City of Cultures

City of Cultures

By Rahul Jacob

Financial Times

Mar 26, 2004

The few credible moments in the British film Love Actually, last year’s cynically commercial Christmas blockbuster, mostly take place at Heathrow airport.

The arrivals area teems with people from every part of the world, hugging and kissing relatives and friends as they clear immigration.

It is a microcosm of London at its multicultural best and an image I have often wished were replayed again and again on the giant screens that loom over Leicester Square in the capital’s West End.

Corny? Perhaps, but like many recent converts, I tend to overdo it. I arrived in London about a year ago from Hong Kong, carrying, along with the warm clothing I hadn’t worn for years, outmoded preconceptions about the city.

I liked London from the time I first visited in 1988 from New York, but regarded it as less multicultural than the American metropolis.

I was wrong on several counts. To my amazement, my work permit for five years was processed in three days, even though there can be few professions in London where there is less of a labour shortage than journalism.

The immigration lawyer who helped so efficiently happened to be South African and the movers, when my furniture arrived a few months later, were Albanian.

Unwrapping some family photographs, including several of my mother wearing a saree, they seemed delighted to find that I had grown up in India. It has been that kind of year. Everywhere I go, I bump into people from somewhere else.

In London now for a year, I have come to believe it is the most happily mongrelised metropolis in the world. The foreign-born proportion of the population may be higher in New York and Los Angeles, but the ease with which people from elsewhere in the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and other parts of the world are able to live and work in the UK is striking.

While interracial marriage is rising in the US, in London it is already a fact of life. In New York, the ghettos I inhabited were professional or national; my friends were either other Indians who had come out to the US on scholarships as I did, or other journalists, who were American.

In London, my closest friends include an American, a British-born Indian married to an Italian, an Italian married to a Scotsman, an Indian schoolmate and his wife – whose sister and brother are married respectively to a half Sri Lankan, half English civil servant and an Englishwoman – and two women who are English but who have spent most of their working lives in Asia.

A few weeks ago, I met Petrit Luci on a Monday evening when a friend and I wandered into the Cinnamon Club, an upscale Indian restaurant within walking distance of the Houses of Parliament that is frequented by the British political establishment.

Luci served us drinks at the restaurant’s downstairs bar and as we left, I asked him where he was from. His reply floored both the English friend I was with and me. Luci arrived in the UK from war-torn Kosovo four years ago.

He was pleasantly surprised, he told me when I interviewed him a week later, by the courtesy of government officials he encountered at the camp for asylum-seekers in Oxford where he spent his first three months. "The first thing that impressed me was that the police officer said, ‘It doesn’t matter where you are from, you should feel safe here.’"

Luci also appreciated other acts of thoughtfulness; one of the employees at the camp routinely gave him cigarettes and the staff took pains to inform him that there was a separate area for Muslims to pray. (Luci was born Muslim, but is not religious.) "I don’t know if I have been lucky. I have no bad memories," he says.

Inspired by the meeting to write this article, over the next fortnight or so I kept a mental log of the "foreign" population in London I met by chance.

The list turned out to be long – very long in fact – and included an Italian academic married to a medical researcher whose parents emigrated from Sri Lanka in the seventies, a Palestinian dry cleaner in my neighbourhood, a parking attendant from Ghana who moonlighted as an office cleaner while he also studied accounting, a school teacher from Hong Kong and a New Zealander who trades forward contracts in electricity for Shell.

Diaspora derives from the Greek, "to scatter," and just about every diaspora has been liberally strewn over London. Walking out of a restaurant called, as it happens, The Real Greek Souvlaki Bar, I asked the waitress where two assistant chefs were from. The chef was Greek, she said, his assistants were from Angola. Angola!

The phenomenon extends well beyond the restaurant industry. A recent article in the Independent, a UK newspaper, billboarded the foreign-born staff at a hospital in north London; its nurses came from the Philippines and Kenya, its doctors from Spain and Nigeria and its medical director from Pakistan.

The UK is often seen as the least "European" government in its foreign and economic policies, but because of London’s relaxed labour laws, thriving service industry and its role as the region’s financial capital, at street level the cosmopolis represents the European ideal at its best.

It is in London not in Paris nor in Frankfurt where there is the greatest concentration of a pan-European workforce.

Brussels may be where the bureaucracy sits, but London is where the heart of the European Union beats most vibrantly.

The Cinnamon Club, hospitals, and trading floors of brokerage houses across the city reflect that diversity. "We have 22 nationalities working here.

The English are teased for being the only ethnic minority," jokes the Cinamon Club’s owner Iqbal Wahhab. Wahhab himself was norn in Bangladesh. The woman at the cloakroom turned out to be from Kazakhstan.

Despite such globe-spanning variety in so many of London’s workplaces, immigrants are making something of a comeback as a favourite whipping boy of politicians and the press. It is a refrain that goes back centuries: Elizabeth I worried about London being overrun by Africans, saying, "There are of late diverse blackamoores brought into these realms of which kind there are already here too manie."

The prospect of additional countries from Eastern Europe being included in the European Union in May has stirred up a similar cacophony of criticism – headlines such as "500 immigrants EVERY day to swamp Britain" and "Gypsies’ Guide to NHS Scrounging’ – in the country’s reactionary tabloid press.

The danger is that this fantasy world imagery of grasping, scrounging immigrants swamping Little England will slow the steady march of integration and assimilation being played out on London’s streets every day.

Sanjeeva Dissanayake, who spent part of his childhood in Sri Lanka and is a doctor who works in pharmaceutical research, says he cannot remember immigration being such a hot topic 10 years ago. "My ex-secretary said, ‘It’s the immigrants who cause the problems.’ I felt quite sad. (This started with) the media and the politicians, but people are being affected."

I had been invited to dinner at his mother’s home by Dissanayake’s sister and after we had finished a Sri Lankan feast, his Italian wife, Donatella Maraschin, returned to the theme. During a recent visit to the hospital for pre-natal tests, she said she had been treated rudely at St Mary’s in Paddington in central London, because she speaks English with an Italian accent.

"I don’t think this is England per se. It’s a human reaction to foreigners," says Maraschin, who has a PhD from Reading University and teaches there.

Maraschin then defused her criticism by saying that the attitude to outsiders was much more welcoming in the UK than in her native country. "In Italy, even if people are Albanian, they call them all Moroccans. Even if you are a legal alien, it is difficult to rent because people don’t want you around," she says.

That faith in Britain’s openness is what brought Petrit Luci to London. "My friends said, ’If you go to London, they treat you the same as others.’ I had friends from Kosovo who were educated but they had to work in the building industry in Germany," he says. "Here some of my friends from Kosovo are in management."

This is the same abacus Jotham Annan, a British student at the Royal Academy of Drama and Art (Rada) whose parents moved to the UK from Ghana, refers to when I ask him about whether he feels British or Ghanaian.

"If you do things by the book, you can get somewhere here. I love England - anything I’ve wanted to do, I’ve been able to do. I went to arguably the best drama school in the world and now I’m working with Trevor Nunn (the acclaimed British theatre director)," said Annan. I saw Annan in a staging at Rada of Kafka’s The Trial but by the time I interviewed him, he had landed the part of Horatio in Hamlet directed by Nunn at the prestigious Old Vic theatre.

Despite its recent political rhetoric on East European immigrants and asylum-seekers, the British government has over the past few years become more liberal – not less – in allowing employers access to people from all over the world who have skills that are in short supply. David Thompson, the celebrated chef at the Thai restaurant of the Halkin Hotel, says obtaining work visas is very easy for his restaurant’s cooks, usually taking just six to eight weeks.

UK Home Office figures show that 44,443 healthcare staff from countries outside the EU were issued work permits last year, a 27-fold increase on the number issued 10 years ago.

This carefully calibrated confusion by the British government, between its strident public pronouncements on immigration to pacify the right-wing press in the UK and its pragmatic public policies designed to attract a workforce from all over the world to keep businesses ticking, may now be veering in the wrong direction. "The debate about immigration is silly," said a Palestinian dry cleaner in my neighbourhood. "We do the work that the English are no longer willing to do."

The irony is that as London becomes more multinational by the day, its cosmopolitanism as well as its economic opportunity is becoming a draw for people from all over the world. Tim Naylor lived much of his life in a village called Turangi in New Zealand before he moved to the UK aged 27 "I feel at home here. It’s not where I was born that’s for sure.

There are times when you feel there’s the whole world in this city," the now 41-year-old commodities trader for Shell said. "London seems more of a melting pot than New York. In New York, you have a Greek neighbourhood and an Italian neighbourhood. In London, you go from one neighbourhood to another and everything is completely mixed up."

I asked Lucy Chan, a teacher in a south London school in Catford whose students are mostly from Africa and the Caribbean, what she might miss about London when she and her husband, Tim, who works for the UK foreign service, move to northern China this summer. "I will miss the kind of life we have here. I see London as my home," she replied. "Going back (to Hong Kong) would be very comfortable, but it is easier for me to integrate here than for Tim (there) because London is so diverse."

The very foreignness of her surroundings in a south London school where 40 languages are spoken by a student body from places as far-flung as Somalia, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean had made her feel at home."I feel privileged because I understand them; they have very little English and I know how difficult it is to speak a foreign language," she said.

Perhaps the secret of London’s success as a home to so many different nationalities is that is almost impossible to feel foreign in a city where you are likely to hear Cantonese at one street corner and Italian at the next, where your corner shop is run by Sri Lankans and where your minicab late at night is driven by a Nigerian. At one of the meetings of the FT Weekend soon after I arrived, I was surprised to find that nearly half the staff at the meeting were foreign-born. London seems to me more of a mosaic than its US counterparts: Assimilation is much more of a two-way street.

For me, London is now primarily coloured not by its magnificent parks and monuments but by the different faces of its cosmopolitanism.

Last summer, just a few months after I arrived, I was jogging along the south bank of the river Thames when I chanced upon a performance by a young Greek band. Swept along by the music, a grandmother, with the easy self-assurance of women her age, jumped up and did a solo rendition of what I guessed was a Greek folk dance.

She then tried to draw several men into the dance but had no takers until a young Chinese woman gallantly joined her. I watched this bit of uniquely London street theatre with elation. I had just arrived that afternoon from a short trip to Copenhagen, which suddenly seemed monochromatic. It felt good to be home again.

Rahul Jacob is the FT’s leisure editor

Places you should go

North

The White House kosher restaurant, 10-12 Bell Lane NW4. For a traditional Jewish meal, snack or takeaway. Nearest Tube: Hendon Central
Hummingbird, 84 Stroud Green Road N4. One of the capital's first Caribbean restaurants. Nearest Tube: Finsbury Park
Ringcross community centre, Lough Road, N7. Colombian cooking demonstrations and recipes. Nearest Tubes: Holloway Road/ Caledonian Road
Kolos Super Market, 230 Stoke Newington High Street N16. Newly opened East European grocery store. Nearest Tube: Manor House

East

Columbia Road open-air flower market for plants from all over the world. Sunday 8am- 1pm. Nearest Tube station: Bethnal Green
Whitechapel market has a number of stalls catering for the Bengali and Somali communities. Open Mon-Wed, Fri and Sat, from 8.30am-5.30pm, Thurs 8.30am – 1pm. Nearest Tubes: Aldgate East/Whitechapel
Latinos No.1, 510 Kingsland Road, London E8. Colombian art, crafts, coffee, fast food, music and fashion. Nearest Tubes: Bethnal Green/Old Street
Pellicci's, 332 Bethnal Green Road E2. One of the East End’s oldest and most famous Italian restaurants. Nearest Tube: Bethnal Green

South

The White Eagle Club, 211 Balham High Road SW17. Traditional Polish food and drink and Zabawa dancing. Nearest Tubes: Balham/Tooting
Hoa Noam, 126 New Cross Road SE14. Traditional Vietnamese cuisine at reasonable prices. Nearest Tube: New Cross Gate
Bhangra Mix, Dukes, 349 Kennington Lane, London SE11. Second and last Saturday of every month, 10pm-3am. Unique club where Bhangra & Bollywood take control with a twist of Arabic House Soul and international tunes. Nearest Tube: Vauxhall
O Cantinho de Portugal, 135 Stockwell Road SW9. No-frills Portuguese home cooking on the seafood-dominated menu. Nearest Tube: Brixton

West

Bar Salsa, 96 Charing Cross Road. Spanish music and dancing. Nearest Tube: Tottenham Court Road
Adam I Agusla, 258 King Street W6. Polish delicatessen, sandwich bar and restaurant. Nearest Tube: Hammersmith
Brazilian Touch Café, 40-42 Oxford Street W1. Traditional Brazilian meals and snacks. Nearest Tube: Oxford Circus
Misato, 11 Wardour Street. W1. New budget Japanese restaurant in Chinatown. Nearest Tubes: Piccadilly Circus/Leicester Square.

Nearest Tubes given as a guide only. In some cases overground rail services or buses may run nearer

Compiled by Katie Boulton

[ Previous | Next ]