Looking to London

Cynthia Cockburn

Description

The city of London is celebrated as one of the most ethnically diverse capitals in the world, and has been a magnet of migration since its origin. Looking to London steps into the maelstrom of current and recent wars and the resulting migration crisis, telling the stories of women refugees who have made it to London to seek safe haven among the city's Kurdish, Somali, Tamil, Sudanese and Syrian communities, under the watchful eye of the security services.



Cynthia Cockburn brings her lively and lucid style to a world in which hatred is being countered by compassion, at a moment when the nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiment expressed in Brexit is being challenged by a warm-hearted 'refugees welcome' movement bringing community activists into partnership with London borough councils for the reception and rehoming of victims of war.



This book is essential reading for all who want to think more deeply about the meaning of asylum.
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. London: Magnet for Migrants

2. From South-East Turkey to North-East London: Kurds in Hackney

3. From the Horn of Africa to the Isle of Dogs: Somalis in Tower Hamlets

4. Home for Whom? Tamils in Hounslow and Home Office Detention

5. The Sudans' Divided People Come To Camden

6. Syrian War, Migration Crisis and 'Refugees Welcome' in Lambeth

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Minority Studies
• Ethnic Studies
• Human Rights
• Municipal
• Social Science
• Charities
• Sexual Abuse
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Tower Hamlets
• Women
• Religión
• Gran Londres
• Hostile Environment
• 21st century
• Housing
• Charitable organization
• Detention
• Windrush
• Incarceration
• Deportation
• Demographics
• Kurdish
• Emigration
• General officer
• London Borough of Tower Hamlets
• Local government
• Legislation
• Multiculturalism
• Gender
• Woman
• Tamil
• Administrative division
• Nationality
• Municipality
• Greater London
• European Union
• The Women
• Religion
• General
• Hounslow
• Lambeth
• Hackney
• EU
• Migration
• District londonien de Tower Hamlets
• Assimilation
• Somali
• Grand Londres
• London
• Immigration
• Tamoul

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 septembre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781786801272
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Looking to London
Also by Cynthia Cockburn:
Anti-militarism: Political and Gender Dynamics of Peace Movements
From Where We Stand: War, Women s Activism and Feminist Analysis
The Line: Women, Partition and the Gender Order in Cyprus
The Postwar Moment: Militaries, Masculinities and International Peacekeeping (co-edited with Dubravka Zarkov)
The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict
Bringing Technology Home: Gender and Technology in a Changing Europe (co-edited with Ruza F rst-Dili )
Gender and Technology in the Making (co-authored with Susan Ormrod)
In the Way of Women: Men s Resistance to Sex Equality in Organizations
Two-Track Training: Sex Inequalities and the Youth Training Scheme
Machinery of Dominance: Women, Men and Technical Know-how
Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change
The Local State: Management of Cities and People
Looking to London
Stories of War, Escape and Asylum
Cynthia Cockburn
First published 2017 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Cynthia Cockburn 2017
The right of Cynthia Cockburn to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The author is the source of all photographs except where otherwise noted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 9922 5 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 9921 8 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0126 5 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0128 9 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0127 2 EPUB eBook





This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
Simultaneously printed in the United Kingdom and United States of America
For Charles, with whom I became a Londoner.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. London: Magnet for Migrants
2. From South-East Turkey to North-East London: Kurds in Hackney
3. From the Horn of Africa to the Isle of Dogs: Somalis in Tower Hamlets
4. Home for Whom? Tamils in Hounslow and Home Office Detention
5. The Sudans Divided People Come to Camden
6. Syrian War, Migration Crisis and Refugees Welcome in Lambeth
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank very warmly all who have supported me in researching and writing this book. Each chapter ends with a footnote, naming and thanking the many people who generously spent time helping me with it. Midway through the project I was unexpectedly hospitalized twice for cancer surgery and received memorable NHS care at University College London Hospital (UCLH), and afterwards at Heathgrove Lodge nursing home in the London Borough of Barnet. Special thanks go to the community of NHS surgeons, doctors, nurses, physios, care workers, cleaners and others from whose skill and kindliness I benefited in those months. I continued my study of London s demography from my UCLH hospital bed: of the first 56 staff of all grades I encountered on the ward, I estimate that only 12 per cent were white British, while 88 per cent were migrants originating in 22 different countries. Here was London s celebrated diversity expressed within the walls of a single workplace, a clear parallel to the place-based communities I was writing about in the localities out there . While recovering the strength I needed to cope with buses and tubes, I often called on the services of a local cab company, Prime Cars, and would like to thank Kamrul and other helpful drivers for enlivening journeys in rain and shine.
My greatest joy in life is the company of my daughters, Claudia Cockburn and Jess Coburn, and my beloved grand-daughters, Elsa Maria, Josie and Deniel. I know you know what your never-failing love and encouragement means to me. Many friends, too, supported me in getting home and back to work. Thanks to you all, but most particularly to you, Liz (Khan) and Sue (Finch), who gave so much time to my needs.
Finally, my publishers. It s been a great pleasure to return to Pluto Press, who trusted me enough back in the 1970s to publish my first book, and several subsequently. It was good to find them surviving and thriving after many setbacks, and as supportive as ever. My special thanks to Anne Beech, Pluto s perceptive and positive-minded Editor-in-Chief, who encouraged me to persist with the book despite setbacks, and guided me gently through the final stages of writing and editing. Thanks also to Emily Orford, Neda Tehrani, Melanie Patrick, Robert Webb and other Pluto staff who helped in so many ways to get the book into print. Looking to London has many failings, this I know. But all of them are down to me, and in spite of the best efforts of all the many people I name and thank.
Introduction
This book is a celebration of London, but a cautious one. It celebrates the city s famous cultural diversity. It celebrates the generations of migrants who have made it what it is. And it celebrates the courage of today s many refugees from war, who are helping make a reality of their belief that London welcomes newcomers. The celebration has to be cautious, however, because London is a profoundly unequal place, of obscene wealth and profound poverty, building sky-high palaces while homeless people, among them many refugees, sleep rough on the streets below. We need to remember, too, that today London is a financial centre fostering capitalist exploitation worldwide, and yesterday was the capital of an empire that created the conditions giving rise to wars in Asia and Africa today.
Nonetheless, I have my own reason to value London. I arrived here 63 years ago, as a labour migrant, an ill-informed 19-year-old from the socially conservative, class-ridden and almost wholly white British industrial East Midlands in which I was born. Travelling to the capital in search of a shorthand-typist s pay packet changed the trajectory of my life, entirely for the better. I kept a diary in those days. It tells me that on Saturday, 29 August 1953, my father brought me to London and deposited me and my suitcase in a hostel housing 300 women. That Monday, 31 August, early in the morning I went out onto the pavement and, asking my way from people around me, located my workplace. I was shown to a desk and sat down at the typewriter - one of those heavy manual machines we used in those days. The people with whom, morning and evening, I packed into London s red buses absorbed my attention. Many were, I discovered, labour migrants like myself, but from further afield. Quite a few were Caribbean and Asian, from the Commonwealth.
My first move out of hostel accommodation was into a small flat in Victoria, shared with other women. Next, I lived for a while in a rented room, which I had to myself. My job was in the clerical grades of government service, and when I reached the age of 21 I became liable to a foreign posting . They sent me to Bangkok, Thailand, to be the secretary of the British Information Officer in the UK Embassy. There, I began to register facts about the wider world of which till then I d been ignorant. Thailand, one of the few countries in Asia that avoided colonization, taught me what imperialism had meant elsewhere. I had a lesson in revolution too. At the back of a cupboard in the office I found an extraordinarily beautiful photographic portrait of Ho Chi Minh. Who was this man? Learning about North Vietnam directed my gaze towards Mao Tse Tung, and I began to read about the long march of the communists which, only eight years previously, had culminated in the creation of the People s Republic of China. I wanted to go there. I wanted to see for myself. But when the British Embassy learned that I was seeking a Chinese visa, the Charg d Affaires stood me on the mat and said No way! Not while you re an employee of the British state. Are you defecting or something? So I resigned my job, got the visa and travelled in China. Those weeks were an important addition to my erratic education. And with a tale to tell, I found I could write.
Back in London in 1958, now with a partner, I settled down in a small rented flat in Primrose Hill. I made a living from freelance journalism while he studied architecture at North London Polytechnic. Behaving, as so many did in those days, in a socially endorsed and orderly manner, we got married (in church, no less) and a few years later had our first child. It was at that point, in 1966, we moved from our flat in Primrose Hill to an address in Kentish Town. Property was cheap in those days, and with only modest help from our families we were able to buy the freehold of a nineteenth-century terrace house. This house became a truly felt home and would, as it turned out, remain my home till the present day, half a century on. I often dwell on this relationship of mine to the concept of home, the comfort, security and longevity that define it. It s what makes me pay such close attention to refugee women as they speak of the homes they have been forced to abandon, and their feelings about the places - tents, bed-and-breakfast lodgings, rented rooms - they ve inhabited on their way to achieving a new one.
Wars and refuge from wars began to take on significance for me as my partner and I explored our borough, Camden. We found ourselves among two large migrant communities, Greek Cypriot and Irish. I remember so well the little Cypriot shop in Inverness Street where we would go for olives and pitta bread. Each weekend there would be a wedding in the Greek Orthodox Church at the end of our street. Cyprus was still a British colony then, and many of the older Camden Cypriots had come here as economic migrants. But now some were coming in flight from the fierce anti-imperialist war on