The hundreds of languages spoken in London are the city’s greatest glory

Every history of London — and there have been very many — has looked at the importance for the city of migration. Not to mention it would be as inconceivable as ignoring the River Thames. Both, after all, flow directly through the city’s heart. In this scholarly new study, the difference is that London’s history of migration — its patchwork of settlement, its Irish ‘rookery’, its ‘coloured quarter’, Huguenot silk-weavers, Jewish street-sellers, German bakers, Italian waiters, Chinatown, Banglatown — is placed centre-stage. The movement of all these people to the capital — its extraordinary national, then continental, then international pull — is the story.

Panikos Panayi, born in London of Greek-Cypriot parents, emphasises that his own story is typical. From its inception, he stresses, this ‘great metropolitan hive’ has been a ‘migrant city’, as well as being, for most of the last half-millennium, the ‘world’s greatest’. It was founded by Roman immigrants who travelled from the sun-baked south to a place at ‘the very end of the world’ (in Joseph Conrad’s words), among ‘sandbanks, marshes, forests and savages’. There they founded a settlement, which thrived as the result of a ‘superb position’ that allowed easy communication with the rest of the country and with the Continent.

Throughout its history — even when disease among closely confined inhabitants kept life expectancy low — the city’s population has been sustained by migration, from within the British Isles and increasingly from the wider world. Recent political events have emphasised modern migration both to London and to the country as a whole — what Panayi calls the ‘hyper-growth’, which has seen the capital expand dramatically since the Big Bang of 1986.

As a Londoner, I was certainly conscious of this phenomenon.