Every Race, Colour, Nation and Religion on Earth
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Language is one reason; fluency in English is a great gift for one's children. Then there are the many refugees, who arrive expecting to return home, but find, over time, that home has come with them. "People don't treat you as a foreigner, but you feel it yourself," said one Somali man of his first trip back after 15 years in London.
"You see things like spiders and snakes that used to be normal, but when you go back you are scared. You become westernised, although you don't realise it."
But there is another, more surprising reason why people make their homes in London: Londoners themselves. Bilsen, a 40-year-old Turkish woman, couldn't understand the frosty atmosphere when she first arrived. "When you're on the underground, people don't talk," she explained with horror.
"They don't even make eye contact." Quickly, however, the benefits of being left alone began to become apparent. "Like the English say, 'Mind your own business'," Bilsen remarked with approval.
In fact, London's haughty denizens have been waiting for their new neighbours for centuries. This is because of one traditional feature of English life: not something it offers, but something it lacks. It is the great need which has left every Londoner stickyfingered for life. It is food. New immigrants often find that food is the first thing they miss from back home.
Thus a parade of good restaurants - usually on high streets, usually with patriotic signage - is the focus around which most new communities begin to express themselves. This is true all over the world, but the British seem to have a unique affinity for foreign food of every kind - so much so that, like tea, they quickly adopt it as their own. The ersatz exoticism of a chicken tikka masala is unmistakably English, and the ubiquitous doner column, a respectable dinner in Istanbul reduced to little more than binge fuel in London, now scarcely registers as foreign.
