A 'Hounslow girl' has become a byword for a new breed of young Muslim women who wear hooped earrings along with their headscarves, according to a young playwright.
Ambreen Razia will perform The Diary of a Hounslow Girl, her semi-autobiographical one-woman show about a Muslim girl growing up in west London, at Kennington's Ovalhouse this June.
While much of the ground it covers, from traditional Pakistani weddings to fights on London's night buses, is based on her own formative years, the title comes from a throwaway remark by a friend.
"I was with a friend not long ago when she commented: 'She's such a Hounslow girl', and I had to ask what the expression meant," says the 22-year-old, who lives in Colliers Wood, near Wimbledon.
"She told me it refers to the sort of person who wears a headscarf and goes to a mosque yet still listens to Chris Brown, wears big hooped earrings and meets up with boys after school."
Ms Razia believes feisty young Muslim girls treading the line between tradition and modern fashions and values are still underrepresented on stage and screen.
She describes the 16-year-old at the heart of her new play as the sort of character she might have become had she made some less wise choices.
"She thinks she's got it all figured out like me when I was that age. I was going out with a non-Muslim boy when I was 16 and felt I couldn't tell my family because they're quite traditional, but my friends were too young to offer me much wisdom," says the University of West London graduate, who has performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
"It's like I've created a parallel life for myself. I could easily have made some of the really bad decisions she does and going down the same route."
The play is a comedy and includes humorous accounts of Pakistani weddings, where Ms Razia says you're always getting your cheek pinched by aunties you've never met before.
But it also addresses hard-hitting topics like child sex exploitation and teen pregnancy - issues she says affect some of the young people she works with at the Arc Theatre in Dagenham.
If there's one overriding message from her play, she claims, it's about the need to improve communications across the generational divide existing within many families.
"Sometimes there's more expectation than communication between parents and young women. If parents communicate better with young women from my generation I think they'll get better results," she says.
The Diary of a Hounslow Girl will appear at the Ovalhouse in Kennington on June 3-6. For tickets, priced £5, see www.ovalhouse.com or call the box office on 020 7582 7680.
