Southall, London

Southall is a district of the London Borough of Ealing, in west London, and the best-known "Little Punjab" of Britain. Ealing is one of the ten local authorities in England and Wales with the most Sikh residents, according to the Office for National Statistics' analysis of the 2021 census.

Key moments

• 1958 to 1967: Sikhs who met in homes held programmes at Shackleton Hall and then at 11 Beaconsfield Road. Two groups merged in 1964 as Sri Guru Singh Sabha Southall and opened a first gurdwara at The Green. In April 1967 the Khanda was brought from Darbar Sahib, Amritsar, for amrit parchar, and a former dairy was converted into a gurdwara within weeks.
• 4 June 1976: Gurdip Singh Chaggar, an 18-year-old Sikh engineering student, was stabbed to death by a gang of white youths. The Southall Youth Movement had formed by 7 June. Two white teenagers were found guilty of manslaughter in May 1977 and jailed for four years each.
• April 1979: the National Front held an election meeting at Southall Town Hall on 23 April, which the Youth Movement opposed. The death of the teacher Blair Peach that month belongs to the same history, and no one went to trial for it.
• June 1984, after Sri Harmandir Sahib was attacked: the Khalistan Council was founded in Southall under Jagjit Singh Chohan, with its headquarters in London. On 10 June about 25,000 Sikhs from across Britain marched from Hyde Park to the Indian High Commission, in central London.
• 30 March 2003: the Sabha opened its new gurdwara on Havelock Road, inaugurated, it says, by Prince Charles. Its own figures are a main hall for up to 3,000, langar for up to 20,000 meals a week, and over 15,000 worshippers and visitors weekly. It calls itself the leading gurdwara outside India, and we found no independent ranking.
• 7 November 2021: the second UK phase of Sikhs for Justice's Khalistan referendum was held at gurdwaras in Southall and Gravesend. Organisers claimed more than 10,000 voters; the figure was not independently confirmed.

Today: Southall is where British Sikhs gather for worship, for the Panth's causes since 1984 and for the memory of racist violence in the 1970s.