London, always a cosmopolitan city, grew steadily more polyglot and multicultural. The Commonwealth connection accounted for only part of the transformation. Despite restrictive immigration laws, the flux of refugees and asylum-seekers from many countries continued, and new communities of Vietnamese, Kurds, Somalis, Eritreans, Iraqis, Iranians, Brazilians, and Colombians sprang into being. Many of the foreigners settled into housing estates in the poorer parts of Inner London, particularly the crescent of inner boroughs to the east of the City. At the other end of the economic spectrum, London’s position at the crossroads of the global economy brought transient populations of the international business world as well as schools, shops, and renting agencies and services to support them. Their social geography was entirely different, spreading in an arc through the northwest and southwest suburbs. London also attracted wealthy foreigners to become property owners and seasonal residents. Thus, people from the Middle East, East Asia, and Latin America purchased real estate and internationalized neighborhoods such as Mayfair, Park Lane, and Belgravia. Shopping streets that lead north from Hyde Park, such as Queensway and the southern end of Edgware Road, were almost entirely taken over by Arabs.

Though it is not easy to establish reliable figures on London’s ethnic composition, the columns of names in the telephone books and school registers are testimony to the transformation of a population that in the middle years of the 20th century was still chiefly British-born and Anglophone. Nearly one-third of the resident population of 21st-century London comes from overseas. The western boroughs best reflect the multiethnic quality of the city (partly because of their proximity to Heathrow), while the boroughs of Havering, Barking and Dagenham, Bexley, and Bromley form an arc of almost entirely British-born white populations on the far eastern edge of London. Those are also the areas least touched by the cosmopolitan restaurants, clubs, and shops that have banished old, insular dining habits elsewhere in the metropolis.

Residential patterns

London’s social geography is never static. The city has never had ghettos or strong policies of segregation. The areas of local government are too large and the housing stock too diverse for exclusionary practices of the kind encountered in some North American cities. There is intermixture even in the areas having a high concentration of one particular group, such as those of the extreme orthodox Jews at Stamford Hill, the Sikhs at Southall, or the West Indians at Brixton. Boundaries and distributions are perpetually shifting. Minorities follow one another in the familiar sequence of arrival, consolidation, and outward and upward mobility. Jews who came to Whitechapel in the 1890s shifted eastward to the semidetached suburb of Ilford. Cypriots who had settled along the Seven Sisters Road moved north along the old drovers’ road, Green Lanes, to Tottenham and Haringay. Traces of earlier diasporas are scattered through Inner London. Most of London’s 11 Welsh churches are grouped around the center. The Welsh Congregational Church at Radnor Walk in Chelsea today serves a dispersed instead of a local congregation. Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish Lutherans drive eastward on Sunday mornings to worship in their old churches at the dockyard gates.