Mosque at the Trocadero is good for it and the community
It has been announced that a plan to convert part of the Trocadero in Piccadilly, London, into a mosque has been approved by the council. The mosque is being proposed and funded by the property tycoon Asif Aziz, who owns “nearly 40” properties in London, through his charitable arm, the Aziz Foundation. According to Time Out, earlier plans for a much larger mosque were “withdrawn in 2020 following backlash from far-right groups and some residents”. This has still produced uproar from racists on social media who have described it as yet another case of Muslims “taking over”, some of them pointing out that the local area is full of bars that serve alcohol and that nearby Soho is full of strip joints, which makes the mosque rather out of keeping with the local area (with the suggestion that Muslims are either hypocrites for wanting to put a mosque there, or are trying to drive the “local community” out). All of this is nonsense.
First, Piccadilly Circus is not Soho. Soho is nearby, but even that is not just strip joints and sex shops but a distinct neighbourhood where people live, including Muslims, and where all sorts of hospitality businesses are to be found, including restaurants and cafés which are not at all indecent, a street market selling fruit and vegetables and other commodities, and businesses of pretty much every other kind. Piccadilly Circus is a major tourist destination which is near to many of the West End’s cinemas and theatres, to a big bookshop (not as big as it once was, mind you), to Regent Street with its shops selling all sorts of things (clothes, computers, toys for example), to St James’s Park and Whitehall. Muslims work in most of these industries and visit the area every day as tourists and shoppers. Currently the only mosque is a tiny one in a shop unit on Berwick Street, which is just yards from the strip joint hotspot, which does not admit women and which has been the scene of confrontation between the management and women seeking to pray; the nearest one to that is the Muslim World League centre off Goodge Street, some distance further north.
Second, the amusements that this building was associated with in the past, such as the arcades, restaurants, cinema and Guinness World of Records have been gone for years; the centre was closed in 2014 although part of it is used as a hotel and that will continue. To have the building used, with regular attendees contributing funds, means it will be maintained and won’t be somewhere rats and other vermin can colonise and be a health hazard for food businesses in the local area. It will not cause any extra traffic congestion; there is not going to be any parking, and nobody will need to commute by car to pray here anyway as there are plenty of mosques in the suburbs, just not in central London. This will be for people who live or work locally.
Despite being the right age to have been a teenager when the Trocadero was the amusement mecca for London’s teenagers, with its Alien War and Sega gaming centres, I only remember it for the Guinness World Records exhibition which we visited as a family some time in the 80s. Apparently the amusements ceased to be cool, then one of them was damaged by a flood, Sega pulled out and before long you could get gaming consoles which were connected, rather than having to travel to central London to play games against others. Before this period it had sat unused for twenty years following the closure of an earlier entertainment centre in 1965. I don’t know how much of the building this prayer centre will take up; perhaps Mr Aziz could open a few halal restaurants on other floors to offer a sample of the Muslim world’s cuisines to the tourists and refreshment to the local working people. If you’re worried about us “taking over”, don’t worry, the strip joints are still open round the corner.
Image source: London Attractions Guide. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution (BY) 2.0 licence.
