Abstract
Speaking on his LBC show on 29 March 2021, David Lammy the Labour MP for Tottenham, North London, and then shadow justice secretary defined his identity in the following way: ‘I’m of African descent, African-Caribbean descent, but I am English.’ But for one caller who responded on air just after this statement, it was simply not possible for Lammy to be English and at the same time have African-Caribbean roots. The question of the inclusion of first- and second-generation migrants in Britain is examined through the lens of London in Panikos Panayi's latest book Migrant City: A New History of London. Panayi, a professor of European History at the University of Leicester, has an impressive track record in publications about migrants in Britain: his work on Germans in Britain is central to thinking about how Europeans have shaped modern Britain. He has also published on ‘enemy aliens’ in Britain during the First World War, as well as on the topics of migration, memory, and violence in modern imperial and non-imperial contexts. In Migrant City, he combines years of extensive research, new and old, with his own roots and sense of belonging. In the prologue, he takes us back to his childhood and teenage years in the neighbourhood of Hornsey, North London, where he grew up with his Greek-Cypriot family.
Panayi easily convinces his readers that London migrants are worthy of a book to themselves. He outlines how half of the migrant communities who have settled in Britain have elected London as their home (xviii). These groups include Europeans, ranging from the Huguenots in the sixteenth century and revolutionaries and anarchists in the nineteenth century but also migrants from the British Empire and Commonwealth, as well as other places, including Latin America and Asia. The aim of Panayi's book, as outlined in the preface, is to ‘demonstrate that immigrants constitute real Londoners in the same way as the white British do’ (xvi). At such an early stage in the book, one wishes that Panayi had unpacked a little more what the term ‘real Londoners’ might mean and who has the authority to define this category. In writing the history of migrant Londoners, Panayi astutely shifts the conventional focus of migration studies beyond the dual approach that links migration with persecution and exploitation on the one hand, and with social mobility on the other. To him ‘the relationship between migration and the evolution of London only becomes fully comprehensible by accepting that migrants have impacted upon the economy, society and culture’(xvii). London has welcomed migrants both from the lower echelons of society and as wealthy elites who have gained success in finance, the arts and sport, among others.
While other scholars who have penned ‘biographies’ of European capital cities often devote the early sections of their books to considering how one might write about such complex urban and historical spaces (a good example of this being Colin Jones, Paris Biography of a City, 2006), the question of approach does not occupy much space in the introduction of Migrant City, although clearly the structure of the book is thoroughly thought through. To examine his topic, Panayi has chosen a thematic approach so that each chapter ranges in time from the medieval period until the present, with a particular focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Peppering the book are frequent case studies about a particular community that illuminate the theme of a given chapter.
The book opens with a dizzying mapping of migrant communities in London and its suburbs, outlining early settlements and their development as migrants climbed social ladders and followed the city's urban development, moving into new areas. In some cases, as with the Jewish community in Golders Green, some areas only really developed through the settling of migrants (p. 47). The following chapters focus on migrants and labour: they stress the often-exploitative conditions of low-paid employment that migrants faced and still face, the gendering of employment, and how skilled migrants have, throughout history, fallen back on unskilled and semi-skilled jobs because of racism. Panayi also examines the high rate of self-employment and entrepreneurship among migrant communities (p. 87) as well as elite migrants. While doing so he keeps his reader aware of the social and economic heterogeneity that characterizes migrant communities, as well as the legal restrictions they face in moving to and obtaining work in Britain. Migrant City carefully examines the varied relationships of love, hatred, and friendship between migrants and white Britons; a significant corrective to some studies that consider migrant communities in a hermetic way. Later chapters stress how migrants have shaped London, from religion to food, through to entertainment. Panayi's superb study demonstrates how migrants have been crucial in the flourishing of skills, labour, and knowledge that have made London a cosmopolitan city.