Search Results

This chapter reveals the similarities and differences between the Chagossians' forced displacement from the Chagos Archipelago and their onward migration to the UK. The ‘echoes of marginalisation’ include bureaucratic hurdles in acquiring citizenship status and the relevant identification documents, familial separation across continents, and the implications of relocation to an area of relative ethnic diversity, socio-economic deprivation, and educational challenges. The similarities go only so far, of course. In particular, unlike the high rates of unemployment in Mauritius in the 1960s, late 1970s to early 1980s, and again since the late 1990s, Crawley has had consistently extremely low rates of unemployment since its inception as a New Town in the 1960s. By and large, Chagossian migrants in Crawley have managed to find jobs and adequate housing, and have been able to access state welfare when required. Compared to their overwhelmingly negative assessments of their lives in Mauritius, they have reported a far wider range of experiences, both negative and positive, relating to education and employment, taxes and benefits, and racism and discrimination in the UK.

This chapter continues Chapter 5's ethnographic focus on the Chagossian community in Crawley, while revisiting the themes of home and homeland explored in Part II. It starts by revisiting debates amongst scholars of migration and displacement about the distinction between ‘forced displacement’ and ‘voluntary migration’. It asks to what extent Chagossians contrast their forced displacement from Chagos to Mauritius with their onward migration from Mauritius to the UK. The data reveal that experiences of onward migration to the UK and settlement in Crawley have challenged Chagossians' preconceptions of Britons and of life in the UK, and subtly altered their assessments of Mauritians and life in Mauritius. Next, the chapter examines the degree to which experiences of migration and settlement in the UK and changing visions of the future are delineated according to stage in the life course. It concludes that, despite very different experience of forced displacement and onward migration, claims of a desire to return to Mauritius take much the same form amongst migrant Chagossians in Crawley as claims of a desire to return to Chagos take amongst displaced Chagos islanders in Mauritius.

Rowheath Park at Bournville (from 1921) and the Hills and Dales Park, the Old Barn Club and Old River Park, made for NCR employees between 1906 and 1939, are highly significant to the history of corporate landscapes in terms of their scale and the sophistication of their designs in a factory context. A comparison of these parks, designed by landscape architects Cheals of Crawley, and the Olmsted Brothers respectively, reveal differences in the cultural, symbolic and stylistic approaches to landscape design in the two nations, including what it was possible to achieve in the suburban landscapes of Britain and the United States and in the beliefs, desires and expectations of the factory worker and his patriarch in what the landscape could provide for them. In context of corporate recreation, the scale and sophistication of these gardens and parks were astonishing and unprecedented. Their landscape architects succeeded in projecting local and national landscape identities through design, thus creating spaces that heightened employees’ sense of belonging to the region and to the corporate community.

The chapter explores three Pakistani-based terrorist cells in the UK in 2004-6. These cells represented a new pattern, as people of Pakistani origin had rarely been involved in terrorist plots in Europe in the past. The cases demonstrate how al-Qaida, which was regrouping in the Af-Pak region after the invasion of Afghanistan, managed to exploit extremists in the UK for global jihad in Europe. Contributing factors included changes in the relationship between militant Islamists and the state in Pakistan, in combination with radicalization in Europe over Iraq.