25/10/2026
History of South Asians in Bexley
Bexley was closely connected with the East Indies from the start of the seventeenth century. Local gentry families had made their fortunes in the East Indies. Others were stockholders in the East India Company and their sons worked for the Company in its factories at Surat, Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. Erith acted as a lightering port for Company ships to offload part of their cargo onto barges before carrying on up the Thames to London, or to take on ballast from the nearby pits before proceeding into the deep waters of the Ocean.
The first recorded South Asian to visit Bexley was Thomas Crayford, an Indian aged about 16 years baptised at St Paulinus Church on 4 July 1770. His original name is unknown, and he had taken the Christian name Thomas after St Thomas the Apostle of India and the surname after the local parish. There was a Crayford family in north west Kent in the nineteenth century that might have been descended from him.
In 1838 Jehangeer Nowrojee and Hirjeeboy Merwanjee, two Parsi shipbuilders, passed through Bexleyheath on the their way from London to Chatham. They were collecting building specifications from the Royal Navy, which was commissioning ships from their yards in India. In their memoirs they mentioned that “the ride from London to Chatham by coach is very beautiful: the view from Shooters Hill and from Dartford Hill is very fine”.
In the 1881 a Laskar from Goa, Villier Pereira aged 13, was recorded lodging at the Running Horses Public House in Erith. He was most likely a cabin boy serving on the ships that docked in the nearby harbour. In 1901 Sanger and Sons circus visited Bexley bringing eleven elephants with their Indian mahouts.
The Reverend Pitt Bonarjee, a Bengali Christian writer, married an English woman and moved to Abbey Wood in 1911 and served as pastor of Welling Congregational Church from 1912 to 1918. During and after the First World War some injured Indian troops were treated at The Queen's Hospital in Sidcup. They included Hannah Chef Singh, a 27-year-old driver in the Indian Syce Corps who underwent ground-breaking plastic surgery there between 1919 and 1920.
In 1935 an Indian architect D C Wadhwa designed the modernist houses on Danson Road opposite Danson Lake. About the same time Ahmed Syddique, a Moslem from Calcutta married to an English woman, opened a garage in Danson Road. During the Second World War a friend of his, Dr Asit Chaudhuri, a Hindu from Chittagong, came to Bexleyheath, living in Townley Road for 15 years.
The independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 led to the immigration to Great Britain of part of the Anglo-Indian community as well as some Sikhs, Hindus and Moslems displaced by partition, while the independence of British colonies and protectorates in Africa was followed by immigration of South Asian communities from those countries, notably after the expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972. The independence of Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 led to further immigration from there, particularly from the district of Sylhet. By 1982 there were Indian restaurants operating in both Old Bexley and Crayford.
Today there are vibrant Anglo-Indian, Sikh, Moslem and Hindu communities in Bexley. There is a Guru Nanak Dabar Sikh Temple in Belvedere and Masjid Abu Bakar Mosque in Crayford.
In the 2001 census 6,268 residents identified as South Asian, representing 2.87% of the population.
