After 10 years living abroad Tarquin Hall wanted to return to his native London. Lured by his nostalgia for a leafy suburban childhood spent in south-west London he returned with his Indian-born American fiancee in tow. But priced out of the housing market they found themselves living not in a townhouse oozing Victorian charm but in a squalid attic above a Bangladeshi sweatshop on London's Brick Lane. A grimy skylight provided the only window on their new world—a filthy noisy street where drug dealers and prostitutes peddled their wares and tramps urinated on the pavements. Yet as Hall got to know Brick Lane he discovered beneath its unlovely surface an inner world where immigrants and asylum seekers struggle to better themselves and dream of escape. Salaam Brick Lane is a journey of discovery by an outsider in his own native city.
