stratford e15-most cosmopolitan place in the history of humankind

luka

Well-known member
says so in the guardian. not rome, not new york, not constantinople, no stratford, e15. centre of the universe, capital of the world.
 

sufi

lala
hmmm guardian say so :rolleyes:
interesting but irritating too
a lot of generalisation, oversimplification & reductionism

e.g "Chinese community "The reason for their thin spread all over London is because of the idea that you want to set up a Chinese restaurant that's a little way away from the next one." :mad:
ignores the fact that "chinese" is a description of a whole host of different communities, mainland, diaspora etc. and that while chinese restaurants are the feature that non-chinese see it's probly not the most significant ...

london ain't new york - you can't just say this is a jamaican area to the exclusion of other nationalities, e.g around here there are plenty of other communities that ain't mentioned - they also manifest in different ways
- there's a lot of eritrean restaurants and community groups in lambeth (less so ethiopians)
- there's plenty of algerians in brixton, who are less visible as they don't have their own labelled cafes or shops, they do run a mosque in the recreation centre tho
- streatham hill seems to be the focus of somali community in south london, there are caffs and money transfer shops
- there's also a significant community of yupyups who are responsible for house prices rising and a change in the local economy towards higher end services like yuppy bars & that, a process of gentrification leading to a generation of immigrants leaving the area = 'black flight' & de-diversification
but this 'diversity' is unrepresented in the grunter which jus reduces brixton to a big ol jamaican blob...

fair enough, you can't really expect to get to that level of detail in a report that covers all of london - but focussing on georgaphy and maps means that you're not really looking at a very representative picture of lunun's diversity

& obv i'm not trying saying that brikky is more or less diverse than e15 - jus that the guardian as usual is over simplifying to the point of divisiveness. The census is still too blunt an instrument for this type of analysis, altho it's prolly the best available - iirc it only asks for place of birth & i don't think it asks about languages - so it would not reflect the complexities arising from different communities different lengths of time in UK & levels of 'integration' or 'assimilation', members of 'communities' who are born here and whose identities are not as simple as just saying o i'm a member of this or that feckin tribe

grrr - po-faced response to light-hearted post! :D
 

luka

Well-known member
it didn't actually say that in the guardian to be honest. it didn't even mention newham as far as i could see. it's just a claim i've been making for the last few years. it's also true. stratford is not a dump. your mum lives in a dump. she gnaws discarded chicken bones and sleeps in an abandoned fiesta.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
yep it was an interesting piece but Soof is right, the 'Chinese community....restaurants' line in particular was pretty shocking - even i know there is, e.g., a sizeable Eritrean community in Lundun, and that wasn't mentioned. lot of holes in the story.
some rum phrasing etc.
still i posted a link to it on my blog, the Somalian interview in particular gripped me - i had no idea about the situation re. Wembley and forcing closure etc ripping things apart.

that cafe photo looked like a little hot dog stand i passed on the bus the other night, except outside the hot dog stand was a lot of snow and four guys whose pints i wouldn't spill (judging from their colours they might have been gang members, btw).

there is a very interesting treatment in Nick Danziger's Danziger's Britain (1994, and recommended if you haven't already), incidentally, of some of the issues the Somali community in one area of Liverpool were grappling with at that time (Cardiff and Lpool and Mcr are the only towns outside London in the UK w' significant Somalian communities, population-wise, and i know we've discussed the importance of engaging and grappling w' and not necessarily belittling populist narratives on asylum seekers and economic migrants etc but FWIW i can tell you in my limited experience the average Manc factory worker 'has no problem' with large numbers of asylum seekers but some do with specifically people from Somalia, people of Somalian heritage, and i don't know why this particular prejudice is there, well i mean i've got guesses but i'll not bore anyone with any more ill-thought rants)...

Luka means stuff like below, i think
http://www.cre.gov.uk/duty/reia/statistics_census.html#distribution_eg

on a light-hearted and playful note, i can only think of one specifically Burmese restaurant in London, and i don't think more than one Sudanese (Mandola?).
there are about maybe half a dozen to a dozen Ethiopian restaurants in Chicago incidentally, but i can't think of any Eritrean eateries at all, nothing like that.

sorry to sound like a missing the point guardian writer...
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
scottdisco said:
yep it was an interesting piece but Soof is right, the 'Chinese community....restaurants' line in particular was pretty shocking

Is it? Obviously there's variation in the Chinese community blah blah blah but the restaurant/takeaway business is still an important economic activity. For instance, the last book I read was about Western perceptions of Chinese food, and one of the things he talked about in regards to the Chinese community in the UK was exactly that, that part of the reason for the dispersal of the Chinese community was the need to site takeaways and restaurants at a reasonable distance from competition.

there is a very interesting treatment in Nick Danziger's Danziger's Britain (1994, and recommended if you haven't already), incidentally, of some of the issues the Somali community in one area of Liverpool were grappling with at that time (Cardiff and Lpool and Mcr are the only towns outside London in the UK w' significant Somalian communities, population-wise,

Afaik Leicester has a reasonable size Somali community as well. There was an article in The Economist that I remember last year that was looking at the problems of the Somali community there and how many of the economic niches that they could occupy (halal butchers, international phoning centers, money transfer shops, minicabs) had already been take up by earlier immigrants.

on a light-hearted and playful note, i can only think of one specifically Burmese restaurant in London,

Mandalay on Edgware Road? Have you ever been there? It's really good.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
Pearsall:
>Is it? Obviously there's variation in the Chinese community blah blah blah but the restaurant/takeaway business is still an important >economic activity

yeah, my bad :eek:

apologies for lazily tossed-off writing.

your implicit recognition of variation blah blah blah is i guess what Soof and i were getting at.
Rob Lewis is quoted in the article as only offering one reason for dispersal and one reason alone. i appreciate you can't go through things with a fine tooth-comb but on a subject this fascinating and all-enveloping i guess we were expecting a little more. but yeah, point taken :D

yeah i know Brum as well as i'm sure Leicester has a sizeable enough Somali community but i meant those cities had the largest populations in the provinces, of Somalians, folk of Somali heritage etc. certainly Liverpool is the only town in the UK with a Somalian councillor (although Theo van Gogh associate Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born in Somalia and is a Dutch MP!).

and yeah The Economist always writes pretty good on issues of race and class in the UK, i think. my mam's best mate's daughter's best mate (phew! mouthful) interned for them and even as a trainee she had a card instead of a wage. fill your boots!

>Mandalay on Edgware Road? Have you ever been there? It's really good.

yeah, had a great fishy curry. very knowledgeable Arsenal fans who knew a pleasant amount about the 'great' (sic) Man City sides of yesteryear.
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
Yeah, the guys who run Mandalay are very nice. My parents live close by so I've gotten takeaways from there many times.

How's the weather in Chicago? We're getting an absolute boatload of snow here in New York.
 

sufi

lala
Mandalay mmm! fish samosas

re the chinese takeaway thing - the guardian was quoting an expert, but it sounded like they took his remarks so far out of context that they become meaningless (as per usual) - i mean look at southall (apparently london's least white british neighbourhood) where there are restaurants all the way down the high st - look at chinatown in soho ffs :mad:

somalis in leicester - interesting case in point - while liverpool and cardiff have long-established somali (and yemeni) communities as sailors settled there long before the refugee movements late 20thC, leicester is also atypical - the somali community there is less longstanding than even the somali refugee communities in Londo - e.g in wembley, streatham, bethnal green... A sizable proportion of the Somali community in Leicester are actually 'secondary migrants' who originally got refugee status in other European countries (particularly Norway iirc) then came over to UK as EU residents - again, the picture is complex and doesn't lend itself to superficial soundbites or extrapolation from random stats.
Leicester's role in pioneering refugee reception when the ugandan asians arrived is also ... interesting...

as fer the weather - well i'm in bristol & it just snowed a few little flakes over here, nice!
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
sufi said:
re the chinese takeaway thing - the guardian was quoting an expert, but it sounded like they took his remarks so far out of context that they become meaningless (as per usual) - i mean look at southall (apparently london's least white british neighbourhood) where there are restaurants all the way down the high st - look at chinatown in soho ffs :mad:

Well, I think what the expert probably talked about (but the Guardian didn't bother to explain properly) is that places like Southall Broadway and Gerrard Street are 'destinations'; they can support large numbers of restaurants because they cater not only to the local population but also to further-flung ethnic kin and interested outsiders who are willing to travel for 'authenticity', whereas in other parts of the city Chinese takeaways and curry houses tend to be at a certain distance from each other because there are only so many of such establishments that can be supported in neighborhoods without a significant Chinese or South Asian presence.

The effect of this dispersal pattern is more obvious among the Chinese population than the South Asian one because it is a much smaller community in London, and also because the Chinese do not tend to run small neighborhood grocery stores/off-licences/newsagents in the same way that South Asians do.

edit: And yeah, I know that British-Born Chinese (BBC's) have been quite successful at moving into the professions, but you know what I'm driving at.
 
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Backjob

Well-known member
It's interesting for me to contrast London with Singapore.

Singapore is about 70% chinese, 10% south indian and 10% malay, with the other 10% being a mix of arabs, thais, vietnamese, filipinos and caucasians. Plus a bunch of migrant tamil workers who stay a few months and then go back. It's been that way for years. Massively diverse because of it's role as a central Asian hub for transport and trade.

But the character of the place is totally different from London. London is one 'british' city with minority pockets. Whereas singapore is genuinely a 'mixed city'. There is a bit called 'Little India' but's its more a place for the migrant workers than the singaporean indians - you never see any women there!

And I wonder if one of the reasons for this is that it is mandated that the population make-up of any block of government housing must represent the greater population of the city i.e. it's illegal for monocultural ghettos to form (in government housing anyhow, and most people live in governmen housing).
 

MBM

Well-known member
A mate of mine is a scouser of pakistani heritage. He lived in London for a while and then went to live in New York. In 2000, I went to visit him and I asked him why he stayed there.

In the UK, he told me, he - as a member of a racial minority - was merely tolerated. In NYC, it was the other way round. Minorities were the norm and could celebrate who they were.

I found this observation interesting.

Let's say Stratford is "the most cosmopolitan place in the history of humankind". What does that actually mean? That there are plenty of restaurants with enticingly ethnic cuisine? That people of colours and creeds respect (not merely tolerate) each other? That all is peace and brotherly love?
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
Pearsall's careful considerations of the restaurant angle and other things are exactly what was missing from the guardian's coverage above, to be fair (hence my earlier seeming eruption of fury at 'em, but i did mean shocking in the colloquial sense of lazy or poor or whatevs; anyway, i'll stop defending myself... ;) ).

re. what MBM was saying, a good mate of mine of Pakistani heritage who is a Manc would probably say something fairly similar, AFAIK. well, not that he's ever been to New York but... :eek:
but there again, a second-generation Pakistani-heritage pal of mine who lives in the town next door to Burnley (with its BNP support and whatnot) would not, i think.
those sorts of issues/questions raised are for the thinkers of this board to consider i think.

yes i know New York is not the rest of the USA but there we go.

i know - and yes, this is only half-arsed anecdotally - apparently you'll see couples from different ethnic/racial backgrounds together on the streets of London, i mean more commonly than in New York (well i've read this in print etc by people familiar with both cities).

OK, it's a half-arsed observation only really fit for the pub, but anyone care to comment?

people might find the below pdf interesting
http://pooh.undp.org/maindiv/hdr_dvpt/reports/global/2004/pdf/hdr04_chapter_5.pdf#page=15

it's fascinating reading about the Singaporean govt (a mate is in Singapore for a bit at the moment, and their emails mention some interesting society/ethnicity/language etc observations) on the monocultural ghetto tip.

Sufi:
>Leicester's role in pioneering refugee reception when the ugandan asians arrived is also ... interesting...

care to expand?

does anyone else remember a Mail on Sunday article from a couple of years ago or so, regarding the 'news' that Leicester would one day soonish become the first city in the UK to have a majority minority population (i.e., its White British population would number less than its minority ethnic population)?

iirc they took a two page spread in one of the prestigious bits of the paper (yunno, near the editorials, over about pp.8-9 or whatever) and their piece was, essentially, a thinly disguided racist lament...

oh as for weather i was in small-town Indiana over the weekend.
minus 7 fahrenheit, a couple of feet of powder dumped on you, and drifts in the fields about 18 feet deep is not what i signed up for :eek:
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
scottdisco said:
i know - and yes, this is only half-arsed anecdotally - apparently you'll see couples from different ethnic/racial backgrounds together on the streets of London, i mean more commonly than in New York (well i've read this in print etc by people familiar with both cities).

Well, the difference is that you will see far more black/white couples in London than you will in New York. You will see black/white couples in New York these days (certainly more than I remember from my childhood) but at nowhere near the frequency you do in London. Having said that, I'm sure you see more black/white couples in New York (and, although I've not been there since I was a child) on the West Coast, in Chicago (I'm guessing though, am I right Scott?), around the big northeastern cities and around Atlanta then in the country at large. I've never seen a b/w couple in Savannah, Georgia, where my mother is from, and that city is split pretty much evenly between the two groups.

Other types of mixed-race relationships are far more prevalent than black/white. That has always been the big dividing line in America, in romantic relations, in neighborhoods, and so on. Asians and Hispanics (and yeah, many Hispanics in America are white or black) are somewhere in the middle, but blacks and whites are still pretty segregated in America, certainly in the big cities. For instance, the neighborhood I live in in Queens (which is about 20% black as a whole) is no more than maybe 2% black.

Race relations between blacks and whites in London, at least in my experience, are much better than in the States.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
oh btw Pearsall, nice sig. line, your blogs are quality :D

(i was interested to see you writing a bit about Kenan Malik and his admirable recent getting about on the subject of Islamophobia. not that i normally give the time of day to Jonathan Freedland but i thought his commentary/additions on/to what Malik had to say were also interesting and kinda compelling: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1396112,00.html)

>I'm sure you see more black/white couples...in Chicago (I'm guessing though, am I right Scott?),

well,
er
and i note you link to the US Census page so you'll know this yourself but for a city that is (the Big Apple itself is recorded as 27% of its population being "Black or African American") 37 per cent black {neighbouring Gary, Indiana - my only but frequent experience of Gary is through a train-window - is about 84% black/African-American} Chicago doesn't seem exactly chocka w' e.g., black/white couples. mind you, reading between the lines of your post, NYC doesn't seem compared to London, granted.

the big thing about race relations in Chicago, really - and i guess you may be aware of this, and if not, cool - is that it's really one of the most segregated bigger American cities. a large proportion of black Chicagoans are concentrated on the South Side and parts of the West Side.
the neighbourhood on the North Side (a mile or so from the Cubs ballpark, sports fans! etc.etc.) where i'm at now seems pretty diverse, a lot of white and Asian and black citizens AFAIK, and on the (er, ha...) restaurants tip a lot of Hispanic and Asian and Euro-different heritages cuisines, don't get me wrong,
but yeah it is really quite segregated.

>Other types of mixed-race relationships are far more prevalent than black/white

it's interesting you say this actually.
my girlfriend's two best mates in Chicago are both in mixed-race relationships (well, quite a lot of her Chicagoan mates are actually, but i think of her two bezzies the quickest).

i know a bit about the Chi's politics and whatnot because my girl well [www.ywcachicago.org] works there.
but the very short (guidebook) version of the segregation alluded to above &c. is unscrupulous realtors (here quoting almost verbatim from one old Lonely Planet cause it said it best, and concisely) fuelling white fears of African-Americans in the bad old post-war years and whatnot, "block-busting", white flight, blah blah.
there's all zoning laws and school catchment areas and other things coming into play, i'd best shut up before i tie myself completely in knots and get utterly confused but yeah.

the city is making steps to reverse decades of earlier bad faith etc but of course it's going to be slow.
a lot of the country's biggest projects, such as the Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side (Henry 'Skip' Gates did a four-part docu series that the Beeb screened last year or so about, er, 'the Afro-American experience' or whatnot and he was wondering around the Robert Taylor at one point), and the Cabrini Green 'hood on the Near Northwest Side, are basically being torn down and replaced, but from what i know so far of Cabrini Green it's being yuppified and i don't know what is happening to the old tenants etc (i should pay far more attention to my better half).
i don't know, mixed-income developments are up and coming but SORRY this is getting rather off-topic.

i don't quite think that basically - for Chi-town's African-American population - Gary is to the Chi what Essex is to white cockernees tho' i do wonder if some old-timer Cabrini Green residents might head out to Gary (conversationally with Chicago residents i have heard this in the past, and on more than a few occasions iirc)... ...but i think Chicago is a fascinating town, not of course anywhere near as hollowed out as tragic and blasted Detroit, but i would like to learn far more about the race relations issues etc here because i don't think there are any major problems that often make the news or anything, but the structural issues of this de facto segregation are clearly affecting the city, its economics, community relations, etc.

>Race relations between blacks and whites in London, at least in my experience, are much better than in the States.

i think that's a decent call, TBH.
 

Pearsall

Prodigal Son
scottdisco said:
and i note you link to the US Census page so you'll know this yourself but for a city that is (the Big Apple itself is recorded as 27% of its population being "Black or African American") 37 per cent black {neighbouring Gary, Indiana - my only but frequent experience of Gary is through a train-window - is about 84% black/African-American} Chicago doesn't seem exactly chocka w' e.g., black/white couples. mind you, reading between the lines of your post, NYC doesn't seem compared to London, granted.

No, New York isn't really comparable to London in that sense. I said Chicago as I was thinking that, as the big metropolis at the heart of a region that is generally noted for its conservatism, it would be the sort of metropolitan exception to wider patterns in a similar way to Atlanta (which is the only place I've ever seen b/w couples in the South - of course the Midwest is both much whiter and has a very different history to the South).

the big thing about race relations in Chicago, really - and i guess you may be aware of this, and if not, cool - is that it's really one of the most segregated bigger American cities. a large proportion of black Chicagoans are concentrated on the South Side and parts of the West Side.
the neighbourhood on the North Side (a mile or so from the Cubs ballpark, sports fans! etc.etc.) where i'm at now seems pretty diverse, a lot of white and Asian and black citizens AFAIK, and on the (er, ha...) restaurants tip a lot of Hispanic and Asian and Euro-different heritages cuisines, don't get me wrong,
but yeah it is really quite segregated.

New York is pretty similar in that respect - I'll try to find them but I've seen maps before that map out New York City's population by race in terms of density by neighborhood (ie the white map will have shades for less than 5%, 5-10%, 10-25% and so on) and there is little overlap between the white and black maps, whereas the Hispanic population overlaps quite frequently with both groups.

>Other types of mixed-race relationships are far more prevalent than black/white

it's interesting you say this actually.
my girlfriend's two best mates in Chicago are both in mixed-race relationships (well, quite a lot of her Chicagoan mates are actually, but i think of her two bezzies the quickest).

Yeah, I can't remember where I saw it (I'll need to find it again) but I saw some tables a couple months ago that showed the outmarriage rates of various racial/ethnic groups of the American population, and both the Hispanic and Asian outmarriage rates were at about 35-40% (rising to 70%+ for long-settled groups like Japanese-Americans), while the black outmarriage rate was about 8%. I'll try and find it if you're interested?

And it's certainly no secret that a recent big thing has been white male/Asian female couples (any Asian-American message board is full to the brim of Asian male teeth-gnashing over this).

The rest of your post is really great, dude. :) I don't know nearly enough about the Chi as I should, so it's cool to hear about it from someone who knows the place well but has an outsiders perspective on it.
 

scottdisco

rip this joint please
awh cheers for the words Pearsall :D

those tables you mention do sound interesting, if you happen to come across them think of the Dissensus lot, but don't break your neck.

>And it's certainly no secret that a recent big thing has been white male/Asian female couples (any Asian-American message board is full to >the brim of Asian male teeth-gnashing over this).

well the two couples i mentioned in my post are both boy/girl but it's the girls that are both white, boys both Asian, so yeah near enough pretty much ;)

your point about overlap is i take it to do with, basically, the entire fucken history of the States, politics, culture, blahblah?

w'out opening up Pandora's Box or whatever... :confused:
 

Backjob

Well-known member
Dude if you think Asian-Americans are pissed about the whole white guy-asian girl thing, you should hear what Asian Asians say about it!

In vietnam they're actually trying to ban it...
 
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