Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
MULTIETHNIC LONDON
With around three hundred languages spoken and all the major religions represented, London is
Europe's most ethnically
diverse
city. First-, second- and third-generation immigrants make up
over thirty percent of the population, with many more descended from French Huguenot
refugees. The first immigrants were invaders like the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans,
while over the last four centuries, the city has absorbed wave after wave of foreigners fleeing
persecution or simply looking for a better life. In the postwar period thousands came here from
the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent; today's arrivals are more likely to come from the
world's trouble spots (Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq) or from new EU member states like Poland.
London doesn't have the sort of ghettoization that's widespread in the US, but certain areas
have become
home from home
for the more established communities. Brixton and Hackney
are the most prominent African-Caribbean and African districts; Dalston, along with Haringey,
is also home to the largest Turkish and Kurdish communities; Southall is predominantly
Punjabi; Wembley is a Gujarati stronghold; Acton has a sizeable Polish community; Hoxton is a
Vietnamese neighbourhood. The East End, London's top immigrant ghetto, has absorbed
several communities over the centuries, and is currently the heart of Bengali London, while
the Jewish community has more or less abandoned the East End, and now has its largest
Orthodox communities in Stamford Hill and Golders Green.
south of here,
Whitehall and Westminster
, is one of the easiest bits to discover on foot.
This was the city's royal, political and ecclesiastical power-base for centuries, and you'll find
some of London's most famous landmarks here: Downing Street, Big Ben, the Houses of
Parliament and
Westminster Abbey
. The grand streets and squares of
St James's
,
Mayfair
and
Marylebone
, to the north of Westminster, have been the playground of the rich since
the Restoration, and now contain some of the city's busiest shopping zones: Piccadilly,
Bond Street
,
Regent Street
and, most frenetic of the lot,
Oxford Street
.
East of Piccadilly Circus,
Soho
,
Chinatown
and
Covent Garden
are also easy to walk
around and form the heart of the West End
entertainment district, where you'll find the
largest concentration of theatres, cinemas, shops, cafés and restaurants. Adjoining Covent
Garden to the north, the university quarter of
Bloomsbury
is the location of the
ever-popular
British Museum
, a stupendous treasure house that boasts a wonderful
central, covered courtyard. To the north of Bloomsbury lie King's Cross and St Pancras
stations, home to the
British Library
and the city's Eurostar terminal, and now at the
centre of a massive redevelopment project.
Welding the West End to the financial district,
Holborn
is a little-visited area, but offers
some of central London's most surprising treats, among them the eccentric Sir John
Soane's Museum and the secluded quadrangles of the Inns of Court, where the country's
lawyers learn and ply their trade. Fashionable
Clerkenwell
, to the east of Holborn on the
northern edge of the City, is visited mostly for its many popular bars and restaurants, but
also has vestiges of London's monastic past and a radical history to be proud of.
A couple of miles downstream from Westminster,
The City
- or the City of London, to
give it its full title - is the original heart of London, simultaneously the most ancient and
the most modern part of the metropolis. Settled since Roman times, the area became the
commercial and residential heart of medieval London, with its own Lord Mayor and its
own peculiar form of local government, both of which survive (with considerable
pageantry) to this day. The Great Fire of 1666 obliterated most of the City, and although
OPPOSITE
HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT AND LONDON EYE
