A Minaret Rising Over Kingsland Road
On a busy London street better known for shops and buses, the tallest minaret in Britain quietly reaches into the sky. Its story began not in Sinan's sixteenth-century Istanbul, but in 1990s Hackney.
Walk along Kingsland Road in Haggerston, East London, and amid the traffic and terraced housing, a striking Ottoman-style dome and a soaring minaret rise above the rooftops. This is the Suleymaniye Mosque, a Sunni place of worship that has become a landmark for the Turkish-speaking community and Muslims across the Borough of Hackney.
Despite sharing its name with the great sixteenth-century Süleymaniye Mosque built by the Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan in Istanbul, this London mosque is an entirely different building with no design connection to Sinan. It is a modern structure, conceived and raised in the closing years of the twentieth century by a community far from Istanbul.
The mosque's origins trace back to the vision and funding of the UK Turkish Islamic Cultural Centre, known as UKTICC. Construction began in 1994, a project born of a community's desire to build a spiritual and cultural home in the city they now called home. It would take five years of building before the doors finally opened to the public in October 1999.
What emerged was no modest prayer hall. The completed mosque spans a total floor space of 8,000 square metres, roughly 86,000 square feet, making it one of the largest religious buildings of its kind in the city. Inside its Ottoman-style architecture, the mosque can accommodate up to 3,000 worshippers at once, a testament to the scale of the community it was designed to serve.
But the Suleymaniye Mosque was conceived as more than a place of prayer. Its planners folded in a conference and wedding hall, classrooms for religious and community education, and facilities for funeral services. It even provides accommodation for students of the Marathon School, weaving education into the fabric of the building alongside worship and celebration.
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