Altab Ali Park: The White Chapel and a Turning Point
Why is it significant?
Walk through the iron arch into the little garden of Altab Ali Park. Lawns, plane trees, a few old gravestones leaning by the walls... and on one side a small white monument of slim pillars, with a red disc standing behind them like a rising sun. This garden is where Whitechapel got its name.
Key Facts
| Place | Altab Ali Park: The White Chapel and a Turning Point |
|---|---|
| Address | Adler Street, London E1 1EE, United Kingdom |
| Geo Coordinates | 51.51620, -0.06850 |
| Part of Walk | Four Waves of Newcomers: Whitechapel, Spitalfields & Brick Lane in London's East End |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk through the iron arch into the little garden of Altab Ali Park. Lawns, plane trees, a few old gravestones leaning by the walls... and on one side a small white monument of slim pillars, with a red disc standing behind them like a rising sun.
This garden is where Whitechapel got its name. A chapel stood here from the thirteenth century, later the parish church of St Mary Matfelon, and it is said that its walls were whitewashed or built of pale stone, so that travellers on the road to Essex called it the white chapel. It was rebuilt several times over the centuries, and finally destroyed by German bombs in the Blitz of 1940. Its ruins were cleared after the war, and the churchyard became a public garden.
On 4 May 1978, the day of local elections, a 25-year-old Bangladeshi clothing worker named Altab Ali was walking home from work along Adler Street, at the edge of this park, when he was stabbed to death in a racist attack by three teenagers. He was one of many victims of racist violence in the East End in those years, but his death became a turning point. Days later, around seven thousand people marched behind his coffin from Whitechapel all the way to Downing Street.
A generation of young British Bangladeshis found their political voice that spring. They organised, they defended their own streets, and they went into local politics, and in 1998 this park was renamed in Altab Ali's memory. The white monument is a smaller copy of the Shaheed Minar in Dhaka, which honours the students shot dead in 1952 for demanding the right to speak Bengali. Every year, on the night of 21 February, crowds gather here to lay flowers at midnight.
A chapel that named a district, a murder that changed it, and a monument to the right to speak your mother tongue, all in one small garden. Carry on east along Whitechapel Road for a couple of minutes, on this same side of the street, to a modest brick building where the most famous bells in the world were made.