Big business in Little Asia

Where is the best sari in London? The smart answer would once have been Southall, Wembley or the curry corridors of Brick Lane, Tooting or Norbury. Not now. The answer lay in Cherie Blair's order for a Nehru suit and Indian tunic for Tony's Indian high-profile peace mission. They came from Babs Mahil "of Upton Park".

Most Londoners, if they have heard of Upton Park, think of West Ham football club on a wet winter evening. Yet Mahil's Chiffons boutique is not alone. Green Street, E7 may be on the far side of the River Lea and at the "wrong" end of the District Line. But it lies in the heart of the new Asian Bond Street, some 300 shops stretching for a mile north of the football club.

London is again on the move. Away from the familiar enclaves of the City and Westminster, from the "Ns" and the "SWs", is a London of which most readers of this article know little. It is a city they never visit, with names known only on Tube maps. Its high streets have been drained by shopping malls. Its communities have been destroyed by architects with tower blocks. But the flood of Asian migrants that arrived in the 1970s and 1980s has transformed many of these districts into a mini subcontinent.

This week we were told that one in 10 London businesses is now in Asian ownership. Visit Green Street and you can see why. Until 25 years ago, the area was as English as you get. West Ham United was a famously, sometimes notoriously, cockney side. It had moved up from the old ironworks in Canning Town in 1904, to an area being developed for City clerks using the new trams and District Line into London.

Green Street is the length of Oxford Street, a full mile from Barking Road to Romford Road. It is now lined with Asian shops. Were it not for the roof gables and bargeboards, it might be a street in Bombay or New Delhi. A "pie, mash and eel" stall clings on valiantly near the Tube station, amid halal butchers, money changers and "Al Madina" cafes. Green Street makes Southall seem as English as Cheltenham. This is true Little Asia.

The neighbourhood seems remarkably multicultural. There is a substantial Afro-Caribbean community. The back streets teem with temples and mosques, Pentacostalists and Salvationists. Ask the dominant ethnic origin and the answer is firmly "Asian", whether the language is Hindi, Gujerati or whatever. For good measure the area is "Upton Park", not West or East Ham or Forest Gate. Green Street is free of the gangsterism of Tower Hamlets and the West London enclaves. Its "families" are for real. Visit the Mahil establishment, or any other Green Street shop, and you meet mother, father, sister, aunt. Walk down the street with the local councillor, Harvinder Virdee, and you do not shift continents or cultures. You recall a time when a London politician was recognised by his constituents every few yards.

Green Street's staples are gold and fabrics. The morningand afternoon price fixingon the London Gold Exchange is chalked up along the street. But the street trades; it does not make. Upton Park is a classic "glocalised" economy. Order an outfit here and the design with your measurements goes online to a factory in Delhi or Bombay, to be made up and Fedexed back to London within days.

I asked traders why they did not use factories in England. The reply was always the same: "Minimum wage and working-time directive." These people must compete globally. Why use a Whitechapel or Leicester sweatshop when the internet opens lines to cheap labour in India? "If a bank or a call centre can trade from Bangalore," said one shop owner, "why not clothes from Delhi?" The Blairs may have thought they were patronising ethnic London. Their suits were made in India at hourly rates that would appal the TUC and Brussels - yet keeping hundreds of Indians in work.

These Asians are colonising London's inner suburbs with a middle class that long ago deserted them. Like Mr Virdee, many residents hail from Kenya or Uganda. The expulsion of Asians from East Africa has been a commercial salvation for London. Like the East European Jews who fled the pogroms a century ago, the Asians brought education and enterprise to the East End. They worked hard to move out, at least as far as Upton Park. Even today, as they gaze along bustling Green Street, they talk of moving on to Chadwell Heath or Romford. The magnetic pull of residential London is still radial.

The Borough of Newham was at first stunned by the capitalist explosion in its backstreets. Why not in the "development hub" planned by the borough's leader, Sir Robin Wales, for the borough's heart at Stratford? The answer can only lie in the flexibility of Upton Park's miles of modest, privately-owned terraces. These businesses need back doors and street frontages. They cannot adapt tower blocks or big redevelopments. They demand the informality to which Victorian London so readily lends itself.

Newham now recognises its golden goose. Green Street's Asians are in active partnership with the borough. If you want to turn a twostorey terraced house into a blaring sari boutique with hair-dressing salon, Mecca travel agency and bhel-poori snack bar, you will have no planning trouble. The thesis that Newham's bourgeois renaissance might ripple out from the Stratford triangle seems increasingly wide of the mark.

Green Street's commercial and communal dynamism is surely a firmer base for renewal than the thundering shopping malls of the North Circular. It is ironic that the biggest single investor in Newham is not a multiple store or government office block. It is Terence Brown's West Ham football club. The castellated entrance of its £37 million stadium towers not over Stratford. It towers over Upton Park.

Chiffons at one end, West Ham at the other. This is a London to watch.