Tower Hamlets breaks new ground as cricket taps into East London's grassroots

Towers Hamlets in East London is one of the most densely populated boroughs in England. It's one of the most socially deprived as well, with more than a third of its 320,000 population comprising the British Bangladeshi community that first moved to the area back in the 1970s.

Last week that community, and the area at large, was presented with a slice of sporting infrastructure that has been several decades in the making. An eight-strip cricket square - unveiled by Mayor Lutfur Rahman at the eastern end of London's historic Victoria Park and set to be ready for use in June - is the first fine-turf pitch ever to have been laid in the borough.

With the exception of its neighbour, the City of London, Tower Hamlets is believed to be the last borough in the whole of England to gain access to such a facility. There are three Non-Turf Pitches (NTPs) in Victoria Park - weather-beaten strips of tarmac and synthetic carpet that are in near permanent use throughout the summer months and, as often as not, through the off-season too, with the keenest players unafraid to dodge round football goalposts to get their fix whenever possible.

But there's never been an investment in the borough quite like this. The new home ground of Tower Hamlets CC will be a publicly accessible facility, comprising a curated outfield, permanent sightscreens, and even landscaped grass mounds to frame the outfield, thereby encouraging spectators to gather and passers-by to respect the sanctity of what is intended to be more than just another shared patch of ground in one of London's most-popular parks.

"The latent interest in cricket in this borough is second-to-none, but it has been severely undersupplied with both facilities and with traditionally operating cricket clubs," says Josh Knappett, Facilities and Project Lead at Middlesex Cricket in the Community, whose community outreach scheme has been a key driver of this initiative. "This has been a big project that's taken a long time to get here, and we're very excited. This is a site that's going to have a long-lasting impact to grow the game for men, women, boys and girls in this area."

Over the next two years, up to £150,000 is set to be ploughed into cricket in the borough by Towers Hamlets Council and its partners, among them the ECB, Middlesex Cricket in the Community, and London Cricket Trust. That money will go towards such projects as the renovation and expansion of the borough's existing NTPs, as well as a new set of all-weather nets in Stepney Green Park in Bow.

There is, however, an under-current of controversy attached to the project. Mayor Rahman, who turned the first sod at Wednesday's opening ceremony, is currently facing government intervention into what the Guardian recently described as a "toxic and secretive" decision-making culture, having previously been barred from public office for five years after being found guilty of election fraud in 2015.

Nevertheless, Rahman was propelled back to power in 2022 on the strength of his support from within the Bangladeshi community, and irrespective of any wider concerns about his management style, there appears to be broad local consensus that this investment in the borough's cricketers is as essential as it is overdue.

"The club has needed a ground since the day it was founded," Shahidul Alam Ratan, a founder member of Tower Hamlets CC and CEO of the charity Capital Kids Cricket, tells ESPNcricinfo. "We were campaigning since day one, but there was no movement whatsoever, because the council was entirely focused on football. But in the last two decades, cricket has become the most popular sport in Bangladesh, and it's started to shift the interest [in East London]."

Through Capital Kids Cricket, which was founded in 1989 and with whom Middlesex recently entered a two-year schools partnership, Ratan has become a major part of cricket's story in the area. In 2019, he oversaw a Guinness World Record for the largest cricket lesson at a single venue, when scores of local primary schools were invited to Hackney Marshes on the eve of the ODI World Cup. And, in 2020, the Kia Oval was renamed in his honour for 24 hours in recognition of his efforts to keep children active during lockdown.

Now, however, he is hopeful that this proper investment in Tower Hamlets can unlock the full potential of cricket in East London, not least thanks to the full application of its Clubmark-accredited status, which offers the sort of safeguarding guarantees that cannot be replicated by other more ad-hoc teams in the local area.

"A lot of people play cricket in Victoria Park in the summer, but we don't have that safe environment for young people, or for women and girls to come and play," Ratan says. "If, as a club, and as a local authority, we can offer a controlled zone, and a safe space, that will be a game-changer for the local community."

The growth of cricket's popularity in Tower Hamlets hasn't just been limited to the Bangladeshi community. The Victoria Park Community Cricket League (VPCCL) takes place on the existing NTPs, and plays host to a hugely diverse range of teams, including across its nascent women's competition, while the thriving North-East London Cricket League (NELCL) takes place at weekends across the council-maintained turf pitches of neighbouring Hackney, albeit with minimal oversight at county or ECB level.

However, with the ECB's recognition that between 30-40% of recreational cricketers in the UK are South Asian, there can be no denying the extent to which the Bangladeshi community is Tower Hamlets' driving force. What's more, harnessing that potential is recognised as a vital means for English cricket to address the many criticisms that were laid out in last year's damning report by the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC).

One of the longest-standing complaints is that county age-group pathways have been notoriously difficult for minority ethnic players to penetrate, with British Asians representing just 5% of the cricketers at the top level of the men's game. And while none of the local participants have yet progressed to professional level, Ratan estimates that some 30 former Tower Hamlets players have already gone on to forge coaching careers within cricket. These include Shakeel Ahmed, who worked at Middlesex for five years before returning as development manager at Capital Kids Cricket, and Tanvir Ahamed, who was named Middlesex's coach of the year in 2022.

"To my knowledge, there aren't many clubs in Middlesex, or probably even nationally, that have had the same level of engagement for ongoing careers within cricket," Knappett says. "They've had a phenomenal track record of players coming through, then staying within the game, and continuing to give back to their local community."

As for the wider interest in the sport, that was made abundantly clear two summers ago, when neighbours Essex hosted three ODIs between Bangladesh and Ireland at Chelmsford - half an hour's drive up the very A12 that backs onto Victoria Park - and were inundated with some of the most passionate support imaginable at an ostensibly neutral venue.

Nevertheless, it is still early days for the full harnessing of East London's potential. Up until now, the region's most talented players have relied almost entirely on luck to be noticed, and even then - as was the case for Essex's Jahid Ahmed, a graduate of the University of East London and first British Bangladeshi to play county cricket - that was not sufficient for them to be able to reach their potential. Jahid's exposure of the racist abuse he suffered between 2005 and 2009 was a key factor in Essex being fined £100,000 by the Cricket Discipline Commission earlier this year, at the culmination of a lengthy independent inquiry.

Middlesex's own shortcomings have avoided quite the same levels of scrutiny, although the gauche comments of their former chair Mike O'Farrell at the DCMS hearings in 2022 seemed to epitomise county cricket's long-standing failure to address the needs of the game's marginalised communities. In the wake of the ICEC report, however, there has been a renewed drive towards collaboration - not least when it comes to Essex's and Middlesex's invisible boundary, which runs almost directly behind the eastern boundary of Tower Hamlets' new pitch.

As Ratan acknowledges, this historic divide has been "a bit challenging" when it comes to delivering cricket across East London's green spaces, with parts of Hackney Marshes and the Olympic Park falling under Essex's jurisdiction. However, the relationship between those two traditional counties will become increasingly important to London's cricket community in the coming years, especially now that Essex has been chosen ahead of Middlesex to be the region's Tier 1 representative in the new Women's County competition from 2025 onwards.

"Clearly, we will still aspire to Tier 1 status in 2029," Knappett says. "But ultimately it's irrelevant whether players progress on the Middlesex side or the Essex side, because whatever's right for those girls is something that we're happy to support. It's about enabling the game to thrive, and to give talented players the optimal provision to be professional cricketers."

It may yet take several more years for this investment to come to full fruition, but for the first time in forever, Tower Hamlets has the recognition that its enthusiasm has long been crying out for.