Every Race, Colour, Nation and Religion on Earth
Page 1 of 4
by Leo Benedictus
"People here don't know their own neighbours, and they're like that their whole life. When I meet English people, which is not very often round here, my experience is that they are lost, really miserable people, sometimes with emotional problems. They don't know how to speak to you. They are surprised you are open and nice to them." - Gosia, 25, from Poland.
London in 2005 is uncharted territory. Never have so many different kinds of people tried living together in the same place before. What some people see as the great experiment of multiculturalism will triumph or fail here.
New York and Toronto would contest the cosmopolitan crown, but London's case is strong. According to the last census, in 2001, 30% of London residents had been born outside England - that's 2.2 million people, to which we can add the unknown tens of thousands who didn't complete a census form.
And even this total takes no account of the contribution of the city's second- and third-generation immigrants, many of whom have inherited the traditions of their parents and grandparents. Throughout the 1990s, Greater London was the fastest growing part of the UK - and yet the white population in that time actually fell
