The issue of segregation – across residential areas, across and within schools, within workplaces and in terms of access to the most economically advantageous positions in society, for example – has long attracted public and political attention. It has stimulated much academic research, describing situations both national and local, exploring their impacts on economic, social, cultural and political life, and seeking to influence public policy.

There is a long tradition of such work in the US, reflecting not only a population history over the last three centuries or more built on immigration from a wide range of cultural origins but also the particular situation of discriminated groups there – notably the descendants of black slaves. Although geographical patterns of immigrant settlement have characterized the UK over a longer period – Jewish, Huguenot, Roma and Irish immigrants have settled in particular areas, for example, almost all of them urban – segregation has only become a consistent feature of national debate since the Second World War. This was generated by large-scale immigration of groups, mainly from the former British Empire, with skin colour and cultural identities (language, religion, dress and so on) different from those of the majority (White British) population that have stimulated tensions – feelings of ‘them and us’ differences – and led to discrimination in labour and housing markets. Such tensions have occasionally generated inter-group conflicts – ‘race riots’ – which have led to government responses seeking inter-group harmony, not least through legislation that seeks equality across ethnic groups and encourages their integration into the dominant society, even if some members of minority groups wish to retain elements of their cultural/ancestral identity.

Over the last 50 years or so the UK has attracted many immigrants from a variety of backgrounds. Despite many aspects of public policy designed both to manage those migrant streams and to promote social harmony, inter-group tensions remain in place, if less intense than in the earlier decades of that period. One aspect of the multi-ethnic/multi-cultural society that is frequently raised as a problem constraining the development of that society being ‘at ease with itself ‘ is segregation. Because members of the different cultural groups now present in British towns and cities in considerable numbers tend to congregate in separate residential areas – in part because of choice, in part because of constraints, financial and otherwise – inter-group contact, and especially contact between those groups and the majority population, is restricted.