It was meant to be a “potent symbol of our tolerant and welcoming society”, a sanctuary for spiritual contemplation that drew inspiration from the great mosques of Cordoba and Kairouan, in an architectural complex that would have “ranked itself with the major religious buildings of Europe”.

But, after an 18-year struggle, plans for east London’s “mega-mosque” have been definitively quashed by the communities secretary, who today rejected the appeal against Newham council’s 2012 refusal of the scheme.

The decision marks the end of a long and chequered battle to realise a mosque in an unpromising corner of West Ham, on a site south of the Olympic park, sandwiched between railway lines and the Channelsea River.

Tablighi Jamaat, an 80-million strong Islamic missionary movement, acquired the seven-hectare site in 1996, where a single-storey brick building is regularly used by around 3,000 worshippers. In 2005, the group unveiled plans to build a gargantuan place of worship. A sinuous concoction of billowing bronze waves, designed by Zaha Hadid acolyte Ali Mangera, the complex would have housed 70,000 people (making it three times the size of St Paul’s cathedral). It looked like a giant walnut whip, eccentrically spiralling out of control – an alien symbol that attracted the suspicions of local residents, Islamophobic far-right groups and the condemnation of transport planners alike.

A giant walnut whip … the 2005 proposal for a 70,000-capacity mosque by Mangera Yvars architects. Image: MYAA

In 2007, the £300m project was handed over to safe-pair-of-hands architects Allies and Morrison, who were charged with taming the scheme. It wasn’t a happy marriage. Once again, the plans fell into disarray three years later when the client missed Newham’s deadline to submit a masterplan.

Public opposition was also growing. By 2007, more than a quarter of a million people had signed an online petition opposing plans for the mosque, claiming to represent “the Christian population of this great country England” and saying the mosque would “cause terrible violence and suffering”. Then-mayor Ken Livingstone condemned “the particularly vicious nature of the campaign,” adding that it should be “condemned by all those who support the long-established right of freedom of religion in this country, and all the more so as it is based on information which has long been established to be factually untrue.”

Stepping into the breach in 2011 came an unlikely saviour: Nick Ray, a scholarly Cambridge University lecturer and architect, who worked on the British Library with Colin St John Wilson. His practice, NRAP, has built some fine student accommodation and faculty buildings, but never anything on this scale. Still, as author of Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas, he was perhaps perfectly placed to work for a group that has been variously accused of promoting regressive views and harbouring terrorists.

His team developed a thoughtful scheme that references the long lineage of courtyard-focused “hypostyle” mosques – but the result somehow can’t escape looking like a multi-storey car park dressed in jazzy Islamic-inspired cladding. In a bid to quell fears, the practice described it as “less than mega”.

Brick box meets Stansted Airport … inside NRAP’s ‘less mega’ mosque. Image: NRAP

Their design is a great big brick box, a 30,000 sq m shed for 9,000 worshippers, over-sailed by a roof of the Stansted Airport variety, held aloft on tree-like columns. There are the usual references to Islamic architecture – the “glittering golden veils” and perforated brick walls that echo the mashrabiya latticework screens of Arab cities. But there is little that confirms the claims of their QC in the planning appeal: that the “grace and subtly of the architectural language … [would] rank with the major religious buildings of Europe.”

A gargantuan mosque in east London could be a truly wonderful thing, a symbol of London’s openness to religious debate and understanding, adding to Islam’s rich tradition of spectacular architectural spaces. But this isn’t it. What had at one stage been conceived as a mixed-use development, with 300 flats and a mix of shops, became an inward-looking haven, not the open community hub it purported to be.

And what about the group behind it? According to Jenny Taylor, founder of the Centre for Religious Literacy in World Affairs, Tablighi Jamaat is the most successful of the many such groups to form after the Mutiny (known to India, where it comes from, as the Uprising) in the mid-19th century. Now 80-million-strong, they create an atmosphere of spirituality, solidarity and purpose among themselves that proves extremely compelling to young men. As a revivalist group, Taylor says, it is interested only in other Muslims and therefore particularly inward-looking.

The sect has faced criticism from other corners of the Muslim community. Taj Hargey, an imam and the director of the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford, who is best known for allowing men and women to pray together and for discouraging veils, said: “Tablighi Jamaat presents itself as inclusive but is anything but. It is a sectarian group that does nothing much for social cohesion with its fundamentalist view of Islam.”

Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, founder of the Muslim Institute and godfather of the Quilliam Foundation, has opposed the mosque project because he believes the group peddles “fairytales”. For better or worse, this riverside fairytale was not to be.

Plans for Prayer City ... Sheppard Robson’s rejected design for the Kingsway International Christian Centre. Image: Sheppard Robson

The “mega-mosque” is not alone in having its Olympic legacy dreams dashed. For almost a decade, a huge evangelical church known as the Kingsway International Christian Centre (KICC) occupied a warehouse on what is now the Olympic park. It saw 12,000 people attend every Sunday, bussed to the site from all over east London and beyond, making it one of the largest church congregations in Europe.

Forcibly relocated to make way for the Olympics (along with over 100 local businesses) the KICC had accordingly grand ambitions, hiring Sheppard Robson architects to conjure a £70m cathedral on a four-hectare site in Rainham, in the Thames Estuary.

Researching pre-Olympic development plans, I went to one of their services in 2009 and was welcomed with open arms, handed a credit card donation slip, and regaled with their plans. The architects had dreamed up a fantastical origami bird of a building, rising to a pointed star-shaped peak, which would have housed an 8,000-seat auditorium – where the white-suited pastor Matthew Ashimolowo (net worth $16m) could strut before enrapt audiences. The planning application was refused because of its transport plan, and the KICC is now housed in a converted office building in Chatham, Kent – renamed Prayer City.

House of One … a plan for a combined church, mosque and synagogue in Berlin. Image: Kuehn Malvezzi

The answer, perhaps, is neither a “mega-church” nor a “mega-mosque”, but a non-denominational super-space where all these groups could gather.

Berlin-based architect Wilfried Kuehn thinks he might have the answer. Last year he unveiled plans for a House of One – a hybrid church, mosque and synagogue proposed for Petriplatz in the heart of Berlin. Each of the three areas are planned to be the same size, but a different shape, arranged around a shared courtyard.

“What’s interesting is that when you go back a long time, [the different religions] share a lot of architectural typologies. They are not so different,” he said. “It’s not necessary, for instance, for a mosque to have a minaret. And a church doesn’t need a tower. This is about going back to the origins when these three faiths were close and shared a lot architecturally.”

The history of religious buildings is a history of appropriation and reuse. From the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul – built as a Christian basilica, later converted into a mosque, now a museum – to the Brick Lane Jamme Masjid – which started life as a church, later became a synagogue, and is now a thriving mosque.

If an east London mega-sanctuary is to be built by any of these faiths, why not make it a gigantic inclusive shed for them to hammer out their differences – and perhaps see that they don’t have so much to fight about after all?

