"The India Club briefly transported new arrivals back to their homeland"

BY THE TIME THIS ARTICLE IS PUBLISHED, London’s India Club will have closed. It’s been a well-kept secret for years. On the Strand, squeezed between a cafe and a newsagent, is a small door bearing the sign of the Hotel Strand Continental.

- KAVITA PURI

If you walked up two flights of narrow stairs, you entered another world. The decor was frozen in time in the 1950s. On the sunflower-yellow walls hung black-and-white photographs of prominent pro-independence Indian politicians. The Indian food tasted like it was home-cooked. You ate on Formica tables placed so close together that you could overhear conversations – perhaps between employees at India House, maybe a university student meeting their parents, a visiting tourist from India or a member of the Indian diaspora.

In 2019, the National Trust’s exhibition here, ‘A Home Away from Home’, explained how, following the 1948 Nationality Act, citizens from Commonwealth states were invited to work in Britain to help regenerate the postwar economy. Thousands of south Asians came and, to help them settle into their new home, the India League – a British-based organisation that had campaigned for Indian independence in the 1900s – created a welcoming and inclusive space: the India Club, established in 1951.