BY THE TIME THIS ARTICLE IS PUBLISHED, London’s India Club will have closed. It’s been a well-kept secret for years. On the Strand, squeezed between a cafe and a newsagent, is a small door bearing the sign of the Hotel Strand Continental. If you walked up two flights of narrow stairs, you entered another world. The decor was frozen in time in the 1950s. On the sunflower-yellow walls hung black-and-white photographs of prominent pro-independence Indian politicians. The Indian food tasted like it was home-cooked. You ate on Formica tables placed so close together that you could overhear conversations – perhaps between employees at India House, maybe a university student meeting their parents, a visiting tourist from India or a member of the Indian diaspora.
In 2019, the National Trust’s exhibition here, ‘A Home Away from Home’, explained how, following the 1948 Nationality Act, citizens from Commonwealth states were invited to work in Britain to help regenerate the postwar economy. Thousands of south Asians came and, to help them settle into their new home, the India League – a British-based organisation that had campaigned for Indian independence in the 1900s – created a welcoming and inclusive space: the India Club, established in 1951.
Among the founder members were prominent pro-independence politicians including Krishna Menon, the first Indian High Commissioner to the UK; some say that Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, was one, too. The purpose of the India Club was “to promote and further Indo-British friendship”. It was intended to be non-political, with a broad membership. In those early days of immigration from the subcontinent, finding Indian food in London wasn’t easy – but at the India Club, you could eat dosas, sambhar and butter chicken. It was also an important social space at a time when there were hardly any cultural establishments catering for south Asians. In the 1950s and early 60s, racial discrimination wasn’t illegal in the UK, and Indians and Pakistanis – along with others considered non-white – could be turned away from social clubs, pubs, even restaurants.
Oral histories collected for the National Trust exhibition are now kept at the British Library. They include the story of Gyanaprakasam Joseph. He arrived in Britain in 1957, and worked at the India Club until 1993, becoming head waiter – it was his onl
