London is a city of migration and this is not only because the person you walk past in the street, or who is standing at the bus stop, has journeyed here from somewhere else. It is much more than both this and the superficial idea that the capital has breached a particular threshold, or measure, of cultural diversity. The language of ‘diversity’ – be it in academic circles or economic city branding or political slogans – renders the experiences we are concerned with in this book into a succession of surface clichés or flat travesties.