building is open to general public, but is not yet in the festival programme. **

I’ve long admired the Idea Stores ambition, which was to revive the library tradition and service in Tower Hamlets. A series of adventurous buildings followed, this being one of them and one of David Adjaye’s early civic projects at such a scale.

I enjoy its presence and stature on Whitechapel Road, and how this is achieved with a grid of glazing that manages not to be oppressive. There is certainly a sense of lightness and movement through the building, achieved through a central circulation core and open floor plans. As you move upwards the building offers new and unexpected views across Whitechapel, so there is always something to see, and it must have the least known café with the best views in the East End.

I’ve never quite understood why the exterior escalator to the first floor has been closed almost since day one. Whether this is the short-sightedness of design to not anticipate the pragmatics of use, or whether it is a lack of ambition in programming, a resistance to radically change how the building is to be used – but then again, isn’t this ever the quandary of architecture.