Is British Culture Undermined By Multiculturalism? A Photo Essay

I was sitting at the University of Hull library today, when I saw this headline in The Guardian.

I thought about Hull, the city that I live in, which  is the third poorest local authority in the country and voted overwhelmingly to leave the EU. Instead of writing a long treatise as to my thoughts on the subject, I took my camera out and photographed my journey home.

This is the Allam Medical Building, so named after the Allam family, whose generous donations helped finance the centre. The Allam’s are British-Egyptian.

Next, I met Moyo Ajibade. He’s a second year student at Hull University and has a popular YouTube channel, NoLimitsMedia. On it, he talks honestly about his experiences of university. Moyo is from London and his family originates from West Africa.

After that, I ran into my friend Dr Ellen Lewis.

Ellen is a global organization development consultant and Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Systems Studies, Faculty of Business, Law and Politics at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. As well as that, she is a co-author of a soon to be released publication: Inclusive Systemic Evaluation: A New Approach for the SDG Era (2018 in press), UN Women, New York. Ellen was born in Puerto Rico.

HeiSeYa is an extremely popular authentic Japanese takeaway. It is very reasonably priced and, from extensive experience, I can inform the reader that it is delicious.

150 yards away from HeiSeYa, you find the wildly popular Roots, a Caribbean bar/restaurant. I have seen Olympic gold medallists, university students and the working people from Hull have enjoyable nights there. It has rums and dishes from all over the Caribbean.

As I walked down Newland Avenue, I saw all of these shop fronts:

That’s two Polish supermarkets, an Oriental food store, a Mexican bar/restaurant, A Persian restaurant (1 of 2 in the city), an Egyptian tea room, a Chinese takeaway and a Japanese noodle bar.

 I put my camera away and cycled onto the next street and saw these establishments:

That’s an authentic Italian, An Indian street food restaurant, an Indian and Continental store (the one stop grocery shop for food), another popular bar and a restaurant that specialises in North African food. I finish my journey at Gelatos, a gelateria that I’ve spent enough at to earn some kind of patronage.

It is famous for its coffee, teas, ice-cream, sorbets, pizzas, flatbreads…everything is superb.

These pictures are of my journey from the university to home, via Gelatos. The people and businesses that I have taken pictures of are from Bangladesh, Britain, Egypt, India, Iran, Italy, Kurdistan, Morocco, Nigeria, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, South Africa and Turkey. The businesses employ people from all corners of the world and are wildly popular with the people of Hull. I will leave it up to you to decide how well the migrants have integrated.