Brick Lane

Brick Lane (Bangla: ব্রিক লেন) is a long street in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, in theEast End of London. The street runs from Bethnal Green in the north, passes throughSpitalfields and is linked to Whitechapel High Street to the south by the short stretch of Osborn Street. Today, it is the heart of the city's Sylheti Bangladeshi community, and is sometimes known as Banglatown.

Winding through fields, the street was formerly called Whitechapel Lane, but derives its current name from former brick and tile manufacture, using the local brick earth deposits, that began in the 15th century. By the 17th century, the street was being built up from the south. Successive waves of immigration began with Huguenot refugees spreading from Spitalfields, where the master weavers were based, in the 17th century. They were followed by Irish weavers, Ashkenazi Jews and, in the last century,Bangladeshis. The area became a centre for weaving, tailoring and the clothing industry, due to the abundance of semi- and unskilled immigrant labour.

The street is the location for Monica Ali's book Brick Lane, published in 2003, now also a film.

Monica Ali (born October 20, 1967) is a British writer of Bangladeshi origin. She is the author of Brick Lane, her debut novel, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2003. Ali was voted Granta's Best of Young British Novelists on the basis of the unpublished manuscript.

Brick Lane  follows the life of Nazneen, a Bangladeshi woman who moves to Tower Hamlets in London at the age of 18 — her English consisting of "sorry" and "thank you" — to marry an older man, Chanu, described by The Observer as "one of the novel's foremost miracles: twice her age, with a face like a frog, a tendency to quote Hume and the boundless doomed optimism of the self-improvement junkie, he is both exasperating and, to the reader at least, enormously loveable." Geraldine Bedell wrote in The Observer that the "most vivid image of the marriage is of her [Nazneen] cutting her husband's corns, a task she seems required to perform with dreadful regularity. [Her husband] is pompous and kindly, full of plans, none of which ever come to fruition, and then of resentment at Ignorant Types who don't promote him or understand his quotations from Shakespeare or his Open University race, ethnicity and class module".

Brick Lane is a 2007 film starring Tannishtha Chatterjee, which is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Monica Ali. Is about a woman named Nazneen, who moves to London at the age of 18 from rural Bangladesh, with her husband Chanu, who is twice her age and was wedded to her in an arranged marriage.On doing this she leaves behind her sister and her home. Married to a man she does not love, she receives letters from her sister about her carefree life, living vicariously through those letters. The film picks up the story with the couple having lived in a small flat for 18 years and having had two daughters.

Nazneen is filled with desire when a young, good-looking clothing worker visits her house and she has an affair with him.The movie is based during the 9/11 period where racial tension was risen, and the Bengali community was becoming more religious including the character Karim. The film was critically acclaimed and the novel was an award-winning best seller. The film caused controversyamong a relatively small number of Bangladeshis in London. They objected to some comments made by the character Chanu, arguing that these portrayed the Bangladeshi community as backward and uneducated. On 31 July 2006, a protest was held in Brick Lane where over 100 people marched and unsuccessfully demanded the film be banned.

It is a woman's journey about finding her own voice and searching for her place caught between two worlds. The film is directed bySarah Gavron and produced by Alison Owen.

The film was released in the UK on 16 November 2007, and in the US by Sony Picture Classics in limited release on June 20, 2008. The DVD Region 2 release occurred on 10 March 2008. Tv premiere on C4 in November 2008.