Southampton’s Muslim community has a history that begins with the sea. Lascar seamen – the term applied to South Asian, East African and Southeast Asian sailors who crewed British merchant ships – were present in Southampton from at least the mid-nineteenth century, when the steamship routes to India and the Far East required large numbers of trained sailors who were recruited in the ports of the Indian Ocean. The White Star liners that operated from Southampton from 1907 included lascar crew members in their engine room departments, and small communities of settled sailors and their families established themselves in the dockland areas of the city during this period.
The post-war migration of the 1950s and 1960s brought larger numbers of South Asian workers to Southampton, primarily from Pakistan and later Bangladesh, recruited into the catering trade, textile manufacturing and service industries. The community concentrated initially in the Shirley and Portswood areas, where cheap housing was available and where social networks could form around established families and mosques.
The Southernhay Mosque
The mosque at Southernhay Road in Southampton, formally the Medina Mosque, was established in the 1970s and has been the central institution of Southampton’s Muslim community for fifty years. It provides prayer facilities, an Islamic school, welfare services and the social infrastructure that religious communities typically organise around. The mosque has grown with the community; its building was extended and improved multiple times as the congregation expanded.
Southampton currently has around fifteen mosques and Islamic prayer facilities across the city, reflecting both the size of the Muslim population and its internal diversity: the city has Sunni, Shia and Ahmadiyya communities with separate facilities, as well as the Turkish-speaking community centred around its own mosque in the St Denys area. The communities have different origins, different religious practices and different relationships to the city’s institutions.
The Halal Food Scene
The halal food economy in Southampton is substantial and largely invisible to non-Muslim residents unless they are looking for it. The clusters around Portswood and St Mary’s have grocery shops, butchers and restaurants serving Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Somali and Middle Eastern food. The restaurant strip around St Mary’s Street has expanded over the past decade to include Afghan, Yemeni and Syrian food alongside the established South Asian offer.
The student population of the University of Southampton, which includes a significant international cohort with substantial Muslim representation, has supported the expansion of the halal food economy around Portswood. University campuses are often the location where halal food transitions from community provision to mainstream catering, and Southampton follows that pattern. The university catering operation provides certified halal options across multiple outlets.
The community’s history in Southampton – from the lascar sailors to the post-war migrants to the current generation – is inadequately documented in the city’s mainstream historical narrative. The City Archives hold some relevant material and the community itself maintains oral history projects. The story of how Islam came to Southampton is a story about the port, about the global trade routes that made the city, and about how those routes brought people as well as goods.
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