Abstract

Some three centuries ago, French Huguenots found refuge from persecution in London. They were by no means the first exotic minority to gravitate there and they were very far from being the last, being followed by nineteenth-century Jews, twentieth-century Poles and the legion of post-colonial migrants, all long before the present-day globalization of immigration. No realistic interpretation of the heritage of London, or of its global tourist-historic primacy, can be other than ethnically plural – to say nothing of its historic imperial ties with peoples above and beyond those who physically migrated there, its even older magnetism for regionally diverse migrants from within the British islands, or its human diversity otherwise defined. Where London has led, other world cities have followed, and increasingly lesser places, to the point where national populations are enthusiastically claimed – or grudgingly recognized – to represent a plurality of heritages.