Stoke-on-Trent Muslim Welfare and Community Centre

Across the old pottery city of Stoke on Trent in the English Midlands, the Muslim Welfare and Community Centre serves a congregation drawn largely from families whose roots trace to Azad Kashmir, Punjab, Bangladesh, Gujarat, and more recently Yemen and Somalia. Stoke is famously the home of English ceramics, where the six towns of Tunstall, Burslem, Hanley, Stoke, Fenton, and Longton grew around the bottle kilns of Wedgwood, Spode, and Royal Doulton. Muslim settlement here began in earnest in the 1950s, as workers were invited to fill jobs in foundries, textile mills, and later the National Health Service. Successive generations have built neighbourhood mosques, Islamic schools, and charitable centres that now form a proud part of the city's multicultural fabric.
The centre's name, Muslim Welfare and Community, speaks to an ethic of service taught by the Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, who said that the best of people are those most beneficial to others. The centre runs daily prayers, a women's section, a youth club, a weekly food bank for residents of any faith or none, a funeral washing service for the local community, and Qur'anic lessons for children in the evenings after school. The congregation's imam delivers sermons in Urdu and English, reflecting the generational mix of worshippers, and on Eid the hall fills with several hundred worshippers in shalwar kameez, thobes, and suits.
The building itself is a converted British industrial or community structure adapted to serve Islamic worship, as is typical of Muslim centres across the old industrial Midlands. Carpeted prayer halls, a small mihrab aligned with Makkah, separate wudu facilities for men and women, a kitchen serving free meals in Ramadan, and a modest library of Islamic texts fill the premises. Visitors from across the West Midlands often stop in on journeys through the A500 and M6, and students at Staffordshire University and Keele University rely on the centre for Friday prayers. On this page you will find accurate daily prayer times for Fajr, Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and Isha at the Stoke centre to help every worshipper in the Potteries plan their worship peacefully.