Leicester will soon become the first British city with a non-white majority – a transformation which is welcomed by its citizens.
Some time in the next five years Leicester will become the first English city where everyone is a member of some ethnic or religious minority. The schools are already there. By 2007, only 44% of pupils across the city were ethnically white. By 2015 at the latest, the adult population will be less than half white. Of course there are parts of every city in England where white people are a minority, but they are only parts. In Leicester this is the situation in the city as a whole. An enormous transformation is under way, and no one outside seems to have noticed. But does this make the city a model for our future? Or is it a proof that mass immigration brings unmanageable strains?
Talking to people around the city, two things are obvious. The first is that Leicester works, mostly, and diversity is genuinely popular here; the second is that it is unique. In important ways it is more like London than like other provincial cities and this has helped it on.
"People in London think we're a Muslim city in the north," says Viv Faull, the dean of the cathedral, "but they're wrong on both counts." For a start, Leicester is not in the north. London is only an hour and 10 minutes away by train. Nor is it "a Muslim city". The unique character of migration into Leicester is twofold: firstly, that it is multicultural, not bicultural. Instead of a simple divide between Asian Muslims and the rest, as is common further north, everyone here is a minority. The largest community was, until very recently, Hindu not Muslim; and the overwhelming majority of the Asians here, whether Hindu or Muslim, came from families which had first emigrated to east Africa a couple of generations before arriving here after their expulsion in the early 1970s.
This makes the picture very different to the towns further north. In Bradford the Muslim population is larger than in Leicester, but they are almost all Pakistani in origin, without any intermediate migration, and there are no other significant minorities.
"Leicester is a Gujarati city," says Riaz Rafat, a Muslim interfaith worker: "At one stage it was the biggest Gujarati city in the world outside of Durban in South Africa. And the fact that we have had a Gujarati-speaking population – with Muslims, Hindus, and Christians all speaking the same language – means that a Muslim in Leicester will feel more in common with a Leicester Hindu than with a Pakistani Muslim."
I heard the same observation from Suleman Nagdi, a remarkable man who helped invent the Muslim community in Leicester after his father died on a bank holiday. Islam demands that bodies be buried within 24 hours of death (in fact, this early disposal is practised by all Gujarati religions: Hindus and Christians do it too). British practice, on the other hand is much slower, and in Leicester 20 years ago no cemeteries were open on bank holidays. Nagdi complained to the city council, and when the council told him it was sympathetic, but could not deal with individual grievances and needed a body to negotiate with, he decided to make one.
Over a period of four months, he walked into every one of the city's 36 mosques and talked to the elders. He had soon formed the Muslim Burial Council, which now consults widely, even in Europe.
"We are a community of communities," says Nagdi, "that's why umbrella organisations are important."
But not even the Gujarati element predominates in Leicester. Although the centre of Leicester has been redeveloped with all the normal chain stores, the rest of the city is not in the least bit homogenised, and is full of an individualistic commercial energy.
Nick Carter, who as editor of the Leicester Mercury had a deliberate policy of promoting good community relations and not running Daily Mail-type scare stories, says that the east African immigration brought "a particular entrepreneurial spirit, and a strong family and community ethic. It's always been very difficult in the last 30 to 40 years for anyone to point to the minority and say, 'They are living off us.' In times of recession, Leicester never seems to recess as badly as other places because of these multiple small businesses."
Walking a quarter of a mile down the studentish bit of the Narborough Road I found foodstores from India, the Caribbean, Poland, Africa, "Kurdish, Turkish, Lithuanian and English specialities"; two chapels, a Hindu temple, a signpost to the nearest mosque, half a dozen restaurants, two bars and one brothel. There was not a single chain store. The same was true of the shops in the Evington region, where much of the Muslim settlement has concentrated.
Here, a Deobandi mosque, built in 2000, faces the Edwardian church of St Philip's, started in 1909. The church's congregation is about 30, mixed white, Indian and African; the mosque across the road holds 500 people. And on Fridays "it's full: prostration room only, with another hundred outside on the pavement," says the rector of St Philip's, Alan Race. But Race does more than watch, with a certain wry envy. His church is also the home of a study centre for interfaith relations. The local parish raised £60,000 towards the cost of the centre. "The faithful group here have seen their area utterly reshaped. Nonetheless, they have come to see that a new way of being a parish church has to be invented, and shaped," he said.
Leicester is, on some measures, the most religious city in Britain: 20% to 25% of the population takes part in religious life. But although religion has provided ways for communities to define themselves politically, it does seem that the defining elements in the story have been cultural. There is a genuine and widespread belief in tolerance, which does not exclude conflict but does seem to bring politics down to the personal, where these difficulties can be resolved. "In London, there's a heck of a lot of tolerance," said Erfana Bora, a science teacher at a Muslim girls' school, "But that's because nobody gives a damn."
But to export Leicester's peculiar and hard-won tolerance is not easy. There are a couple of policy tricks that could work. The Church of England has helped manage the transition gracefully; the St Philip's parish has turned itself into a resource for the whole community, while the bishops' interfaith council provides a way for other religions into the establishment. The Leicester Mercury's scrupulously anti-inflammatory reporting has helped; so too has the work of the Muslim Burial Council. This brings mosques together with each other, and with the unglamorous end of local politics, in a way which sidesteps theological differences and knits the religious into local, democratic politics.
But none of these things are magic remedies. No one I talked to believed that Leicester had the answer for anywhere else; they were modestly confident that it might have the answers to its own problems.
