Shahporan Islamic Centre
Hackney Road E2
2014

In the 1990s, the local Bangladeshi community established a small mosque and community centre within the end house of a Victorian terrace. Behind the property stood a former industrial works building, which gradually became the main prayer hall as the congregation grew. This project set out to transform those modest and improvised facilities into a purpose-built mosque complex, while simultaneously restoring the historic Grade II–listed house at the front of the site.

A notable feature of the restoration is the conservation of the nineteenth-century recessed lettering advertisement on the gable wall of the terrace — a trace of the building’s manufacturing past. Its preservation anchors the scheme in the layered history of the neighbourhood and reinforces the dialogue between old and new.

The architectural language of the new mosque draws inspiration from a thirteenth-century Anatolian tile motif, connecting the present Muslim community to an Islamic historical imagination. This historic pattern is abstracted and expanded to span the full height of the new façade, becoming both ornament and structure. Reconstituted stone panels are crafted to reinterpret the tile geometry, giving the building a sense of material solidity and permanence. Across the remaining portions of the frontage, a metal screen evokes the delicate intricacy of the traditional mashrabiya lattice, filtering light and creating subtle visual depth.

The overall composition is conceived to appear as though the mosque has been carved from a single block of stone—an expression of endurance, rootedness, and continuity for a community that has made this place a spiritual home over several decades.