‘Camdenwalla’ tells the story of a helpline set up to protect South Asian restaurant workers

Take a short walk from Euston Station towards Warren Street and you’ll hit Drummond Street, an unassuming row of Victorian terraced houses with enough Indian and Bengali restaurants to rival Brick Lane.

Despite lacking the sheer scale and vibrancy of Tower Hamlets’ “Banglatown”, for many this is London’s Little India.

It was here that waves of South Asian families arriving in the capital from post-Partition India, Pakistan and Bangladesh started businesses and gave their community a taste of home as they made new lives as Londoners. But the successful assimilation of these communities cannot be divorced from the real history of strife and division, particularly in the face of racist violence.

Head a little further, towards Warren Street Tube station, and on the corner of Drummond Street, you’ll find a converted pub building, now the Camden People’s Theatre on Hampstead Road. This also happens to be the place where volunteers chose to fight back against racist abuse that went ignored or underreported, in what became the Camden Monitoring Project.

It is almost too poetic that the People’s Theatre is now staging a new production which seeks to capture an overlooked part of the borough’s history. Camdenwalla, the debut of playwright Jonny Khan, shares the story of the volunteer-run group set up to help restaurant workers get home safe during rising racist attacks from the National Front and skinhead gangs.

Developed through archival research and the oral histories of Camden’s Bangladeshi community, the play is set over one night in 1994. The choice of year is deliberate: the same year that the 15-year-old Richard Everitt was murdered in the borough by a gang of British Bangladeshis, who were seeking revenge on another White boy.

This is the ambience in which we meet the play’s protagonist, Muhammad (Emmerdale’s Bhasker Patel) as he finishes his restaurant shift to retreat to an unkempt office. He has a long night ahead of him: fielding phone calls from individuals who are being harassed or attacked, booking transport, monitoring police activity and keeping records of all incidents on file to pass to the authorities, if they need it.

It is a faithful depiction of the real Camden Monitoring Project, a helpline spearheaded by Nasim “Nash” Ali in the 1980s. Ali was later elected to Camden Council and became the borough’s first ever Muslim civic mayor and the first Muslim leader of the council.

Reflecting not just on the height of the National Front and the Skinheads but also police racism, Ali says he and others felt mobilised to defend their community, inspired by the Black Sisters Group and Southall Monitoring Project. “We were the generation that was standing up for ourselves, defending ourselves. If anyone needed us, we could go out and help them get home safely,” he adds.

Ali and others operated out of the Camden Community Relations Office, driving a donated minibus to pick people up. As far-right violence fell away, he and colleagues focused on building positive relationships between the authorities and local youths, founding Camden United — a football team comprising Bangladeshi, Black African Caribbean and White players.

Yet despite “decades of action” to achieve equality, many feel the progress is in danger of being reversed, Ali says, arguing that the real, historic prejudice and violence against minorities is already apparently lost from contemporary conversation around race and policing especially.

“We grew up in the days of two-tier policing when it was targeted at Black and Asian people,” he says. Yet even though Muslims “haven’t heard the P-word in a long time”, he adds that “the fear is really growing among the Muslim community. But we made Camden what it is. I gave blood, sweat and tears for this country,” Ali says.

Camdenwalla is animated by how attitudes towards assimilation differ within the community, particularly between generations, as it confronts race hatred, which it explores through the dynamic between Muhammad and his energetic teenage niece, Alima (Nusrath Tapadar), who is at once far more distrusting of the police and dismissive of her uncle’s keeping records for them.

Contrasting Muhammad’s stoical, bureaucratic approach to community protection with Alima’s more headstrong rejection to the police, the play pitches quiet survival against headstrong protest. For writer and director Khan, the point of Camdenwalla is that both positions are valid.

“My generation, we have the privilege that our older generation has given us to be a bit louder, and stand our ground. I was really interested in this idea that our parents haven’t rested so we can rest,” he says.

Turning to modern parallels, Khan, the child of South Asian immigrants, suggests that contemporary racist language is more passive but the prejudice remains. “You feel it rather than see it, [and] it’s getting worse with politics as people are starting to be more open with racist language. I can never say it’s as bad as it was then, but the need for community care, to be there for one another, was prevalent then and it’s still prevalent now.”

He points to the flying of English flags outside his window due to the World Cup, and the ambiguity this presents to him. “I find it hard to know the intention of things like that. It’s about football, but I can’t help but second guess — is it deeper than that?” Khan says.

“British pride is beautiful, but it’s sometimes a bit scary for people who are seen as not completely British.”

Camdenwalla is playing at the Camden People’s Theatre until Saturday 4 July 2026.

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