Introduction

This chapter investigates how residents of the London Borough of Haringey perceive the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of their local neighbourhood. It demonstrates the extent to which this diversity, and perceptions of it, has an impact on relationships between neighbours and residents’ everyday practices and social activities. Diversity has been a recurrent theme in discussions over living in cities as residents have become increasingly diverse in socioeconomic and ethnic terms, as well as with regards to lifestyles, attitudes and activities. Since the 1990s, migration patterns to the UK have become increasingly varied and now include more and more countries and an array of other variables, such as ‘differential immigration statuses and their concomitant entitlements and restrictions of rights, divergent labour market experiences, discrete gender and age profiles, patterns of spatial distribution, and mixed local area responses by service providers and residents’ (Vertovec, 2007, p 1025). This context, which Steven Vertovec (2007) described as one of ‘super-diversity’, coexists with growing social inequality. Many studies have focused on the impact that diversity has on the sense of community within urban areas and neighbourhoods in the UK. While some have reported on residents living ‘parallel lives’ (Cantle, 2001), many others have focused on the possibilities of convivial everyday encounter and interaction (Amin, 2002; Sennett, 1999; Neal et al, 2013, 2015).

This chapter makes three main contributions to wider literature on super-diverse urban neighbourhoods and the experiences of their residents – first, in the sampling approach the research adopted. Studies such as Pemberton and Phillimore (2016, p 1) have sought to understand ‘how place-making proceeds in super-diverse urban neighbourhoods where no single ethnic group predominates’ by interviewing European Union (EU) and non-EU migrants. This chapter demonstrates that the experiences of recent migrants are only part of the story. To truly understand the dynamics of super-diverse areas like Haringey, where no single ethnic group predominates, it is important to acknowledge that a significant proportion of the population is long established – and often British-born – black and minority ethnic (BME) groups for whom the label of migrant is ill-fitting and inaccurate. It is also necessary to acknowledge the experiences and perceptions of the equally long-established White British working-class residents and that in many cases the most recently arrived are the new middle class – often White British – gentrifiers.