Undocumented, Unseen: The Making of the Everyday in the Global Metropolis of London

Article
  • 2015•09•01

    Parvati Nair

    In (ed) Anne Kershen, London the Promised Land, Ashgate

    Some two decades since the publication of London the Promised Land?, which charted and investigated the successes and failures of the migrant experience in London over a period of three hundred years, this book re-examines the migrant landscape in London. While remaining a beacon for immigrants, the migrant face of the city has changed rapidly and dramatically from one which was heavily populated by semi-skilled and unskilled post-colonial incomers, to one which now embraces the EU Accession Countries, refugees from the Middle East and Africa, oligarchs from Russia, the new wealthy from China, economic migrants from Latin America and Ireland, and still, post-colonial immigrants – at the same time witnessing the exodus ‘home’ of incomers, or their descendants, who now see opportunities where there were none before.

    The contributors, all leading academics and practitioners in their diverse fields, examine changes to the migrant landscape of contemporary London at the micro, meso and macro levels. London the Promised Land Revisited thus explores a range of experiences in the capital, including the presence and treatment of illness amongst migrants, the phenomenon of migrant ‘invisibility’ and asylum, the migrant marketplace and ethnic ‘clustering’, and interaction with local and national government – across a variety of migrant groups, both ‘new’ and ‘old’. As such, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interest in migration, migrant experiences and the contemporary ‘global’ city.