Punjabi settlement in Southall began around 1950, when a rubber factory near the town recruited Indian workers, several accounts naming a manager who had served with Sikh troops during the war. Chain migration followed, heavily from the Doaba.
By the 1970s Southall was the largest Punjabi settlement outside the subcontinent. The Havelock Road gurdwara, rebuilt in 2003, is among the largest in Europe.
In June 1976 Gurdip Singh Chaggar, eighteen, was murdered in a racist attack on Southall Broadway. The Southall Youth Movement was formed out of the response. In April 1979 Blair Peach, a teacher, was killed during policing of a demonstration against a National Front meeting at Southall Town Hall. No one was prosecuted; a Metropolitan Police report released in 2010 concluded that an officer had almost certainly been responsible.
Bhangra as a British popular form was made in Southall and Birmingham in the 1980s, in wedding halls and daytimers, and went back to Punjab from there.
The Punjabi of Southall is a different Punjabi. It carried a 1950s and 1960s Doaba idiom abroad and kept it while the Punjab of the villages moved on.
The settlement began around a factory that recruited Punjabi labour in the 1950s, and the community grew around the Broadway and the Green.
It has the largest Punjabi retail and religious infrastructure in Europe, including one of the largest gurdwaras outside India, and Punjabi is spoken on the street as a first language.
The 1979 and 1981 confrontations over racist organising and policing are part of its history and are commemorated locally. Southall is where British Punjabi political identity was formed.