Heathrow, in London’s western outlands, never lets you forget it’s there. Jets ascend and descend constantly, turning the air into a migraine. People and cargo, all going and coming all the time.
Except for the asylum seekers, the refugees, the migrants, who are stuck like lost baggage in commandeered hotels dotted around the airport.
There is the Atrium, opposite a British Airways training centre, a freshly built hotel that self-describes as ‘ultra-chic’ and charges up to £241 a night. It is so close to a runway that from certain angles it looks as if passenger jets are flying right into it. The Home Office has booked out every floor to accommodate the migrants.
Nobody knows what will happen to them. Nobody knows anything
The story of how some 40,000 people came to be held in hotels like the Atrium is complicated yet simple. You have a threatened, terrorised world full of people on the move. More of them moving every month. You have Britain, with its reputation for generosity, as the preferred destination for many. And you have successive Home Office ministers who, from a lack of options and from a lack of imagination, have ended up spending £5.6 million every day on hotels for the asylum seekers who make it here. Grim stories about these places — like the teenage boy allegedly raped last month in a Waltham Forest hotel where 150 children were held with 250 adults — continue to pile up. Home Office officials tell the press their own policy is ‘unacceptable’. But it grinds on.
A November afternoon, the sky spits out rain. The Atrium, fenced off from the public, looms above Great South West road. Coaches pull up in its car park. Other coaches leave. Migrants mill around, smoking or squatting.
You can’t follow them in. Attempts to do so are intercepted by security guards. Security is the same the world over — overworked, underpaid negativity. No. No. No.
A guy in an ill-fitting black suit appears. He walks sheepishly towards me, halts, then spits in a puddle.
The site security manager.
‘I’m not telling you that you can’t interview anyone’, he begins.
‘Well, you can’t say that.’
I try to interview him. He has no comment when I ask him how many migrants are currently living in the Atrium. He has no comment when I ask him who his employer is. He has no comment when I ask how often the coaches arrive. Two a day? Ten a week? Direct from Dover? No comment. No.
Pairs and trios of migrants walk the lanes around the Atrium. They are not imprisoned. They have the freedom to abscond. There is nowhere obvious for most of them to abscond to, though, in this estranging landscape of brownfield sites, chain link fences and deserted conference centres.
I speak to migrants from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. They variously describe the Atrium as ‘OK’, ‘OK’, ‘OK’ and ‘good’. They say there are only men here, two to a room, around 70 or 80 on each floor. They say the staff are rude. An Iranian tells me that ‘they don’t pay attention to anyone. If you were starving on the street corner they wouldn’t care about you.’
They all think the food sucks. It is cooked elsewhere and brought to the Atrium in bags. One man is appalled to discover that Indian food is eaten in Britain.
Many of them were previously held at Manston, the asylum centre in Kent (‘Not… good,’ says the Iranian) and brought to Heathrow in the last week. One man says he has been in three hotels in ten days. Another says he has been in ten hotels in the last year.
The migrants are dazed. Squinting into phones. They don’t speak English or know how to get around or what to eat or what the time is or what the money means.
‘I don’t know’, says an Iraqi man. ‘We will go to another hotel. You stay in the room. You go to another city.’
His story was typical. His father was a soldier in Iraq, in Rwandz. He was killed. His mother said they had to go, now, to Europe. ‘Me and her go to Greece. I lost her there.’
An odyssey. Four years through the European camps. Serbia, Macedonia, Bosnia, Croatia, Italy, France. Always knackered, watchful for the police, the criminals and a route to Britain. Always improvising. Everything that made him a person could be cleared away in an instant, like stage scenery.
‘Two boys drive the ship.’ There were around 50 of them crossing the channel. He thought he would die there, but he found himself in Dover. Three days in Manston. The overcrowding. The chaos. ‘City next I don’t know.’ Then Heathrow. And the planes above him turning the air upside down every five minutes.
He does not know about the crisis. The newspaper headlines. The polling that shows how unpopular his presence in Britain is. How troubling he is for this government. All the expense. He does not live in a world that has borders. He says he could not stay in France. They would take him back to Greece, and Greece would take him back to Iraq, where he would be killed. Like the others, he says the same thing, over and over. ‘We will create a good life. We will be good people.’
There is a Kurdish man from Iran, 37 years-old. He crossed the channel 24 days ago. It began when a woman died in custody. He joined the protests in Marivan, his town. Women, Life, Freedom — that was what they shouted. They marched every day. ‘After that, the police poured on us.’
They tortured him. He pulls his trouser leg up. Cratered scars along his leg, a moonscape. Crusted and yellow. And on his hands. He says there are more, that the police used knives. He is afraid they will find him here. A tapeworm of fear squirms around inside him.
He fled Iran with money and a bag.
He says none of his belongings — his mobile phone, his clothes, and his money — came with him when he left Manston last week. He says all his family’s numbers were in his wallet. He has lost contact. I ask him why he can’t call his family on a different phone. He doesn’t remember the numbers. He thinks the police might have his family. ‘Police in Iran… mafia, mafia.’
He starts to cry. Two children. This high, he gestures. His children. ‘Please help me get news about my family’ he says through Google translate, crying, looking at the floor.
He has heard nothing from the Home Office. He has no idea how long his asylum claim will take to process, no idea where he will be taken next. This, too, is typical. Nobody knows what will happen to them. Nobody knows anything.
‘Bro’ is from Kurdistan. He knows five words of English: Bro, Good, England, Cigarette, and Sixteen. He says that’s his age. I have no idea if that’s true. He could be thirty. He might be thirteen. He grins.
‘Cigarette?’ he offers, outside the Atrium.
We walk down a lane, smoking, towards a pub. Bro doesn’t really know where he is going.
England is good, he says. Cigarettes are good too, he says. There is not much more to say.
We approach a red letterbox. Bro strides towards it with his diminished, burning fag butt. He makes a gesture that says: I put it in here right? He is still grinning.
The butt halfway inside the slot. Glowing orange. About to drop.
I lead Bro away. He is laughing. I am laughing. ‘Good’, says Bro. I agree with him, now that the butt is safely in a drain. ‘Never in there, OK?’ I point at the letterbox.
Bro wanders off aimlessly down the lane. Was he joking? Has he been an accidental arsonist since he arrived here? Does he know anything about where he is? A wave of hopelessness washes over me. Bro is lost. The Iranian Kurd is lost. All the migrants are lost. Every conversation I have around the Atrium only makes the system, and the Home Office, seem more broken.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Using hotels to house migrants was an emergency measure that became permanent. In February last year, when the number of migrants in hotels stood below 10,000, the Home Office launched ‘Operation Oak’. The plan? ‘Accelerate’ the departure of migrants from hotels. They would be ‘decanted’ — as if they were whiskey — into longer-term accommodation. But there was never enough longer-term accommodation. Hotels kept being booked. Home Secretary Priti Patel briefed that she ‘hated’ using them.
We heard no more of ‘Operation Oak’. The number of asylum seekers kept growing. In 2020, 8,466 crossed the channel in small boats; 28,526 crossed last year; more than 40,000 crossed this year. At the same time, the backlog in asylum applications kept growing too. It’s now two-and-a-half times greater than it was at the end of 2019. When hotel bookings slowed this summer, the asylum system, which relied on the hotel policy more than ministers realised, buckled. Over 4,000 migrants ended up being held at the Manston Asylum Processing Centre in Kent by October 31st. Almost triple its capacity.
All the pressure — the relentless channel crossings, the mountainous case backlog, the paucity of accommodation — seemed to burst at Manston. There were claims of drug-dealing by guards; claims that infectious diseases were spreading through the camp; claims that migrants there were improvising weapons from tent poles. One migrant held there died a few days ago.
The complexities of Britain’s migrant crisis melted away at Manston. They could be reduced to a single line. Migrants keep coming, and we don’t know what to do about it. So, the Home Office, fearing that Manston would blow up, did what it knew best. It frantically booked hotels. Manston was emptied. The Atrium, and dozens of hotels around the country, were filled.
The Atrium’s local is a crooked 16th century English pub. A television with the football on. A dog drowsy in a corner chair. Cheerful blithe Englishmen drinking their lager, watching their sports. Jets split the air overhead, rattling the windows.
Outside, in another world, in the Atrium a few hundred yards away, the future is being housed. The future that has no interest in borders. Those thousands, and those thousands after them, who will come to England whatever the cost.
There will be more Home Secretaries. They will rear up in the newspapers that this pub’s customers read. They will make ever more inflated promises about solving this crisis. They’ll say they can stop the future.
It’s like saying you can house train an avalanche or tame a waterfall. Their soaring words will forever be inversely proportional to their ability to do anything about the border. Net migration is at the highest level on record. Asylum seeker arrivals are the same. And the future will keep coming, across mountains, over the seas, hidden in lorries.
The future will keep showing up in Britain, covered in scars, fearful and lost. We will keep storing it in places like the Atrium, an ‘ultra-chic’ £241 per night admission that we have no idea what to do about migration. That’s just the way it goes now.
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