Matthew Engel knows a thing or two about Leicestershire. He spent his formative years in neighbouring Northamptonshire. Growing up, Leicester was like the glamorous older sister, he says. More attractive. Alluring. Always up to something more interesting, it seemed. “Leicester always seemed to have a bit more going for it,” he says. “And then, when I started following cricket, this was in the late ’60s, early ’70s, Leicestershire were enjoying their most successful period. Ray Illingworth and Roger Tolchard and all of that. They always had a better football team, too.” So when he turned up in Leicester for a week in 2013, he already knew what to expect. Or at least, he thought he did. What he discovered was a county detached from its urban heart – a city demographic that had undergone one of the biggest changes of any city in England in the past 40 years, and a county that, in comparison, had hardly changed at all. You find that in all sorts of places, all over the country; a busy, metropolitan heart and a slower-paced, more rural perimeter. Leicester, one of the most congested cities in the country, was brimming with limping traffic. In the county, the B roads were full of horses, “ladies, mainly,” he says, “riding with the hauteur that can only be achieved by an English woman on horseback.’’ The separation between city and county is more pronounced in Leicestershire than anywhere else in England, he says. There are a million people living in Leicestershire, a third of them in Leicester itself. “The connection between the city and the county, still overwhelmingly white, was never very strong. “The link has become ever more tenuous, especially since Leicester regained its old independence from the county council in 1997,” says Matthew. “Leicester has gone from a city that was more or less white, to a city that is now less than 50 per cent white – all in the space of one, two generations.” It’s a huge change. Historians will look back at this period and see it as an enormously influential time in the city’s history. But it has also lead to a chasm; a biography with a dual narrative – one city, one county, bound by geography and history, a hospital that serves both, a football and rugby team which continue to attract the support of people in both, but increasingly two different places with different attitudes and cultures. Matthew Engel is quick to stress that, although he is a former Guardian feature writer, he is not stereotypically right-on. “I am sceptical of the argument you hear from many liberals that immigration is always a good thing for communities and, if you question that then, somehow, that makes you racist,” he says. “That’s not true. There have been some problems in this country caused by immigration.” That’s not the case in Leicester, he argues. The arrival, in the early 1970s, of families of mainly Gujarati immigrants, expelled by Uganda’s Idi Amin, not only saved them – it saved Leicester. “I think there was a genuine humanitarian need for them arriving here and settling in Leicester,” he says. They came here because they dealt with Leicester businessmen in the hosiery trade. But word soon went round. Come to Leicester, the new arrivals said in letters home. It’s good here. The city council paid for full page advertisements claiming the city was “full up”. The plan backfired. More immigrants arrived. “These people came to Leicester with a purpose. They were in genuine political peril. They may have arrived with nothing – but they were determined people. They were entrepreneurial. Educated. They worked hard. “They started to take over the nation’s newsagents and they kept them open much longer then their predecessors, elderly English couples in cardigans.” In many ways, they were the kind of businessmen that left-leaning Labour politicians instinctively hate on principle – if they’re white, says Matthew. Here, after a bumpy start, they were embraced. Today, Leicester is the poster child for modern British race relations. That’s down to the authorities who welcomed the new influx of migrants, the good-natured tolerance of its people – and the immigrants themselves. Read more: leicestermercury.co.uk/Leicester-gorgeous-girl-8211-eminently-loveable/story-24534358-detail/story.html#ixzz3J5iDxFYo
Posted on: Sat, 15 Nov 2014 00:16:07 +0000
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