Shahed Saleem recalls the handmade mosques of mid-20th century Britain

When Muslim communities started settling in large numbers across Britain from the 1960s, they established mosques across the country. These migrant Muslims, mostly from South Asia, fashioned mosques out of existing buildings they could readily acquire: pubs, cinemas, factories and houses were adapted and reinscribed with a self-made visual language of Islam that emerged from the diasporic memories and imaginings of the communities.

One such mosque was in the north London suburb of Harrow and was created in the 1980s from a pair of semi-detached houses. These were knocked together and the domestic spaces were interlinked and extended to create prayer halls, classrooms and community rooms. I visited this idiosyncratic house-mosque in 2011 and became fascinated by an intriguing structure in its main prayer hall – a timber mihrab, the niche from which the imam leads the congregation in prayer.

Mihrabs have taken many forms across Islamic history and geography, inlaid with intricate mosaic tile or stone, carved elaborately in wood, or simply plastered in a bold form. The dark wooden structure here had a curious composition – it was part sliding cabinet with somewhat Mughal-inspired crenellated arches, framed with a pair of turned posts that could belong to a Victorian staircase. The whole thing was adorned with framed religious inscriptions, photographs of holy places, prayer beads and fairy lights. It was an ensemble quite unlike any other, and wholly unique to the way in which the visual culture of Islam was emerging in this Muslim diaspora.

This mihrab no longer exists. Having outgrown the venue, the community acquired adjacent land and built a landmark new mosque from the ground up. The house that had served them for some 30 years was vacated and the beautiful structure fell into ruin.

For Three British Mosques, an exhibition I curated for the 2021 Venice Biennale, fabricator Michael Short of Remshore Creations reconstructed this mihrab in elaborate detail from photographs I took in 2011, just before its demise, bringing this icon of self-made religious devotion back to life. It’s a remarkable example of British Muslim material culture, and a reminder of a vanishing era when the first generation of South Asian postcolonial migrants were carving out a place for themselves in Britain and making themselves a new home.