This week Monica Ali was behind the blue shutters of her Portuguese second home, relaxing with her family, as discontent among a vocal minority in the Bangladeshi community boiled over into an explicit threat to block filming of her successful first novel, Brick Lane.
The film-makers have taken the threat seriously enough to abandon filming further scenes in Brick Lane itself, the narrow east London street which has been one of the most diverse in the capital for centuries – a sanctuary to successive waves of immigrants, including Huguenot silk weavers and Jewish refugees, where a Christian church became a synagogue and then a mosque, now lined with the curry houses, sweetshops and silk warehouses which have become tourist attractions.
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