London Borough of Tower Hamlets Islamic centres, including the East London Mosque, Britain's biggest mosque. Brick Lane's restaurants, neighbouring street market and shops provide the largest range of Bengali cuisine, woodwork, carpets and clothes in Europe. A 2017 study by Trust for London and the New Policy Institute found that Tower Hamlets has the highest rate of poverty, child poverty, unemployment, and pay inequality of any London borough. It also found that it has the lowest GCSE attainment gap though, meaning that the gap in performance between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged pupils is lower than in any other London Borough. The local authority is Tower Hamlets
East End of London in popular culture as "White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings" (1987). A more realistic fictionalisation on the contemporary gentrification of the area, and the rise of the yuppie, is provided by Penelope Lively in "Passing On" (1989) and "City of the Mind" (1991) and by P. D. James in "Original Sin" (1994). Emblematic of the current worldwide clash of civilisations between West and East, of which the East End has historically been a microcosm, are Monica Ali's (1967– ) novel "Brick Lane" (2003), and Salman Rushdie's fantastic and controversial "The Satanic Verses" (1988) which also uses Brick Lane as a location. One of the earliest