The History of the First Mosque in the UK

When we think of mosques in the UK today, we often picture the large, community-centric hubs in cities like London, Birmingham and Manchester. But the roots of Islamic worship and community life in Britain go back much further than many realise. The story of the first mosques in the UK is a tale of Victorian converts, an eccentric Hungarian scholar, a generous ruler of Bhopal, and — much later — the millions of ordinary families who turned terraced houses into places of prayer.

Two Beginnings in 1889

British Islam has two founding moments, not one, and both fall in the same year: 1889. One was in Surrey, the other in Liverpool, and they could hardly have been more different in character.

The Shah Jahan Mosque, Woking

The title of the first purpose-built mosque in Britain goes to the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, Surrey, completed in 1889. It was commissioned by Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, a Hungarian-born orientalist and linguist who wanted a place of worship for Muslim students at his Oriental Institute in Woking. The funding came partly from Sultan Shah Jahan Begum, the female ruler of the princely state of Bhopal in India, which is why the mosque bears her name.

Designed by the architect William Isaac Chambers, it is a beautiful oddity for its time and place: a small, jewel-like building in the Indo-Saracenic style, with a striking dome, delicate minarets and Qur'anic calligraphy, set down amid the commuter streets of the Surrey home counties. The building made a quiet statement: Islam had a place in British life. It is now listed, and still holds congregational prayers today.

Abdullah Quilliam and the Liverpool Muslim Institute

While Woking had the first purpose-built mosque, Liverpool had arguably the first functioning mosque community in the way we understand it today. Its founder was Abdullah Quilliam (born William Henry Quilliam), a Liverpool solicitor who embraced Islam in 1887 after travelling in Morocco.

In 1889 Quilliam opened the Liverpool Muslim Institute at 8 Brougham Terrace. This was far more than a prayer hall. Over the years it grew to include:

• a school for boys and girls
• a library and reading room
• a museum
• an orphanage
• a printing press, from which Quilliam published weekly and monthly Muslim periodicals read around the world

Quilliam's approach was distinctly British. He gave public lectures, set Islamic themes to familiar Victorian hymn tunes, debated in the local press, and won several hundred British converts to Islam. His standing reached far beyond Merseyside: the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II conferred on him the title Sheikh-ul-Islam of the British Isles.

After Quilliam left Britain in 1908 the community dispersed, and for most of the twentieth century Brougham Terrace served as council offices (for decades it housed Liverpool's register office). Following a long restoration campaign led by the Abdullah Quilliam Society, the building has been brought back into use as a mosque and heritage centre, and visitors can once again pray where Victorian Britain's first Muslim congregation gathered.

The Woking Revival

Woking's story did not end with Leitner. After his death in 1899 the Shah Jahan Mosque fell quiet, until it was revived in the early twentieth century by Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, an Indian lawyer who established the Woking Muslim Mission there in 1913. For the next few decades Woking was effectively the centre of Islam in Britain. Notable British converts were associated with the mosque in this period, including Lord Headley, the Irish peer who embraced Islam in 1913, and Marmaduke Pickthall, whose English translation of the Qur'an remains in print a century later.

The Fazl Mosque (1926), London's First

London itself did not gain a purpose-built mosque until 1926, when the Fazl Mosque opened in Southfields, south-west London. Built by the Ahmadiyya movement and often known simply as "The London Mosque", it was the capital's first building constructed specifically as a mosque, and it drew considerable press attention when it opened — a visible sign that Islam was putting down permanent roots in the capital.

The Long Road to the East London Mosque

The story of the East London Mosque shows how long the road from vision to building could be. The London Mosque Fund was established in 1910 by a committee of prominent Muslims and sympathetic British figures, with the aim of giving London's Muslims a proper place of worship. For decades, Friday prayers were held in hired rooms and halls.

It was not until 1941, in the middle of the Second World War, that the fund finally opened the East London Mosque in three converted houses on Commercial Road in Stepney. As the Bangladeshi community of Tower Hamlets grew in the post-war decades, the congregation outgrew the site, and in 1985 the mosque moved into a purpose-built home on Whitechapel Road. It has kept growing since — the adjoining London Muslim Centre opened in 2004, followed by the Maryam Centre for women — and today it is one of the largest mosque complexes in the country.

The London Central Mosque at Regent's Park (1977)

The most famous mosque in Britain owes its existence partly to wartime diplomacy. During the Second World War, the British government set aside funds and granted a site near Regent's Park for a central London mosque, in recognition of the Muslim subjects of the Empire and mirroring the gift of land for an Anglican cathedral in Cairo. The Islamic Cultural Centre on the site was opened in 1944.

The mosque itself took much longer. After an international design competition, the commission went to the English architect Sir Frederick Gibberd, and the London Central Mosque — with its unmistakable golden dome and slender minaret beside Regent's Park — was completed in 1977. It can accommodate thousands of worshippers and remains a landmark for Muslims visiting London from all over the world.

The Post-War Boom

For all the grandeur of Woking and Regent's Park, most British mosques have far humbler origins. The great expansion of mosques came with post-war migration from South Asia — workers from Pakistan (especially Mirpur), Bangladesh (especially Sylhet), India and East Africa who came to work in the mills, foundries and factories of the industrial towns, and who were later joined by their families.

Through the 1960s, 70s and 80s, communities pooled wages to buy whatever buildings they could afford. Terraced houses were knocked through into prayer halls, many still in use today. Churches, chapels and Sunday schools whose congregations had dwindled found new life. So did old cinemas, warehouses and social clubs, converted room by room as funds allowed.

Perhaps the most poignant example is the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid in east London: built in 1743 as a Huguenot chapel, later a Methodist chapel, then a synagogue serving Jewish refugees, and since 1976 a mosque serving the Bangladeshi community. One building, three faiths, and the whole story of migration to the East End written in its walls.

In the early 1960s there were only a handful of registered mosques in Britain; by the mid-1980s there were hundreds; today there are well over 1,500, from converted houses to landmark buildings like the timber-vaulted Cambridge Central Mosque, opened in 2019 as Europe's first purpose-built eco-mosque.

What These Buildings Mean Today

The early mosques were never only places of prayer, and neither are their successors. Woking hosted dignitaries, scholars and high-profile converts, showing that Islam could sit comfortably within British public life. Liverpool served working people and converts, pioneering the social welfare model — schooling, charity, publishing — that many modern mosques aspire to. And the converted terraces of Bradford, Birmingham and Tower Hamlets embody something else again: the sacrifice of first-generation migrants who built community institutions from overtime pay and door-to-door collections.

Today's mosques carry all three inheritances at once. They run food banks and funerals, madrasahs and blood-donation drives, and they anchor high streets of halal butchers, bookshops and restaurants. When we step into any mosque in the UK, we are walking in the footsteps of Dr Leitner, the Begum of Bhopal, Abdullah Quilliam and thousands of unnamed factory workers who laid the foundations of our community over 130 years.

Quick Answers

What was the first mosque in the UK? The first purpose-built mosque was the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking (1889). The Liverpool Muslim Institute, opened by Abdullah Quilliam in the same year, was the first mosque community in a converted building.

What was the first purpose-built mosque in London? The Fazl Mosque in Southfields, opened in 1926.

Can I visit these historic mosques? Yes. The Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, the Abdullah Quilliam mosque and heritage centre at Brougham Terrace in Liverpool, and the London Central Mosque at Regent's Park all welcome visitors — check their websites for visiting times, and dress modestly as you would for any mosque.