Muslim taxi drivers in plea for wudu space at Heathrow Airport
Campaigners say hundreds of Muslim cabbies currently share one sink in a converted toilet cubicle and have offered to cover building costs themselves
Muslim taxi drivers who serve Heathrow Airport are campaigning for more space to wash before prayers, saying the single wudu station in a converted toilet cubicle that they currently use is woefully inadequate for roughly 200 people to share.
Drivers told Hyphen they had offered to pay for the installation of the space themselves but that Apcoa — the company that manages the taxi “feeder park” where black cab drivers wait before picking up passengers — had drawn the line at converting one cubicle into an ablution sink.
“I wait in Heathrow for around three hours for passengers every day,” said Abdikarim Hassan, who has driven a black cab for 13 years. “By the time it is prayer time, trying to use a small sink to wash your feet is difficult.”
When Hassan began working in Heathrow’s feeder park 10 years ago, he said, he often felt stigmatised by other drivers when doing wudu. “Sometimes people would make comments because they had never seen wudu before,” he said, “or talk among themselves about the water the ‘Muslims were splashing on the floor’.”
Karim Brahim, a black cab driver for 16 years, said he had also felt people judging him when he tried to perform wudu in the car park toilets. “When you are washing your mouth and nose,” he said, “you can feel people staring and making comments that it is not hygenic.”
In 2022 Muslim drivers delivered a petition to the Apcoa office asking for a prayer room and ablution space. The drivers were reportedly told that there were safety concerns about installing a wudu station — but Apcoa relented two years later and converted one of the toilet’s 10 cubicles into an ablution sink. Brahim said the setup lacks privacy and can result in long waits.
Muslim black cab drivers previously campaigned successfully for a prayer space to be built in the feeder park. A Muslim driver who was a former builder had provided a shed for drivers to pray in but it could only fit up to 10 people and was cold and dark, Hassan said. Apcoa built a multi-faith prayer space in 2025 that can now fit up to 35 drivers. “I’m happy we got this at least after asking for so long,” said Brahim.
Black cab drivers also feel they are being treated differently from minicab drivers. There is a larger dedicated ablution and prayer space in Heathrow’s separate authorised area for private hire vehicles, including Uber and Addison Lee cars, to wait. “They have been here for the same amount of time we have been campaigning,” said Hassan. “We feel left behind.”
Apcoa was approached for comment.
