faith and suburbia: secularisation, modernity and the changing geographies of religion in london’s...

Faith and suburbia: secularisation, modernityand the changing geographies of religion inLondon’s suburbs

Claire Dwyer1, David Gilbert2 and Bindi Shah3

Spectacular new religious buildings on London’s outskirts are often cited as evidence of London’s multiculturaldiversity. However, the suburban location of these new buildings is usually dismissed as incongruous, drawingon familiar tropes of the suburbs as sites of modernisation, materialism and secularism. This paper uses thisassumed incongruity to address the complexity of relationships between religion and suburban space by tracingthe significance of religion in changing suburban geographies through a focus on London’s suburbs. The paperbegins with a critique of the absence of religion in suburban studies, which emphasise secularisation and homo-geneity. The rediscovery of the creative potential of the suburbs gives little consideration to religious creativity.Similarly recent work on diasporas and religion have little to say about the significance of the suburban. Ourpaper uses three case studies, of different faith groups, from North and West London to explore three distinc-tive articulations of the relationship between religion and suburban space that we call ‘semi-detached faith’,‘edge-city faith’ and ‘ethnoburb faith’. These examples are not intended as ideal types but as analytical catego-ries that open up the relationships between space, faith and mobilities. We argue there is a need to more care-fully theorise the ways in which faith communities have engaged with the challenges of suburban geographiesincluding processes of secularisation and suggest that the study of faith in suburbia offers new ways of thinkingabout the complexity of suburban space.

Key words religion; suburbs; modernity; secularisation; multiculturalism; London

1Department of Geography, University College London, London WC1E 6BT2Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham TW20 0EX3Department of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Southampton, Southampton SO17 1BJEmail: [email protected]

Revised manuscript received 15 February 2012

Introduction: faith and suburbia

Approaching London on the M4 motorway, just pastthe exits for Heathrow, your eye may be caught bythe glint of sunlight off a large golden dome, perhapsa kilometre to the north. You drive on for five min-utes and just as the final elevated section of themotorway descends into Chiswick, you catch sight ofanother dome, rather closer, surrounded by trees, thistime pointed, blue, covered in golden stars andtopped with a large ornamental cross. These twobuildings, the Sikh Gurdwara Sri Guru Singh Sabhain Southall, and the Cathedral of the Dormition ofthe Most Holy Mother of God and Holy Royal Mar-tyrs in Chiswick (better known as the Russian Ortho-dox Cathedral) are two prominent examples in arecent wave of construction of spectacular religiousbuildings around London. The most famous of theseis perhaps the Neasden Hindu temple or Shri Swam-inarayan Mandir, just off the North Circular Road,close to Wembley stadium and the Ikea superstore.Other prominent examples include the Mohammadi

Park Mosque in Northolt, and the Jain temple atPotter’s Bar (see Figure 1).1

These buildings are often used as signifiers of whatis now a rather familiar story of the development ofLondon as an extraordinarily diverse multicultural city.However, what is less often reflected on is the relation-ship between these sites and their suburban location.Most commentaries simply point to the incongruity ofspectacular and ‘exotic’ architecture in mundane subur-ban spaces. Thus in August 1995 when the Swaminara-yan Hindu temple was opened in Neasden, headlinewriters vied to express the incongruity of ‘Neasden’sTaj Mahal’ or the ‘Temple to the gods of NW10’, em-phasising the ‘extraordinary reality’ of a Hindu templebuilt among the ‘cut-price, crinkly tin, shopping sheds’and ‘grim-grey, pebble-dashed suburban streets’ (TheGuardian and The Independent 28 July 1995).

This supposed incongruity between the sacred andthe suburban can also be seen in the response tothese same places in the 1930s, the time of the greatexpansion of ‘semi-detached London’ (Jackson 1991).Late May 1934 saw a run of performances of T.S.

Citation: 2012 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00521.xISSN 0020-2754 � 2012 The Authors.

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers � 2012 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

Eliot’s pageant play The Rock at the Sadlers’ WellsTheatre in central London (Eliot 1934). The Rockwas written after Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanismand was part of a fund-raising initiative in support ofthe ‘Forty-Five Churches Fund’, a campaign to com-bat the secularisation of mid-twentieth-century Lon-don, particularly its new suburban districts (see Ellis1991). The Rock directly addressed the nature of sub-urban life and its supposed alienation from organisedChristianity:

I journeyed to the suburbs, and there I was told:We toil for six days, on the seventh we must motorTo Hindhead, or Maidenhead.If the weather is foul we stay at home and read thepapers. (Eliot 1934, 8)

In the land of lobelias and tennis flannelsThe rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit,The nettle shall flourish on the gravel court,And the wind shall say, ‘Here were decent godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf balls.’ (Eliot 1934, 30)

The Rock repeatedly castigates the new 1930s subur-bia as a space beyond faith, of godless people ‘dis-persed on ribbon roads, where no man [sic] knowsnor cares who is his neighbour’ (Eliot 1934, 30).Eliot’s conflation of modernisation, materialism andsecularisation corresponds closely with dominantreadings of twentieth-century suburbia, in Londonand more generally. His fears about the secular futureof suburban society also draw upon the same sense of

Figure 1 Map showing locations of case studies and other key religious buildings discussed in the paperSource: Map by Miles Irving (UCL Drawing Office)

2 Claire Dwyer et al.

Citation: 2012 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00521.xISSN 0020-2754 � 2012 The Authors.Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers � 2012 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)

incongruity reflected in the response to the new reli-gious landscapes of twenty-first-century London.

This paper uses this supposed incongruity as astarting point to address the complexity of the rela-tionships between religion and suburban space.Rather than simply counterposing the spectacular andthe mundane, or the spiritual and the material, weexamine the significance of religion in changing sub-urban geographies. Our focus, as indicated by theintroductory discussion, is on London, arguably theplace where mass suburbanisation began, and the siteof unprecedented suburban growth between the mid-nineteenth century and the Second World War (seeGilbert 2010; Jackson 1991). In the post-war period,suburban London was a significant site of post-imperial migrations. The experience of culturaltransformation, in well-known examples like the South-Asian ‘ethnoburb’ of Southall, but also much moregenerally across suburban London, has disrupted aconventional reading of migration and cultural changethat treated suburbia as an end-point in processes ofassimilation (Li 2006 2009). London’s suburbs havebecome important points in transnational networks,spiritual as well as social and economic.

There are two lines of argument that run throughthis paper. The first of these is about the nature ofsuburbia. Vaughan et al. have recently claimed thatbeyond the most basic and perfunctory of definitionsof suburbs (perhaps as parts of a larger functionalurban unit, but located beyond the central core of thecity) it is far from clear what is meant by the term‘suburb’, ‘or indeed, whether it can be thought to pos-sess meaning at all’ (2009, 475). They argue that toooften ‘the language of the suburban floats free fromthe suburban built environment’ pointing to an‘under-theorization and over-representation’ of subur-ban space (2009, 475, 477). The position presentedhere has some sympathy with this; we do not treatsuburban space as a simple container or backdrop,nor are we working with a predefined set of assump-tions about the nature of the suburban. Instead wefocus on the specificity and intricacy of the relation-ships between different suburban built environments,religious organisations and practices. This study, weargue, is part of a broader task directed towardsunderstanding the complexity of suburban geogra-phies, not just in terms of built form as for Vaughanet al., but also in forms of material cultures, organisa-tion, practice, belief and feeling. The task is notmerely to chart changes in the forms of religion thattake place in outer London, but to think about whatthey can tell us about the nature of suburbs and thesuburban condition.

The second theme that runs through the paper isabout the relationship between suburbs, religiousbelief and secularism. The anxiety that underpinned

Eliot’s response to 1930s outer London was part of awider understanding of suburbia as a key element inthe decline of religious attendance and organisation inBritain. His references to golf and motoring echowider tropes that cast suburbia as an environment thatinculcated more materialistic and privatised lives, anda consequent loss of both spiritual belief and commu-nal activity. There has been a recent flourishing ofresearch on geographies of religion, spirituality andbelief, reanimating study of the relationship betweenreligion and space (Dewsbury and Cloke 2009; Hollo-way and Valins 2002; Kong 2010; Olsen and Silvey2006; Proctor 2006; Yorgason and della Dora 2009).Some of this recent work in geography challenges theinevitability of secularisation, building upon widerdebates within the sociology of religion. Jose Casa-nova (1994), for example, has convincingly decon-structed the notion of a singular modernising processof secularisation, through a theorisation of the processthat draws attention to social differentiation and the‘privatisation’ of religious faith, as well as simplenotions of religious decline. Casanova’s emphases oncomplexity, and particularly on the shifting boundariesbetween the public and private expressions of religiousidentity, directly provoke questions about the spatialityof religion and secularism. Recent work explores howspaces are actively produced as secular (Beaumontand Baker 2011; Gokariskel 2009; Howe 2009; Wilford2009), and the significance of material cultures in themaking of ‘sacred space out of place’ (della Dora2009, 225; see also Tolia-Kelly 2004).

However, this turn towards taking religion moreseriously has had limited influence on what might bedescribed as traditional mainstream sub-disciplines;for example, work on religion in the city has yet toimpact much on urban geography more generally. AsWilford suggests, geographies of religion have tendedto work at a ‘finer scale’ of specific religious build-ings, neighbourhoods and local practices rather thanto think about the significance of religion in widerdebates about the character of, for example, urban orindeed suburban space (Wilford 2010). Wilford is par-ticularly concerned that this narrow focus displacesconsideration of bigger issues such as the significanceof the secular and processes of secularisation. Weargue here that suburban religion in London andbeyond has been shaped by an intense, explicit andcomplex relationship with secularisation, in which thecharacteristics of suburbia are not simply a kind ofexternalised, secularising environment, but rather areactive elements drawn upon in the making of boththe spiritual and the secular.

The paper has two main sections. In the followingsection we examine the ways the relationship betweenreligion and suburbia has been understood in two keyfields of work. We focus on the treatment and often

Faith and suburbia 3



the absence of discussion about religion and suburbiain both suburban studies, and in approaches to diasp-oric cultures. Certainly in British suburban studiesthere has been a pervasive sense of the marginality ofreligion to suburban life, and an implicit acceptanceof the inevitability of secularisation. Although religionhas been more visible in studies of diasporic cultures,there has been both a tendency to treat religion as amarker of ethnic difference rather than to studybeliefs and practices, and very little work that hasthought about the distinctiveness of suburban diasporicfaith. The second main section of the paper turns tothink about specific geographies of suburban faith inLondon. The section considers three distinctivearticulations of the relationship between religion andsuburban space that we call ‘semi-detached faith’,‘edge-city faith’ and ‘ethnoburb faith’; these areintended not as fixed ideal-types, but as analytical cat-egories that allow us to approach the complexity ofsuburban space, by opening up the relationshipsbetween space, faith and mobilities. The section isfocused on detailed readings of three suburban faithspaces, deliberately juxtaposing different faiths (Angli-can Christianity, Islam and Jainism) and covering dif-ferent time-periods of suburban development. Whatwe draw from this analysis are not just differences ofexperience, but also common themes in the engage-ments of different faith communities with suburbanspace. We explore suburban hybridity, as manifestedin the buildings, practices and material culture ofthese faith spaces, and different specific responses tosecularisation. We also address the ways that eachcombines a very particular response to their immedi-ate suburban locations with positioning in widermetropolitan or transnational networks.

Religion and suburban space

Suburbs and secularisationIf for nineteenth-century critics and commentatorsindustrial urbanisation was often described as the geo-graphical process threatening organised religion inWestern societies, by the mid-twentieth century subur-bia was regarded as a key site of secularisation. Theclassic secularisation thesis draws on both Weber andDurkheim in suggesting that modernisation causessocial dislocation, the erosion of traditional forms ofauthority and ritual, and consequently leads to thedecline of religion as a significant feature of publiclife (Garnett et al. 2007; Taylor 2007). In writingsabout the condition of England in the nineteenth cen-tury, urbanisation was identified as both locus andpartial cause of the loss of (Christian) faith, but bythe twentieth century this was an increasingly com-mon response to the suburbs and suburban life. Inthe work of Lewis Mumford, mass suburbia repre-

sented the ‘anti-city’, where connections with allforms of challenge or higher calling were lost to the‘bland ritual of competitive spending’ and where lifebecame ‘based on a childish view of the world, inwhich reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle’(1966, 563). Such ‘moral geographies’ of suburbia cutacross important international differences both in sub-urban form and in the relative success of religiousfaiths in the twentieth century. A long-running strandof analysis of suburbia developed this theme of amaterialistic, leisure-obsessed environment to empha-sise its antipathy to spiritual life.

Writing in 1909 on The condition of England, theliberal commentator Charles Masterman identifiedthe ravages made on organised religion by the openindifference seemingly built into an Edwardiansuburbia of ‘Sunday cyclists’ and ‘Sunday music’(1909, 87–8). In the United States there was a differ-ent inflection to the idea that suburban culture was acorrosive influence on faith. Many sociologists, partic-ularly in the post-war decades, held almost as giventhat migration into suburbia and exposure to its con-sumerist culture would inevitably lead to a decline intraditional religion. More recent accounts of Ameri-can suburban history, such as Kenneth Jackson’sCrabgrass frontier (1985), Robert Fishman’s Bourgeoisutopias (1987) and John Palen’s The suburbs (1995),have generally written religion out of their story com-pletely. This shows the power of the suburban secu-larisation narrative, and the marginalisation of thestudy of religion in (sub)urban studies. In accountsthat have generally sought to emphasise the material-istic, domesticated and atomistic nature of suburbansociety, the power of religious association has oftenbeen ignored or downplayed, despite the continuingmanifest success of organised religion in many Ameri-can suburbs (Dochuk 2003).

Those American sociologists who did look directlyat suburban religion took a rather different line. Inboth Will Herberg’s Protestant, Catholic, Jew (1955), asociological study of religion in mid-century America,and in William H. Whyte’s famous The organizationman (1956), a sociology of the new American middleclasses, what we find are claims about a ‘hollowingout’ of religion, a decline not necessarily in atten-dance at churches and synagogues, but in the depthof spiritual belief and full participation in ritual andliturgy. Writing on the ‘church of suburbia’, Whyteidentified a move towards what he described as a‘more socially useful church’ among both Protestantand Catholic congregations. This ‘socially usefulchurch’ meant not that the mission of the church wasdirected towards social problems but that the churchserved a social function in providing focus in a worldof what Whyte called ‘transients’ (i.e. new suburbandwellers):



What the transients want, most urgently, in short, is asense of community – and they are coming to care far lessthan their elders about matters of doctrine that might getin the way. For some people, the result may be far too sec-ular, but . . . what is the alternative? (Whyte 1956, 351)

In Britain the decline in organised Christianity, partic-ularly as expressed in attendance at Anglican, Catho-lic and Methodist churches, has been much moredramatic, with less than one in ten of the British pop-ulation attending church by the end of the twentiethcentury (Bruce 2002, 326; Christian Research 2008).For many the movement to new suburbs in Britaincreated not so much a ‘hollowing out’ of organisedreligion as close to its wholesale abandonment. Writ-ing explicitly on the challenges facing suburbanchurches, Brown has recently suggested that the ‘tran-sient, anonymous and unrooted nature of suburbanlife’ has facilitated ‘a society with only the thinnestunderstanding of obligation and duty’, and hasentrenched ‘social atomization’ (Brown 2009, 66).

Religion and the new suburban studiesThese recent perspectives fit into a remarkably consis-tent intellectual and academic response to suburbiafrom the late nineteenth century onwards that cer-tainly includes Masterman, Eliot and Mumford. Thisview treats suburbia as monolithic, monotonous andmaterialistic, the locus of petty lives of narrow, trun-cated perspectives (Carey 1992). Recent work in whatcan be described as ‘new suburban studies’ has chal-lenged some of the most common stereotypes of thesuburbs, particularly those associated with whatDolores Hayden (2003) has described as the mass-produced ‘sitcom’ suburbs of the twentieth century(see Gilbert and Preston 2003). An early strandre-evaluated the architectural landscapes of suburbia.Before the better-known Learning from Las Vegas(1977), Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturisought Learning from Levittown (1970). In Britain,Oliver, Davis and Bentley’s brilliant polemic Dunro-amin (1981) rescued the suburban semi-detachedhouse from the condescension of history. The late1990s and early 2000s saw a more developed responseto the social and cultural geographies of suburbia. Akey statement of this re-evaluation of the suburbanwas Roger Silverstone’s introduction to Visions of sub-urbia (1997). Silverstone calls for a shift in the studyof suburbia away from the straight-jacketing perspec-tives of social modernisation and mass society,towards an emphasis on suburban modernity.Removed from standard preconceptions, suburbia istreated, at least potentially, as a site of creativity,agency, social innovation, flexibility and complexity.

Religion rarely gets much of an explicit mention inthis work, and indeed is still sometimes treated simplyas a marker of suburban narrowness and conformity.

This is particularly so in cultural studies approachesto suburbia, often fixated with what McAlister (2008)has described as the ‘narrative inversion of suburbanmorality’ – i.e. with authors and film-makers that rep-resent a dark and amoral underside to a suburban liferiddled with hypocrisy. This response is in fact almostas old as the modern suburbs themselves, and can beseen as one particular version of the associationbetween suburbia and materialism – where the tradi-tional surface values (including organised religion)are being eaten away by avarice and desire. The shiftfrom treating suburbs as modernisation to the analysisof suburban modernity undermines this approach, andin turn threatens any simple deployment of secularisa-tion as part of a wider modernisation necessarily asso-ciated with the spread of suburban materialism.

A feature of new writings on suburbia has been are-evaluation of the creative potential of consumerand popular culture recognising the unexpected rich-ness of everyday activity and the seemingly ordinary(see Clarke 1999). Very rarely this analysis has beenextended to think of the connections between religionand suburban culture. Diamond (2000 2002), in hiswork on the history of consumerism and suburbanOrthodox Jews, calls into question the standard antin-omy of belief and consumer culture that runs throughmuch discussion of secularisation. His study showshow, in the North American Orthodox Jewish contextat least, religious consumerism ‘represents an impor-tant way in which suburban commercialism and reli-gious traditionalism fuse into a single idea’ (2002,503). Diamond discusses the development of kosherhaute cuisine restaurants, kosher pizza parlours andboutiques selling Orthodox youth fashions in Ameri-can and Canadian suburbs from the 1980s and 1990sonwards. What was important was that while thismight have looked very much like secularisation, thepattern of consumption remained a religious act. Dia-mond’s model is not the conventional narrative ofswamping of religious identity by material culture, butof adaptation and indeed strengthening of religiouscommunities through the development of a distinctivesuburban culture (see also Ochs 2009).

Recent work in what might broadly be termed theAmerican tradition of congregational studies hasexplored the new suburban contexts of Christianorganisations. Mobility, transience and the geographi-cal attenuation of community are treated as challeng-ing influences on the nature of religious organisation,rather than inevitably secularising forces. Eisland’s(2000) study of urban restructuring and religious ecol-ogy in a ‘southern exburb’ on the outskirts of Atlanta,and Paul Numrich’s (2000) discussion of congrega-tions in an ‘edge-city technoburb’ in Naperville,Illinois, trace the specific ways that mobile societiespresent challenges for traditional forms of localised




Christian congregations. Much of this work hasfocused on the development of suburban megachur-ches (Connell 2005; Warf and Winsberg 2010). AsWilford (2010) shows in his study of Saddleback,Orange County, California, the organisational strate-gies of such megachurches are an active response tothe character of contemporary suburbia and exurbia.Megachurches are more than just spiritual equivalentsof suburban shopping malls, pulling car-commutingworshippers into giant churches surrounded by vastparking lots; they also work with the grain of newsuburbia in other ways, through ‘demographically sen-sitive church services, small groups in homes, parks,coffee shops and workplaces, and continuouslyupdated outreach programs’ (Wilford 2010, 341).Such megachurches are often engaged with forms ofconservative politics or globalising evangelical mis-sions, but Wilford argues that these are used ‘explic-itly to engage the local postsuburban narratives ofidentity formation and self-fulfilment that are so sali-ent to their targeted local demographics’ (2010, 341).Their visibility, economic wealth and often aggressiveevangelism make such megachurches the most appar-ent expressions of suburban religion, particularly inthe USA, but there are other forms of religiousresponse to the suburban condition, particularly inthose faiths associated with diasporic movements andcultures.

Diasporas, religion and suburban spacesAnother emphasis of new suburban studies has ques-tioned uncritical assumptions about their culturalhomogeneity, particularly in terms of racial and ethnicidentity (Clapson 2003; Nicolaides 2004). Kruse andSugrue identify the demonstration of suburban socialdiversity as a key element of the ‘new suburban his-tory’ (2006, 8). A dominant image of suburbia as aracially homogeneous ‘white’ space, a viable general-isation for mid-twentieth-century America, now doesno justice to its complex social geographies. Whiletwentieth-century African American migration to thenorthern cities of the USA was an influence on ‘whiteflight’ to the suburbs, from the 1960s onwards therewas a significant movement of the black populationinto suburbia (Wiese 2004). More generally, by 2000racial and ethnic minorities made up over one-quarterof the suburban population in the 100 largest metro-politan areas of the United States, with similar diver-sity in the suburbs of Canadian, Australian andBritish cities.

Greater London has particularly complex geogra-phies of ethnicity and religious identity, which arechanging rapidly in the twenty-first century (Vertovec2007). The 2001 Census showed that the most reli-giously diverse local authority in the UK was the bor-ough of Harrow in the London suburbs (religious

diversity index of 0.62), with four other outer Londonboroughs, Brent, Redbridge, Barnet and Ealing alsohaving high religious diversity (defined as scores of0.50 or higher) (Office of National Statistics 2006).Nonetheless the sense of suburbs as beyond multicul-turalism retains some power both in popular cultureand as a focus for opposition to the construction ofnew non-Christian places of worship. In Britain suchopposition has drawn upon racialised notions of placethat juxtapose a ‘multicultural’ inner city with animagined ‘white, English’ suburb (Nayak 2010). Eade(1993) describes the vigorous local campaign mountedagainst the Dahwoodi Bohra mosque in Northolt thatmobilised imaginaries of a ‘garden suburb’ and con-structed the mosque as ‘an alien development’ (seealso Crinson 2002; Naylor and Ryan 2002).

An important strand of work has recognised thediversity of suburbs by repositioning them in networksof migration and transnational culture. The best-known analysis of this is Li’s (2006 2009) identificationof ‘ethnoburbs’ in North America and Pacific Rimcountries. These are suburbs with significant concen-trations of new and second ⁄ third generation migrantpopulations that are much more clearly integrated intotransnational networks than with their immediatemetropolis. The existence of ethnoburbs highlights thelimitations of older orthodoxies of social geography,particularly those that drew upon a simple reading ofChicago School sociology in identifying cities as pri-mary centres for migration and suburbs as secondarysites of subsequent cultural assimilation (Harris andLewis 1998). Work on the transnational or diasporicdimensions of suburbia has focused much more oneconomic and cultural networks than on the impact onreligion, while studies of religion and ‘new’ migrationhave tended to remain focused on the urban. In theUSA there is a strong tradition of city-based in-depthethnographic studies of different religious communi-ties drawing on the established traditions of congrega-tional studies (Ebaugh and Chafetz 2000; Leonardet al. 2005; Levitt 2007; Warner and Wittner 1998).These studies develop familiar themes in migrationstudies. They ask how religious communities adapt anddevelop their practices; how faith is transmitted to thesecond generation, particularly when worship remainsin the parental first language; how gender roles changein migration; and discuss the difficulties of securingpremises and religious leaders. Ebaugh and Chafetz’sstudy of Houston echoes Peach and Gale’s (2003)work on the establishment of new migrant religiousspaces in urban Britain in its emphasis on the use oftemporary and provisional premises, such as disusedoffice, factory or warehouse buildings, or in some casesthe sharing of premises between migrant and moreestablished religious communities with ‘parallel’ con-gregations attending services in different languages.



Such urban immigrant religious institutions often takeon an important role as a community centre or ‘immi-grant hub’ (Ley 2008), providing services and networksfor new migrants and sometimes working actively withstate agencies to aid the integration of migrants.

Recently there have been calls for a shift from thestudy of gateway cities to ‘non-conventional places likesuburbs’, and some studies of specifically suburbanexperiences of diaporic religion (Marquaradt 2005;Mehta 2004; Vasquez 2005, 234). For example, in theUS Mehta (2004) describes an emerging suburbanlandscape of Hindu temples in Northern California,while Waghorne (1999) studies the Sri Siva-Vishnutemple in the ‘split-level world’ of suburban Washing-ton DC. In Auckland, New Zealand, Friesen et al.(2005) detail ‘retail and religious landscapes’ (includinga former church that is now a mosque) in their discus-sion of ‘spiced up Sandringham’. In Canada, analysis ofnew immigrant religious buildings in the suburbs(Germain and Gagnon 2003; Hoernig 2006; Isin andSiemiatycki 2002) suggest the ways that zoning lawscan work to encourage the development of new reli-gious sites in industrial and retail areas where parkingcan be provided and noise disturbance avoided(although see Hackworth and Stein 2011 for exampleswhere religious institutions come into conflict with eco-nomic development). Other studies have also consid-ered the changing demographies of suburban Christianchurches and their adaption to incorporate newmigrant groups (Marquardt 2005; Watson 2009).

In London, the most prominent forms of new sub-urban religion relate to the suburban geography ofthe South Asian population reflecting the patterningof early post-war reception and employment opportu-nities, and the significance of home ownership forthese groups (Peach 2006). Most notable is Southall,one of the largest centres of the South Asian dias-pora. It is also in many ways an unexceptional outerLondon suburb, characterised by relatively low-density(certainly by inner London standards) Edwardian andinter-war housing, and several substantial parks; thereare four golf courses within three miles of centralSouthall. Southall might rightly be identified as aLondon variant of an ‘ethnoburb’, and has beenvariously described as an ‘ethnoscape’ (Nasser 2003),‘metropolitan borderland’ (Nasser 2006) and a‘BrAsian suburb’ (Huq 2006). Southall has a densecluster of Hindu, Sikh and Islamic religious buildingsthat range from early conversions of redundant Chris-tian churches, industrial premises and social clubs,through more functional purpose-built temples, gur-dwaras and mosques, to the spectacular Sri GuruSingh Sabha Gurdwara. Such buildings are powerfulexpressions of Southall’s position in transnationalnetworks – at the opening ceremony of the £17mGurdwara, Sant Mann Singh who was flown in from

the Punjab, celebrated ‘a temple second only to theGolden Temple in Amritsar’ (cited in Singh 2006).

By contrast other new diaspora religious buildingsaround London are not located within a settledmigrant religious community but are a function of theopportunities of the suburban or peri-urban fringe forbuilding new and expansive religious buildings. TheSwaminarayan Temple in Neasden was refused plan-ning permission in the more affluent suburb of Harrowbefore gaining a vacant industrial site in the ‘suburb’ssuburb’ of Neasden (The Independent 17 August 1985,cited by Zavos 2009, 886). Similarly the MohammadiPark Mosque in Northolt occupies a disused canal-sidewarehouse site after it was displaced from its previouspremises in a former Jewish youth club in the neigh-bouring suburb of Ealing. Krause (2009) suggests thatthe ‘post-industrial’ landscape of the Lea Valley Indus-trial Park provides a flexible space that is ‘financiallyaffordable and tolerant of noisy worship’ for ten differ-ent African transnational churches. Significant diaspor-ic religious buildings have also been sited in the outercommuter belt of the metropolitan region. The Jaintemple in Potters Bar (see below) and BhaktivedantaManor, a site of Hindu worship and pilgrimage inHertfordshire (Nye 2000) not only take advantage ofthe motorway system to bring together a widely-spreadfaith community, but also respond in their architectureand landscape design to their semi-rural parkland con-texts in the green belt.

What emerges from these literatures, in the ‘newsuburban studies’ and from new studies of diasporiccommunities and religious affiliation, is a requirementto rethink the suburban, and particularly to moveaway from the simplifications of a kind of bowdlerisedChicago School sociology (Harris and Lewis 1998).Rather than a water-tight model of the interrelationsbetween modernising secularism, urban form and sub-urbanisation, in which the suburban is conceived asboth the final geographical destination and the finalshaping force in a process of assimilation, this discus-sion turns attention to a more complex geography ofsuburban space and its relationships with religiousfaith, identity and practices. Like the developments inthe sociology of religion that have challenged any sim-ple monolithic theory of secularisation as modernisa-tion, this turn emphasises the specificity of particularsuburban places and the role of religion in makingdifferent kinds of suburban space.

Three suburban faith geographies

We now turn to consider three specific case studies offaith institutions in outer London, examining particu-larly their relationship with the nature of suburbanspace. The cases do not provide an exhaustive typol-ogy of suburban religious types, even within London,




but have been chosen to draw out the ways that dif-ferent kinds of suburban context offer particularopportunities and constraints for faith communities,particularly in terms of organisation, built form andmaterial culture. The differences between the casestudies also indicate the complexity of suburban spacein modern London, and by extension the limitationsof simplistic understandings of suburbia. The exam-ples also highlight the distinctive geographies andconfigurations of suburban faith particularly in termsof the relationship with place.

Semi-detached faith? St Thomas the Apostle,HanwellThe church-building programmes in the 1930s by boththe Anglican and Catholic Churches were a directresponse both to staggering suburban growth and tovery specific fears about secularisation. The Churcheswere confronted with a kind of urban frontier, oflarge tracts of housing, usually speculatively built andwithout planned community facilities. The MiddlesexForty-Five Churches Fund launched by the AnglicanChurch in 1930, for which The Rock was commis-sioned, aimed to plant new churches in this sea ofsemi-detached housing. Writing in 1934 in the journalof the Anglican London Diocese, Reverend R. Webb-Odell, secretary of the Forty-Five Churches appeal,bemoaned the impact of consumer materialism onthis new suburban environment: ‘Left alone with noman [sic] to care of their souls there is the Wireless,the Cinema, the Public House, everything that is forthe body provided – huge districts without a soul’(Webb-Odell 1933, 161). As Rex Walford argued inhis comprehensive study of the inter-war AnglicanChurch in Middlesex (the historic county that encom-passed much of outer London), the historiography ofthe London suburbs has implicitly or explicitly propa-gated a ‘myth of secularisation’ and almost totallyignored these churches. The comparison with the glutof studies of inter-war suburban cinemas is striking,even though twice as many churches as cinemas werebuilt in Middlesex between 1920 and 1942 (Walford2007, 336). Although the Forty-Five Churches appealstruggled to raise the enormous resources required tobuild new churches, it was remarkably successful, andan important indication that secularisation was nei-ther complete nor uncontested in the period. In totalthe Anglican Church built around 70 new churches inouter London between the wars, with Catholic andother protestant denominations combined construct-ing a similar number (Walford 2007, 319). Thechurches that were built were both an attempt toremake suburbia and a response to the nature ofinter-war suburbia.

An example of these is the Anglican church ofSt Thomas (Plate 1), which stands on a main road in

West London, about half a mile north of the com-muter tube station at Boston Manor. Its tower can beseen from the M4, half-way between the SouthallGurdwara and the Chiswick Orthodox Cathedral. Thechurch is surrounded by typical outer London hous-ing, a mixture of 1920s and 1930s semi-detachedhouses to the south, and slightly more densely-packedEdwardian houses to the north. This is archetypalmiddle-class London suburbia, a landscape of gardensand home-improvement, a product of the greatexpansion in white-collar work in London in the firsthalf of the twentieth century and the efforts of specu-lative builders to profit from the demand for owner-occupied housing in commuting distance of the city.

St Thomas’ was a product of its suburban contextin a number of ways. Firstly it was a direct physicalexpression of the changing geography of the city. Theresources to build the new church came from the sale(and subsequent demolition for redevelopment) of StThomas’ Portman Square in central London. In 1923the Bishop of London had proposed that near-emptycentral churches should follow the people and be dis-mantled, brick-by-brick, and rebuilt in the suburbs(Walford 2007, 101). This happened in a few cases:St Andrews, Wells Street, in the West End was expen-sively rebuilt as St Andrews, Kingsbury, and the towerand Wren-designed interior of All Hallows, LombardStreet, in the City was moved to the side of an arte-rial road in South West London. At St Thomas’ the

Plate 1 St Thomas the Apostle Church, HanwellSource: The Authors



material movement consisted of the church plate, theorgan and a large reredos (Julyan 1957, 4).

The material form of the church responded to itssuburban setting in other ways. The church wasdesigned by Edward Maufe, who was also the archi-tect of suburban churches at St Saviours, Acton, andAll Saints, Esher, as well as Guildford Cathedral (theGuildford diocese covers most of the commuter‘stockbroker’ suburbs to the south-west of London).Maufe’s churches retained a conventional gothicform, but with modernist influences that paredthis down to the bare essentials (Glancey 2003).St Thomas’ is characterised by the contrast between asoaring white interior, powerfully spiritual in its sim-plicity, and a red-brick exterior that echoes the designand materials of the surrounding houses. St Thomas’was the focus of considerable creative effort in itsinterior decoration; one of the underwritten stories ofthe inter-war church-building programme is its signifi-cance for architecture and the decorative arts. Thisseemingly ordinary suburban church contains signifi-cant sculptural work by Eric Gill and Vernon Hill,both now recognised as major figures in English twen-tieth-century sculpture and design. Other art in thechurch made more direct connection to the suburbanmiddle-class lives of the congregation. A mural byElizabeth Starling in a small children’s chapel placesthe annunciation and nativity in a landscape of semi-detached houses and allotment gardens (see Plate 2);the ceiling painting of ‘Christ as Morning Star’ in thelady-chapel was by Kathleen Roberts, one of the maindesigners for Heals, suppliers of fashionable furnish-ings and fabrics to London’s middle classes (Julyan1955, 17). The church emerges, then not just as a sig-nificant site for creativity in the suburbs, but of crea-tive responses to the new suburban world. Thedecoration, furnishings and fittings of the church are

recognisably of their time and place in terms of mate-rials and style, but are used to create a sacred spacein the suburbs.

This new church in Hanwell, consecrated on 10March 1934, built upon a longer history that alsoshowed creativity, flexibility and responsiveness tosuburban context. Like many suburban churches,St Thomas’ began as a mission district planted in anarea of new housing. The first services were held in1907 in a brand-new suburban semi-detached houseat 1 Elthorne Avenue. A bay-fronted upper room(usually the main bedroom in these houses) became aplace of worship, with a tiny altar and lecternsqueezed in (Plate 3). In 1909, the congregationmoved to a rough and ready temporary church,known locally as the ‘Tin Tabernacle’ or more ambi-tiously as the ‘Tin Cathedral’. Although initially‘planted’ by the central London diocese, this commonpattern of house and tin-shed churches showed strongevidence of bottom-up creativity, a flexible andimprovised use of suburban spaces at odds withaccounts of an atomised and privatised materialisticworld.

From the start, St Thomas’ defined itself as thecentre of a parish, and the key focal point for localassociational culture. The new suburban churches sawtheir mission directly as an attempt to create distinc-tive and discrete places in suburban space. They werereconstructing an older geographical structure of par-ishes that drew upon the notion of the village churchin this new territory. St Thomas’ defined itself as aspace for common worship that was open both toconfirmed believers, but also provided a spiritual ser-vice to those who attended less frequently, perhapsjust at Christmas, Easter and Remembrance Sunday,or for the rituals of baptism, marriage and funerals.Until the 1960s the church was extremely successful

Plate 2 Elizabeth Starling Mural, St Thomas theApostle Church, Hanwell

Source: The AuthorsPlate 3 House Church at 1 Elthorne Avenue

Source: Archives of St. Thomas the Apostle, Hanwell




through this parish-based mission, with upwards of400 regular worshippers filling the church for threeSunday services. Such place-making was alsoattempted through a rich, cross-generational associa-tional culture of Sunday schools, youth clubs, scoutand guide groups, fairs, pantomimes and charabanctrips to the sea. In 1960 there were 400 children regis-tered at the Sunday school (Anonymous 1983, 6).

This traditional parish focus attempted to make adistinctive, bounded community from the suburbanspace around the church, and was relatively successfulin the mid-twentieth century. In the twenty-first cen-tury, the church survives as a traditionalist AnglicanChurch, not just in terms of liturgy, worship andbeliefs, but also its sense of itself as a centre of a geo-graphically defined and delimited parish community.It attempts to maintain its commitment to communityand associational culture, but with much more limitedhuman and financial resources. The core congregationhas shrunk to around 100 worshippers, but this is notstraightforwardly indicative of secularisation so muchas a transformation of the local geography of subur-ban religion. In part this is about migration into thearea of people of diaspora faiths, particularly Hindusand some Muslims and Sikhs from the 1960s, andmore recently Catholics from Poland. But the changeis also about the developing breadth of Anglicanismand the mapping of different ideas of mission andresponse to the challenges of faith-making in subur-bia. There have been tensions between St Thomas’and neighbouring evangelical Anglican churches thathave a much more fluid and expansive sense of theirgeographical reach, and which see their mission pri-marily in spreading the gospel rather than serving thebroader needs of a delimited parish.

St Thomas’ was a response to the semi-detachedworld around it, seeking to transform what contempo-raries saw as a landscape of privatisation and materi-alism into a place-based community, with the churchat its centre. In conventional interpretations of subur-bia, the domestic house is often interpreted as thelocus of inward-looking nuclear families and a barrierto more public cultures. The early histories of bothSt Thomas’ and the following example of the WestLondon Islamic Centre indicate the partiality of thisinterpretation, reminding us of the frequent use ofsuburban homes as sites for formal worship as housechurches, synagogues and mosques. We might alsoconsider wider attempts to sacralise domestic space,and in so doing directly challenge the supposed con-nection between private space and secularisation. Thisis most explicit in the organisation and practices ofsome evangelical Christian churches that look forinspiration to the small-cell, house-based example ofthe very early church. However, the use of the hometo extend the spaces of suburban faith beyond dedi-

cated religious buildings is very common, for prayermeetings, textual study and as part of the broaderassociational culture of the group.

Around London the suburban house is a particu-larly flexible building form, capable of redecoration,rearrangement of rooms, physical extension and sub-division. These characteristics have been important inthe responsiveness of suburbia to recent changes inhousehold and family structure, and to large-scalemigration, but what they also provide is the opportu-nity for forms of religious expression. Tolia-Kelly(2004) has discussed Hindu shrines as a part of thedomestic landscape of London, contrasting the simplemandirs of inner city flats with the dedicated roomsfound in suburban Middlesex. Domestic spaces arehighly significant in the geography of the sacred forHindus, and owner-occupied suburban houses givegreat scope and autonomy for its material expression(Nesbitt 2006). This is given vivid expression eachautumn in the dramatic displays of Diwali lights cov-ering many West London semi-detached houses.Many other houses have more subtle displays of ico-nography in suburban front and back gardens orhouse names that provide evidence of the presence ofthe everyday suburban sacred.

Ethnoburb faith? West London Islamic CentreHalf a mile away from St Thomas’ Church, behindthe nondescript high street of West Ealing and sand-wiched between 1960s in-fill local authority housingblocks, is the converted warehouse that serves as thehome of the West London Islamic Centre. This mos-que caters for a diverse Muslim congregation, whichat Friday afternoon prayers overflows to stand andpray in the surrounding car park and streets (seePlate 4). The origins of the masjid lie in a fledglingMuslim community of West Ealing, most of Pakistaniheritage who began to meet, from the mid-1980s, intwo adjoining suburban houses in Oaklands Road(just around the corner and in the same Edwardiandevelopment as Elthorne Avenue, where St Thomas’had begun). In 1996, with the support of the localauthority, they purchased an abandoned warehouse,raising the £260 000 needed in cash loans from thelocal Muslim community. Today the building has beenadapted over four floors to provide male and femaleprayer rooms and washing facilities; a large hall usedfor weddings and Friday prayers; office space; a bookshop and a gym that provides boxing and aerobicsclasses. Popular because sermons are in English andArabic, as many as 1200 worshippers attend Fridayprayers at the mosque. Although the original foundersof the mosque are of Pakistani heritage, the congrega-tion of the mosque is ethnically diverse, swelled byrecent migrants from Somalia but also includingArabs, Bosnians, Iraqis and even Poles. During the



week there are a wide variety of religious activities,including study groups for men and women, dailyQuran study classes for children, while the mosquealso offers a supplementary school in English andMaths for children at the weekend. Imams from themosque support the bereaved and act as chaplains atthe local hospital. The mosque also fulfils manyextended community activities, including support forrecent migrants and assistance with translation forthose in court or requiring state assistance. This rolereflects the extensive community links the mosque’scommittee has built up with local councillors and thepolice service, who set up a stall outside the mosqueafter Friday prayers offering advice and support.

We use the example of the West London IslamicCentre to explore a second geography of faith andsuburbia through an interrogation of ‘ethnoburbfaith’. Although it does not discuss religion directly,Li’s (2009) discussion of the changing transnationalgeographies of ethnic suburban spaces has importantramifications for the way we might approach subur-ban faith. Changing demographies and new geogra-phies of settlement have shifted some of the functionsof diasporic faith organisations in the ‘urban gateway’to other parts of the metropolis; it is no longer neces-sarily in the inner cities that religions organise to sup-port new migrants. The range of activities organised

at the West London Islamic Centre provide plentifulexamples of the ways in which the mosque operatesas a community space for recent immigrants and as agateway to access secular civic organisations and ser-vices (Ley 2008). If suburban culture is seen by manywithin the community as a driving force for seculari-sation, particularly through the impact of materialism,then the mission of suburban diasporic faith organisa-tions is simultaneously to provide support for newarrivals and to defend the faith against its erosion.The West London Islamic Centre is part of thenational UK Islamic Mission, based in Central Lon-don and founded in 1962, which sees its mission asthe propagation of Islam and Islamic charity. Mem-bers of the mosque are involved in inter-faith initia-tives locally, sponsor a weekly information stand inEaling town centre and have organised several exhibi-tions to educate a broader public about Islam. Theircommitment to wider community issues is alsoreflected in their membership of West London Citi-zens, a broad-based coalition of faith groups andtrade unions, which campaigns on a range of localsocial issues (Jamoul and Wills 2008). These activitiessuggest that the mosque cannot be read only as anethnic enclave promoting a strongly bonded suburbanfaith community, but has also developed an associa-tional culture that responds to the wider secular sub-urban society in both theological and social initiatives.

The full implications of Li’s conceptualisation ofthe ethnoburb highlight transnational linkages so thatsuburban locations become highly networked ‘extro-verted’ spaces echoing the postcolonial critique of sub-urban spaces developed by King (2004). Two of thefounder members of the mosque describe the currentmosque congregation as ‘cosmopolitan’. The ethnicdiversity of the attendees is shaped by West London’ssuburban multicultural ‘superdiversity’ (Vertovec2007), but the popularity of the mosque also reflectsits intellectual reputation with English-speaking imamsand teachers who are highly educated (the mosqueoffers well-regarded courses in Islamic studies). TheWest London Islamic Centre is thus embedded withina range of different transnational connections thatencompass both links to Pakistan through the ethnicheritage of its founders and the UK Islamic Mission,but also stretch more broadly within the wider Muslimumma encompassing further transnational familialconnections with Somalia, Bosnia and Poland andacross the Arab world, as well as important transna-tional intellectual linkages with universities in Pakistanand Saudi Arabia. While Li’s discussion of transna-tional linkages focuses on ethnic business and familialnetworks, his depiction of an ethnoburb might beextended to consider many other different spirituallinkages, such as the exchange of religious resources,remittances, prayers and sacred objects.

Plate 4 Worshippers outside the West LondonIslamic Centre

Source: West London Islamic Centre




While the current building has little external modi-fication, in 2010 the West London Islamic Centregained planning permission for the construction of apurpose-built mosque to provide an extended rangeof community activities, including a gym, health cen-tre, nursery, banqueting hall, library and communitycentre, in addition to prayer rooms. Although thearchitecture of the new mosque is more purposivelyIslamic (see Plate 5), the plans for the mosque aredescribed as ‘sensitive to the local environment’,intended to blend with existing buildings and will takeplace alongside the renovation of the neighbouringhousing estate. The community suggest that theirmodifications are flexible – should the congregationcontinue to expand and require new premises, thebuildings could, they suggest, be easily adapted tonon-religious use. Thus the West London IslamicCentre provides further evidence of flexibility and cre-ativity within the suburban built environment. Like StThomas’, worship at the West London Islamic Centrebegan within an intimate domestic space before beingadapted within a flexible, functional, multi-purposebuilding, but will eventually occupy a more architec-turally significant local landmark.

The West London Islamic Centre provides a pro-ductive example to explore further articulations of the

relationship between religion and suburban space. Byextending Li’s concept of ethnoburb to consider thesignificance of diaspora faith spaces we suggest thatsuburban space is shaped not only by the distinctivelocal associational cultures of recent migrant commu-nities but also by complex transnational geographiesof spiritual and material connections. These multipleextroverted faith networks rework suburban space asdynamic, multi-scalar and complex.

Edge-city faith? Shikharbandhi Jain Deraser,Potters BarOur final example moves us further north, to PottersBar in the affluent ‘stockbroker belt’, just outside theM25, the London orbital motorway. Here a new JainTemple, Shikharbandhi Jain Deraser, was opened in2005 (Plate 6; see Shah et al. 2012). The Deraser wasthe culmination of a 20-year project for the OshwalAssociation of the UK, a close-knit transnational Jaincommunity whose members began to settle in the UKfrom East Africa in the early 1960s. The temple is sit-uated in the 80-acre grounds of Hook House, aGrade II listed manor house bought by the commu-nity in 1979. The house now holds the headquartersof the Association, and has been augmented by twolarge assembly halls and parking for 400 cars, forminga multi-purpose community centre (Oshwal Associa-tion of the UK 2005). The facilities are regularly usedfor large- and small-scale events, including weddings,religious and cultural festivals, and community eventssuch as a careers fair, as well as being rented out tomembers of other communities as long as dietary andalcohol prohibitions are observed. We use this finalexample of a spectacular new place of worship by adiasporic faith community to explore a third distinc-tive geography of faith and suburbia, which wedescribe as edge-city faith. This draws upon Joel Gar-reau’s terminology used to describe new extra-urban

Plate 5 Proposal for the new Mosque at the WestLondon Islamic Centre

Source: West London Islamic CentrePlate 6 Shikharbandhi Jain Deraser, Potters Bar

Source: The Authors



geographies, particularly in the USA, relativelydetached from existing urban centres, and focused onhighways and the connections made possible by a sys-tem of automobility (Garreau 1992).

For mid-twentieth-century commentators on thenature of suburbia, mobility and transience were keyfactors eroding sociality in general and organised reli-gious structures in particular. However, recent workon mega churches, particularly in North America, sug-gests this thesis might be reworked, indicating insteadthe ways in which mobility and transience becomepart of a response to as well as a cause of secularisa-tion (Wilford 2010). In London some new religiouscommunities have found that suburban locationsenable the realisation of expansive religious buildingsin greenbelt or post-industrial spaces that are wellconnected to arterial transport routes. As we sug-gested above, in North America such edge-city faithdevelopments are closely imbricated in the planningsystem, with location often in part a result of zoningcodes. A spectacular example of this is Vancouver’s‘Highway to Heaven’, an extraordinary suburban reli-gious landscape adjacent to Highway 99 in Richmond,made possible by zoning for ‘assembly-use’ (seeDwyer et al. 2011). The story of edge-city faith aroundLondon is more fragmentary and more opportunistic,but here too relies on negotiating planningregulations, whether on peripheral industrial estateslike the Neasden temple or in the green belt likeBhaktivedanta Manor (Nye 2000) and the Potters BarJain temple. The case of the Jain temple shows howsuch an edge-city location is important not just forenabling access to a distantiated community of faithcommuters via the motorway system. What we see atthe Jain temple is also a response to the planningcontext and landscape setting of a particular kind ofEnglish edge city, a controlled greenbelt site whosecharacteristics have been integral in the realisation ofthe temple as a potential pilgrimage site.

The site in Potters Bar was found after a protractedsearch for a site in other suburban locations in North-West London that would have placed the temple closerto clusters of the Jain population. Planning permissionwas granted initially in 1979, despite the location in thegreenbelt, because of a commitment to restoring listedsites and because of the recognition of the need for areligious centre for the UK Jain community. Whileother sites were more obviously located in suburbanresidential areas, the semi-rural setting of Hook Houseoffered the Oshwal community the opportunity tobuild a new temple on so-called ‘virgin land’, providingthe possibility that the temple could become an ‘offi-cial’ pilgrimage site or ‘tirth’ for the European and glo-bal Jain community after a century of worship there. InIndia Jain tirths are situated in silent and serene greensurroundings, enabling meditation away from day-

to-day life. The pastoral landscape gardens at HookHouse thus became integral to the realisation of thenew temple. The temple is a complex response to thesite and to the planning regulations in force. Planningregulations required that the top of the temple couldnot be higher than the existing building on the site, sothe temple is sunken in an ornamental garden thatincorporates Jain religious symbols and statues. Withinthe garden are 52 eucalyptus trees to represent the 52villages in western Gujarat from which the majority ofthe Oshwal community traces its ancestry. The templeitself is a spectacular recreation of Jain temples inIndia, made from Indian marble and red sandstone,with pieces carved by craftsmen in India and assembledat the temple site. An Indian architect was employedto complete designs, source materials, manage carvingof the stones, their shipment to the UK and recruit-ment of skilled craftsmen to assemble the pieces onsite, working alongside a British architectural firm,Ansell and Bailey, who were employed to negotiateplanning and building regulations. In addition to com-promises related to the religiously approved symmetryof the temple, other structural and building changeswere made to address weather and climate conditions.The form of the Shikharbandhi Jain Deraser in PottersBar, as the first purpose-built temple with the potentialto be an authentic Jain ‘tirth’ or pilgrimage site, is thuslinked to the possibilities of its location in the green-belt of the edge city. The development of a new templewithin a pastoral landscape suggests an engagementwith the possibilities of this semi-rural site to create anew hybrid form of Jain temple that works within thetraditions of the English landscape garden and therestrictions of the greenbelt. Like St Thomas’ church,the Jain temple – often narrated as an ‘authentic recre-ation’ of an Indian temple – responds to the distinc-tiveness of its edge-city site.

While successful in developing the site to meet theneeds of the Oshwal community in the UK, and inparticular creating a Jain cosmological space in anEnglish setting, these developments have not occurredwithout compromises to the religiously approved sym-metry of the temple, subtle structural and buildingchanges to accommodate local climate, or shifts inusage to accommodate local community sentiments.At the same time, what is clear is the political signifi-cance of this landscape. The English ‘country’ land-scape in the green belt embodies a shared publicdiscourse on appropriate amenities and neighbourli-ness that was seen by some to be violated by thechange in land use at Hook House. There was sus-tained opposition from some local residents to thelocation of the temple in Potters Bar. What recurs inthese challenges is both a shared and privileged dis-course of amenity shaped by tropes of the Englishlandscape and a suggestion from some that the reli-




gious activities of the Oshwal ‘belong’ elsewhere inthe (implicitly racialised) multicultural city.

Like some North American suburban mega-churches, the edge-city location provides a means ofaccommodating a dispersed and mobile faith commu-nity. The edge-city location adjacent to London’sarterial motorway the M25, with ample parking,accommodates a regional community of ‘faith com-muters’ since a large proportion of the UK’s 30 000Jain community lives in north, north-west and north-east London (Sanghrajka, Institute of Jainology, per-sonal communication 2007). The location also enablesvisitors from Jain communities in Luton, Wellingbor-ough and from further afield. Jains do not have a tra-dition of large sites of collective worship and Jainismdoes not promote mass worship. Temples are visitedfor individual worship to renew spiritual commitmentand religious practice and ‘seek blessing’ during spe-cial occasions such as marriages or births. For large-scale festivals, such as Paryushan and Dash LakshanaParva and for weddings, the assembly rooms are used.While not sharing the characteristics of mass worshiptypical of suburban mega churches, like them theOshwal Association relies on electronic networks tolink the wider community, but has also begun toengage with some of the challenges of suburban,mobile faith communities. Plans are therefore underdiscussion about the opportunities for extending thisexpansive site to provide more fixed communal hous-ing for the elderly. In recent years the temple has alsobecome a significant focus in creating a Jain diasporicidentity. The Archbishop of Canterbury’s visit in May2010 reinforced its significance as the representativesite for Jainism in the UK, an important moment ingenerating visibility for this faith. Notably this sym-bolic centrality works not through spatial positioningat the heart of the Jain community, but through itspositioning in regional and transnational networks,and through its adaptation to the distinctive landscapeof the outer London green belt.

Conclusions: faith and suburbia

These examples are of course far from exhaustive ofthe geographies of religion in modern London’s sub-urbia, but they do highlight key dimensions of therelationship between faith and suburban spaces. Whathas developed is far removed from the undifferenti-ated mass society imagined and feared by critics. Thechurch-making initiatives of the early twentieth cen-tury, as exemplified by the work of the Forty-FiveChurches Fund and The Rock, were trying to build astructure of highly localised parishes in suburban Lon-don, combining a renewal of faith with an inclusivelocal associational culture; in short to build broadlybased church-centred communities. What has devel-

oped is a much more complex geography of suburbanfaith spaces, an overlapping mosaic of different units,scales, constituencies and congregations. This is nei-ther a pure space of places nor a pure space of flows.This is a geography that is hard to map, a mixture ofsome intensely localised faith groups, some more tra-ditional parishes, local mosques and temples andother extended faith networks increasingly dependenton car journeys and other forms of faith commuting,all set within wider networks that reach beyond Lon-don. This complicated geography has developed inpart through changes in religious identity in outerLondon, most obviously in the growth of diasporicreligions, but also through the growing significance ofnew forms of Christianity, both inside and outside theestablished churches, that have broken with tradi-tional models of parish communities.

At the same time, this geography of faith can alsobe seen as the result of different responses to thechallenges of secularisation. Instead of a ‘sea ofunfaith’ washing over suburban society, what hasdeveloped are quite specific responses that drawupon distinctive elements of modern suburbia. Wehave suggested here three such geographies: semi-detached faith, ethnoburb faith and edge-city faith asintersecting forms that draw out different dimensionsof the relationships between faith, space and mobili-ties. These are intended not as a model but as sig-nalling ways of learning from (outer) London and asa framework for further empirical analysis of subur-ban faith spaces. These geographies draw attentionto the complexities of the relationship between faith,secularisation and space in suburbia. Justin Wilfordhas justifiably questioned general claims that we aremoving into a ‘post-secular’ age and called for arenewed and critical understanding of the nature ofthe secular; however, his chosen geographical meta-phor is of archipelagos of faith surrounded by seasof secular culture (Wilford 2010). There is dangerthat this metaphor revives the older antimonies ofThe Rock, of faith spaces as defensive refuges fromthe threatening waters of suburban materialism. Ouranalysis of faith in modern London demands differ-ent interpretations, with relevance to the study ofother suburban places. This is a geography of over-lays of different faiths (and indeed different secular-isms), and of intermeshing and sometimesinterconnecting networks.

There are significant lessons here about the geogra-phy of religion, but tellingly also about the nature ofsuburban space. It shows that there can be no straight-forward homology between suburban spaces and secu-lar materialism, and that religion is an element in awider account that sees the potential for creativity,flexibility and innovation in suburban worlds. What wealso argue is that any study of the suburban needs to



reach beyond the straight-jacketing assumptions aboutits nature that are still too often made, towardsdetailed analysis of its complexity. This echoesVaughan et al.’s (2009) call for a new theorisation ofthe suburban coming out of detailed examination ofits characteristics. What we argue, however, is that anew understanding of suburbia must reach beyondstudy of built form, morphology and travel flows, toinclude the geographies of organisations, material cul-tures, practices, beliefs and feelings. A full theorisa-tion of the suburban needs to address not just the waythese take place in suburbia, but to think about howthey are both responses to the developing character ofsuburbs, and also in turn how they remake them.

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to community members at StThomas Church, Hanwell, West London Islamic Cen-tre and Shikharbandhi Jain Deraser, Potters Bar,London for their help and assistance. Thanks to MilesIrving for drawing the map. Earlier versions of thispaper were presented at the Annual Conference ofthe Association of American Geographers in Boston(2008), and at the universities of Hofstra (New York),British Columbia, Toronto, and UCL. We are gratefulfor comments from audiences in all those places andto the referees for their suggestions in the revision ofthe paper. We would also like to thank Alison Bluntfor her guidance and encouragement.

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