London is often depicted as an unfriendly place riven with community tensions. Usually, such impressions are formed by people who live elsewhere and aren’t familiar with the capital’s neighbourhood everyday lives and the friendships and values that bind them. Sometimes, they result from malign desires to portray the city in an unfavourable light as part of some larger goal. The launch of what its organisers call London’s first “peace zone” serves as a gentle but firm rebuke to such misunderstandings and mischief.
The event took place a week ago, on Sunday 18 January, at St Anne’s Church in Salusbury Road, NW6, in the Queen’s Park area of Brent where it meets the City of Westminster. The idea came from women from the local Jewish and Muslim communities.
Building on walks and talks they have together organised and undertaken during the past, sometimes uneasy, couple of years, the zone seeks to demonstrate interfaith harmony. It does so by encouraging residents and businesses to display of strings of images of doves on he homes and premises.
Around 50 people gathered in the airy reception space at St Anne’s and set about cutting their dove shapes from paper plates or, in some expert cases, constructing origami likenesses of them. Blue Peter-style, a few had been prepared earlier and strung across the entrance. Beneath them, four leading lights behind the initiative obligingly posed so On London could take their picture (above)
Catherine Charles and Caroline Bourne (respectively, second and third from the left) are members of the close-by Brondesbury Park Synagogue and co-founders of local “peace talks” to promote friendship between different faith groups. Aliya Azam (left) is an interfaith advisor from the Al-Khoei Foundation, an international charity with an office on nearby Chevening Road, and head of science at the Al Sadiq and Al Zahra Islamic schools along the road. The Reverend Pete Hopkins (right) of St Anne’s was very happy to be involved as host.
The peace zone has been endorsed by Mustafa Field of Faith Forum for London, an organisation whose aims include, in its words, “facilitating dialogue and good relations between different faith communities and wider society”.
“We’re lucky to be surrounded by temples, synagogues, mosques and churches in Queen’s Park,” he said, “and even more blessed by the people who bring different beliefs, languages and cultures into our everyday lives”.
It was a hyperlocal occasion with the simple yet quietly global objective of bringing people together and spreading the message of togetherness by embracing and celebrating the universal symbol of peace. And it wasn’t only about industrious crafting – there was also cake. Local councillor Neil Nerva was in attendance, too.
With dove production well underway, both Catherine and Aliya expressed the hope that the peace zone idea will be taken up in other places too. Their Instagram suggests they are having some success in their own patch of the city, and building on it, with monthly Queen’s Park “walk and talk” sessions for women, guided by the belief that small acts can indeed change the world.
Follow Dave Hill on Bluesky. All photos by him, with appropriate permissions, except the one of the doves on a front door, which is courtesy of Catherine Charles.
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