Community History
Greater Manchester holds two of the most substantial British Bangladeshi communities in the north of England. In Manchester city, the story begins in 1949 with Muhammad Abdul Matin Chowdhury of Jagannathpur, Sylhet, who settled in the city, helped found Shahjalal Mosque in Rusholme, established what community history calls Manchester's first Bengali grocery, and built the associational life that sustained the community through the 1971 Liberation War and beyond. The Bangladeshi community in Manchester remains concentrated in Longsight today. Twenty miles to the north-east, Oldham holds the largest Bangladeshi population in Britain outside London: 21,754 people at the 2021 Census, 8.99 per cent of the borough. Most came from Biswanath and Nabiganj in Sylhet, taking work in the cotton mills first and later moving into restaurants and other businesses as the mills closed. In Westwood, a cluster of six streets became "Bangla Para," the Bangladeshi neighbourhood, and in 1997 the community inaugurated the first permanent Shahid Minar erected outside Bangladesh.
Cotton, Catering and the First Arrivals
Workers from Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, first came to Manchester and Greater Manchester in the late 1940s and 1950s, following the same industrial labour demand and kinship networks that brought Sylhetis to Bradford, Birmingham and London: one man's journey became a chain. In Manchester city, the earliest settlers concentrated in Longsight and Rusholme, neighbourhoods already populated by South Asian workers. In Oldham, the pull was cotton: the town had been the most productive cotton-spinning town in the world, and its mills needed workers willing to take the hot, dusty shifts that others declined.
An important distinction runs through the entire history of Greater Manchester: Rusholme's celebrated "Curry Mile" on Wilmslow Road, its oldest restaurants, and many of its founding institutions were established by Pakistani migrants, not Bangladeshis. Sanam, the Curry Mile's oldest surviving restaurant, was founded in 1963 by Haji Abdul Ghafoor Akhtar, who was Pakistani. Manchester's Bangladeshi institutional life developed separately, centred on Shahjalal Mosque in Rusholme and the associations and welfare organisations of Longsight. The University of Manchester's Bangladesh Society traces its origins to 1958.
Muhammad Abdul Matin Chowdhury: Manchester's Founding Pioneer
Muhammad Abdul Matin Chowdhury was born in 1929 in the village of Sreeramshi, Jagannathpur, Sylhet, and entered the United Kingdom in 1949, making him among the earliest Sylheti settlers in Manchester. He first lived in Birmingham before settling in Manchester, and went on to run the Oriental Restaurant on Oxford Road and the Motijheel in Deansgate. In 1967 he opened the Asian Food Store on Stockport Road, described in community history as Manchester's first Bengali grocery. In 1971 he established Sylhet Travel Services on Oxford Road, described as the oldest surviving Bangladeshi travel agency in the United Kingdom.
Matin Chowdhury also built Manchester's Bangladeshi associational infrastructure. He was one of the founding trustees who in 1967 purchased the building at 1A Eileen Grove, Rusholme, which became Shahjalal Mosque and Islamic Centre, named at a public meeting in May 1975. He founded the East Pakistan Muslim Society, which grew first into the Lancashire Bangladesh Association and then the Greater Manchester Bangladesh Association (GMBA). He was instrumental in bringing Habib Bank to Manchester in 1969 and in acquiring the Longsight "Bangladesh House" community centre in 1983. He died on 19 September 1985, aged 56, and is buried in Sreeramshi.
The 1971 Liberation War: Greater Manchester's Contribution
When Operation Searchlight began on the night of 25 March 1971, Greater Manchester's Bengali community mobilised alongside the national effort. A Manchester Action Committee was among the 110 or more committees formed across Britain under the Steering Committee for the People's Republic of Bangladesh, chaired by Justice Abu Sayeed Chowdhury. In Manchester, Muhammad Abdul Matin Chowdhury founded the Lancashire Awami League; in Oldham, Haji Tasarul Ali personally raised £1,500 for the Shangram independence fund. Across Greater Manchester, men who had left their villages in Sylhet a decade earlier watched BBC broadcasts from their shared houses in Longsight and Westwood, collected money and sent it to the fighters.
The Greater Manchester Bangladesh Association (GMBA) was formed in 1971, initially operating from a room at Shahjalal Mosque, later acquiring premises at 19a Birch Lane, Longsight. For the first generation, 1971 transformed the meaning of their time in Britain: they had come as workers, and they stayed as citizens of a new nation whose independence they had helped finance from factory wages and restaurant takings. The Oldham Bangladesh Association and the Oldham Awami League were both founded in the same year.
Oldham: Bangla Para and the Cotton Mills
Oldham holds the largest Bangladeshi population in the United Kingdom outside London: 21,754 people at the 2021 Census, 8.99 per cent of the borough, concentrated in Westwood, Coldhurst, Glodwick and Coppice. Most Oldham Bengalis trace their origins to Biswanath and Nabiganj in Sylhet, districts that continue to shape community networks and local politics. The settlement grew from around 500–600 Bengalis when Haji Tasarul Ali arrived in 1967 to around 15,000 by the early 2000s, and 21,754 at the 2021 Census.
The cotton mill was the engine of Oldham's Bangladeshi settlement. Men came for mill work from the 1960s, living in shared housing. As Bangla Stories testimonies record, "fifteen people would live in one house," hot-bedding across shifts, while wages far exceeded what was available in Sheffield or Birmingham. The six-street cluster in Westwood became known as "Bangla Para": 99 per cent Bengali, with its own mosque and community centre. As the mills closed through the 1980s and the last Oldham mill shut in 1998, the community moved into the restaurant and rice trade. In 2008 local Bangladeshi businessmen purchased the 1881 Anchor Mill and converted it to a bazaar and cash-and-carry, a visible marker of the community's shift from mill workers to business owners.
The community's most visible monument stands in Oldham town centre: a permanent Shahid Minar, built on the model of Dhaka's Central Shaheed Minar and inaugurated on 5 October 1997, the first permanent Shahid Minar erected outside Bangladesh. The campaign was led from 1990 by the Oldham Bangladeshi Youth Association; Oldham Council provided a grant of £28,000. A Shapla roundabout followed in 2000. Cllr Abdul Jabbar MBE has represented Coldhurst ward since 1994 and became the youngest-ever Mayor of Oldham in 2004.
Oldham: Associations, Wards and the Trials of 2001
The Bangla Stories oral history project, run by the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge, has documented Oldham as home to one of Britain's oldest Bangladeshi communities. At the 2001 Census, Bangladeshis made up 4.5 per cent of the borough , around 9,900 people , with nearly half (49 per cent) living in Coldhurst ward and further concentrations in Werneth, Alexandra and St Mary's. The community built its own institutions as it grew: the Pakistan Welfare Association, renamed the Bangladesh Welfare Association after independence, followed by the Bangladesh Youth Association and the Women's Association.
In May 2001, violence in Glodwick involving some 500 people caused £1.4 million in damage, and Oldham became national news. Official narratives blamed "parallel lives" and self-segregation, but the community accounts recorded by Bangla Stories tell a different story: it was the National Front's decision to demonstrate in Oldham that ignited tensions between Asian residents and the police. For a community that had spent four decades building mills livelihoods, mosques and associations, the riots were a trial , and the testimonies preserved by Bangla Stories ensure its own version of those events is part of the record.
Women, Politics and the Ananna Legacy
On 17 September 1986, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah, a 13-year-old Bangladeshi boy, was murdered in a racist attack at Burnage High School in Manchester. His mother, Fatima Nehar Begum, described by the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre as one of the first Bangladeshi women to live in Manchester, responded not only by fighting for justice but by building a memorial school in her home village in Sylhet, opened in 1996 and enrolling approximately 1,000 pupils by 2016.
In 1989, the Manchester Bangladeshi Women's Organisation was founded, catalysed partly by Bangladeshi mothers' concerns in the aftermath of the Burnage murder. Co-founded by Dr Shireen Sobhani and Nurjahan Ahmad and based in Longsight, it was renamed Ananna in 1999 ("unique woman" in Bengali). The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah RACE Centre and Education Trust, founded at Manchester Central Library in 1999, holds the papers of Ananna and of the South Asian community more broadly, and is the principal archive for the community's history in the city.
In politics, Luthfur Rahman OBE, born in 1976 into a Bengali Muslim family from Jagannathpur, Sunamganj, whose father Surabur Rahman migrated to Longsight in 1968, became in May 2008 the first person of Bangladeshi or Bengali origin to be elected to Manchester City Council, representing Longsight ward. He served as deputy leader of the council from 2021 to 2024 and received an OBE in 2020. He should not be confused with Lutfur Rahman, the elected mayor of Tower Hamlets, a different person from Balaganj, Sylhet.