Crawley is used to new faces. As home to Gatwick airport, millions of travellers pass through this postwar new town every year.
Some people get off a plane and stay, like the estimated 3,500 locals who came from the Chagos Islands and started new lives under the flight path. Others are plonked there by the Home Office. Relative to the size of its population, nowhere in the UK has more asylum seekers and supported (ie legal) refugees. At the most recent count, at the end of June, there were 1,729, equating to 1.43% of the town’s 120,000 usual residents.
