When walking down a London street, you are bound to hear at least
three different languages. Like any large city, you would expect to see a bit
of diversity in the population, but London takes diversity to a completely
different level. In class, we learned that London could probably be considered
as one of the few global cities in the world; my experience has only confirmed
this statement. On popular London streets, you'll experience the diversity probably
due to tourism. The first day we arrived, I was surprised to see a group of
Japanese students getting off a coach similar to ours at Buckingham Palace. I
guess I shouldn't be surprised seeing that we had just flown across an ocean
ourselves, but nonetheless I was. Likewise, on Oxford I heard Portuguese,
French, Dutch, and what I believe was Arabic as I browsed some of the stores.
Walking by Parliament, we even saw a man playing the bag pipes in full
Scottish garb, which was very interesting.
But the diversity
I heard and saw as I explored London was not all because London is a booming
tourist destination. While we were sitting in our seats at the football game,
the man behind us started speaking to us. Despite his grammatically correct
English, his accent was very noticeable and he informed us that he
had recently moved from Germany to live in London. The area where we really
encountered the ethnic diversity of London, however, was certainly the East
End. We learned about the three ethnicities that immigrated to that
area in large numbers: the French Huguenots, the Jews, and
the Bangladeshi. Their presence, while not apparent to the uninformed
eye, is everywhere in that area. For example, we saw an old Jewish soup
kitchen, the elegant homes that once belonged to French silk makers and
Brick Lane that was laden with Bangladeshi restaurants and stores. The ethnic
diversity was visible elsewhere, most notably, through food. At Greenwich,
there were foods of all kinds in market including Ethiopian, Indian, and
Japanese cuisine.
Although I know
that there are many Afro-Caribbean immigrants in London, I saw a lot less
racial diversity than I ethnic diversity. I saw very few Asians (except for
tourists) and Latinos, and I only saw blacks sparingly. I'm sure I would have
seen more racial diversity in other areas of London, but in the limited time
and areas we visited, ethnic diversity was much more prevalent.
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