Peel Street Mosque situated in Canal Parade, Maria Street, Cardiff; was the first purpose built mosque in Wales. Built in 1947. In 1988 it was demolished and redeveloped. The original mosque is illustrated in the adjacent Multicultural Crossroads building, 1 Maria Street, and other descriptions exist in records of the Docks area. It was a white painted rendered building with a small dome and minarets, looked charming and traditional.

The new, brick built building has a name stone inscribed:
'established 1935 constructed 1947' See NPRN 801337 for full description.

Considerable redevelopment in the area generally has taken place; OS NRG reference relates to the new building, it is not necessarily exactly the same site.

The Peel Street Mosque was Wales's first purpose-built mosque and the third in Britain after Woking (1869) and Fazl, Southfield (1925). The mosque's early building chronology has been established by David Webb and Shahed Saleem.

The mosque began as three terraced houses, 17-19 Peel St, purchased in the 1936 by the mission of Sheikh al-Hakimi, a charismatic Yemeni preacher. Planning permission was given on 11 November 1938 for a new purpose-built mosque designed by Osborne V. Webb, the Cardiff architect. The Peel Street site was destroyed in an air raid on Cardiff Docks in 2 January 1941, probably before the new mosque was completed. A temporary mosque housed in wartime Tarran and Maycrete huts was then constructed behind a screen wall formed from the front elevation of the bombed-out houses. An Imperial War Museum photograph (IWM D 15317) shows the opening on 16 July 1943 by Sheikh Hafiz Wahba, Minister for Saudi Arabia, in front of the distinctive screen wall with latticed windows and a full-height pointed doorway.

The temporary buildings were replaced in 1946 by a new brick-built and rendered mosque, again designed by Osborne V. Webb. Shahed Saleel describes the mosque as a simple but formal building, with hints of traditional Islamic motifs, without being dominated by them. There was a single-storey white-washed wall on the street front, with an arched entrance doorway. The two-storey mosque behind had corner turrets with small domes. The arrangement of mosque and screen wall perhaps refers to the arrangement in traditional Islamic cities, 'bringing this alternative urban arrangement to a very British terraced street'. Shaheed explains it was a variation on the mosque themes explored at both Fazl and Woking, 'coming at a time when Modernism had not yet taken hold in Britain [but] with Ornamentalism past', the new mosque capturing 'this period of ambiguity before the post-war building boom'. Some forty years later a structural report by R. H. Williams Associates (March 1982) described the mosque as 'dilapidated' and constructed from rendered load-bearing brickwork with a concrete roof. The 'temporary' ancillary buildings (including wash area) were of lightwight timber construction with galvanized steel sheet roofing. The Peel Street mosque was finally demolished and rebuilt in 1988, by which time Tiger Bay had been redeveloped and Peel Street no longer existed. See the entry for Noor El-Islam Mosque (NPRN 801337).

This record was created by RCAHMW’s Welsh Asian Heritage Project (2023–24), funded by the Welsh Government’s Anti-racist Wales Action Plan.

Sources:

(1) RCAHMW blog 12/05/2021. Christopher Catling, 'Wales's first purpose-built mosque': https://rcahmw.gov.uk/waless-first-purpose-built-mosque/ (2) Glamorgan Archives blog (undated). David Webb, 'Peel Street Mosque' : https://glamarchives.wordpress.com/tag/peel-street-mosque/ (3) Mellor, J., & Gilliat-Ray, S. (2013). 'The early history of migration and settlement of Yemenis in Cardiff, 1939–1970: religion and ethnicity as social capital'. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(1), 176–191. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2013.783221 (4) National Library of Wales, R H Williams Associates (Consulting Engineers) Collection, File O2/190 (Mosque, Peel Street, Cardiff, 1977-84). (5) Shahed Saleel, The British Mosque: An Architectural and Social History (Historic England, 2018), pp. 43-56, also Architects' Journal 19 April 2012.