Pashtuns in Britain: from lascars to Afghan resettlement

At a glance

• Pashtun men from the Indus plain and the North-West Frontier were working on British ships and in Sheffield's steelworks by the end of the First World War, and some had married local women by 1919 and 1920. [2]

• The 2021 census of England and Wales counted 48,705 people aged three and over whose main language is Pashto, up from 40,277 in 2011. [8, 9]

• Birmingham has the most (6,993), then Bradford (2,754), Barnet (2,173) and Harrow (2,128). Harrow has the highest share of any local authority, 0.84 per cent of residents aged three and over. [8]

• The census counts 84,877 people in England born in Afghanistan. In 2001 it counted 14,481. [4, 10]

• Britain's Pashtuns came by two roads: from the villages of the Indus and the North-West Frontier, from about 1919, and from Afghanistan, mostly after the 1970s. Some of Bokhari's participants said the two groups could not follow each other's Pashto. [2–4]

Men from the Indus on British ships

The earliest Pashtun settlers in Britain came by sea. David Holland, in a Sheffield doctoral thesis of 2019 on the first South Asian settlers of that city, found that the largest and earliest group were Pashtuns from Chhachh, a plain twenty miles long and less than ten wide on the south bank of the Indus in Attock district, and from the neighbouring North-West Frontier. [2] The British India Steam Navigation Company and P&O recruited stokers and deckhands from districts of the Frontier and from Chhachh from the late nineteenth century until at least the 1960s, Holland writes. A P&O advertisement of 1955 imagined the news travelling "up through the arid plains of Pakistan and the district of Mardan" to a village, Zarobi, where a chief serang chose fifty-six men from among his own kin. [2]

The land explains some of the pull. Chhachh holdings were small, and Holland quotes the 1930 gazetteer of Attock district: families of small holders "not infrequently send one of their members to seek employment in Peshawar, Bannu, Kohat or Rawalpindi". A younger son who signed on as a lascar earned more than a landless labourer and could pay for the family's farm to be worked while he was away. [2]

Some men left their ships. Naqibullah, a decorated former seaman from a village in Mansehra district, ran a boarding house from about 1919 at 49 High Street, Poplar, in east London. It was described as "very much frequented by Pathan (Pashtun) sailors, Peshawaris, Chhachhis, and Bangashes." From there men moved on to Glasgow, Liverpool, Cardiff, Hull and the steelworks of Sheffield. [2]

Shazreen Khan, a ship's fireman, jumped ship in Glasgow before 1920, found work as a boiler firer in Sheffield's Attercliffe, and married Florrie Macaloney, a steelworker's daughter from Greenock, in May 1920. His granddaughter Angela Khan told Holland the story in 2014. Nearby lived Sultan Mohamed, a collier from the Chhachh village of Rangoo, and Ahmed Wosman, who had married Constance the year before, probably the first marriage in Sheffield between a native Briton and a South Asian newcomer. [2]

Warris Khan, from Behbudi in Chhachh, arrived around the end of the First World War after service as a lascar and worked at the Brown Bayley steelworks for at least ten years. Holland calls him a central node in the network of Pashtuns in the area: he witnessed his friends' weddings and sometimes led the prayers at Muslim funerals, as he did for Ali Amidulla, a fellow Brown Bayley boiler firer, in March 1931. [2] The men lived in boarding houses and group households that took in kin and fellow villagers. The system, Holland writes, lasted into the early 1970s. [2]

Chains of kin after 1947

Migration after the war followed the same lines. Holland argues that the networks built between the wars carried on without a break into the years after Partition and the arrival of the Windrush. [2] One Sheffield man remembered arriving in Bradford from Attock in 1952 and being fed and clothed by the English wife of a friend's father before moving on to Sheffield. [2] Holland cites Badr Dahya's finding that in the early 1970s most Chhachhi immigrants in Bradford held only one and a quarter to one and a half acres at home. [2]

In the larger picture of Pakistani migration, Pashtuns were a minority. A 2009 report for the government by the Change Institute estimated that 60 to 70 per cent of British Pakistanis came from Mirpur in Kashmir and settled mostly in Birmingham, Bradford and Oldham. In London, it found, the community was more mixed, with comparable numbers of Punjabis, "Pathans" and Kashmiris. [5]

Osman Yousefzada, the designer and artist, grew up in the Pashtun community of Birmingham in the 1980s and 1990s and wrote about it in his memoir The Go-Between (2022). He described the first men: "When men came here in the 60s they were these dapper gentlemen, all looking like movie stars in black and white photographs, clocking in everyday at factories, doing double shifts." Then the factories shut. "These men who worked in foundries and did the jobs that no one wanted to do, couldn't retrain," he said. With time on their hands and their livelihoods gone, he says, they turned to the mosque and to the education of their children. [1]

Sophia Bokhari's 2015 Worcester thesis, on the schooling of children from the families of what she calls North Western Pakistani Pashtuns, worked in five areas: East London, Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester and Oldham. Her participants' families came from villages in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa from before Partition, and she notes that the villagers, rather than the people of Peshawar city, were most of those she met in the inner-city areas she studied. [3] One participant told her what he wanted from teachers: "Teachers who motivate you and care. Teachers who speak Pashto and can teach children how to speak English properly and why they need good grades to succeed in life." [3]

Counting Pashto speakers

British censuses do not ask about ethnicity at the level of Pashtuns, so the usual measure is main language. In 2011 the census of England and Wales counted 40,277 Pashto speakers. [9] In 2021 it counted 48,163 in England and 542 in Wales. [8] The language count leaves out British-born Pashtuns whose main language is English, and it includes Pashto speakers from both Pakistan and Afghanistan, so it is a floor for the community and not its size. For the same reason Ethnologue's figure of at least 87,000 and a 2009 estimate of 100,000 Pashtuns, both quoted by Bokhari, cannot be checked against the census. [3]

The 2021 local figures put Birmingham first (6,993) and Bradford second (2,754), followed by Barnet (2,173), Harrow (2,128), Brent (1,713), Ealing (1,670) and Manchester (1,580). Luton had 753, Sheffield 769 and Slough 597. [8] Between the two censuses Birmingham grew from 6,123 to 6,993 and Manchester from 1,147 to 1,580, while Bradford, which Bokhari found ranked first in England for its share of Pashto speakers in 2011, fell from 3,580 to 2,754. [3, 8] In 2011 inner and outer London together held 15,096. [3]

Afghan-born residents live elsewhere. In 2021 Ealing had the most (7,006), then Hounslow (6,444), Hillingdon (6,324) and Harrow (4,825), with Birmingham fifth at 4,628. [10] The Change Institute's Afghan respondents told it that most Afghans in London are Pashtun, with Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras beside them. James Fergusson's Kandahar Cockney (2005), tabulated in the report, places Pashtuns from Wardak in Brent, Hillingdon and Richmond, from Khost, Zadran and Paghman in Newham, from Logar in Hammersmith and from Kandahar in Ealing. [4]

Afghans from the 1970s

Few Afghans lived in Britain before the 1970s, mostly students, businessmen and diplomats. Some 3,000 refugees came after the coup of 1973 and the Soviet invasion of 1979. [4] The Change Institute counted two peaks in migration, after 1979 and between 1992 and 2001, with a large movement west after the Taliban took Kabul in 1996. [4] Of 238,000 Afghans who sought asylum in Europe between 1994 and 2004, about 15 per cent applied in the UK. [4] The 2001 census found 14,481 Afghan-born people in England, 73 per cent in London. By 2021 the figure was 84,877 in England and 816 in Wales. [4, 10] For the war that began this exodus see the Soviet war and the refugees.

After the Taliban returned in August 2021 the government ran three schemes for Afghans. The Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy, opened in April 2021, was for interpreters and others who had worked for the UK. The Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme opened in January 2022, and a third route, the Afghanistan Response Route, was created in December 2023 after a data leak and kept secret until July 2025. By 30 June 2025 about 35,700 people had been resettled, 53 per cent under the first scheme, 37 per cent under the second and 10 per cent under the third. About half were children. The government closed all three to new applicants in July 2025. [6] The largest numbers went to Crawley, Birmingham and Leeds. [6] The schemes selected people by their work and risk, not by ethnicity, and none of the published figures says how many of those resettled are Pashtun. For the political background see Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021.

Two Pashtos in one mosque

Pashtuns from Pakistan and from Afghanistan are often counted together. Bokhari reports that her participants did not see it that way. They told her the Pashto of Pakistan's north-west and that of Afghanistan are very different, and she describes people who went eagerly to a Friday sermon advertised in Pashto at a local mosque and then could not understand the Afghan Pashto it was delivered in. She adds that many of her participants objected to being called "Afghan" and did not want the word "Pathan" used of them. [3] (On the language, see Pashto dialects and variation.)

The Change Institute found that Afghans at first attended mosques that other communities had built and helped to build. Funeral customs differed enough, and communities were under enough pressure over rites and forms of worship, that Afghans built separate mosques, among them the Afghan mosque in Neasden. [4] The same report found a wide Afghan media in Pashto and Dari, satellite channels, newspapers and websites among them, and a strong regard for the BBC World Service. [4]

Gathering places

Without the village hujra (حجره), the Pashtun settlers made their own meeting places. In the 1920s and 1930s they were the boarding houses of Poplar and Attercliffe, where a man could find kin, work and a funeral prayer. [2] Later they were mosques and associations. The Pak Pashtoon Association (UK) Ltd, registered as a charity on 19 December 2014, runs British Pushtoon House, a community centre on Hob Moor Road in Small Heath, Birmingham. Its stated purposes are a community centre and the advancement of the Muslim faith through prayer meetings, festivals and lectures. [11] In 2010 BBC News quoted Lajbar Khan of the Birmingham Pashtun Association speaking for two of its members. [14]

Osman Yousefzada saw another side. In his Birmingham childhood the women created "parallel economies", he said: "they saved together, created saving societies, looked out for one another, swapped information." [1] Of the community today he says it "band[s] together for births, deaths and marriages." [1] A professional class has grown up, he adds, with girls at university and boys in professional jobs. [1]

Nichola Khan, an anthropologist at the University of Brighton, built her 2020 book Arc of the Journeyman on two decades of fieldwork among Afghan migrants, among them Pashtun taxi drivers in Sussex. She writes of violence, displacement, kinship obligations and mobility in their lives and work. [7]

Politics and public life

Few Pashtun public figures in Britain are described as Pashtun by the sources. Nazir Afzal, the prosecutor who reopened the Rochdale child exploitation case in 2012, was, the Guardian wrote, "born in the UK to a patriotic Pashtun ex‑British Army tea wallah", the first of seven children to go to school, in Birmingham. [12] Osman Yousefzada, born in Birmingham, is the author and artist quoted above. [1]

Pashtun politics reaches Britain through the Pashtun Tahafuz Movement, which campaigns for accountability for alleged army abuses in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and draws support from sections of Pakistan's Pashtun population. Its UK chapter's president, Yousaf Ali Khan, was arrested at his family home in Swabi in February 2021. BBC News reported that legal documents show him accused of promoting "hatred" and "violence", and that in a speech in north London in December 2019 he appears to suggest that a bomb blast in a Pashtun area should be answered with one in Lahore, a majority non-Pashtun city. [13]