There is a widely held sentiment among people of colour who call London our home that travelling beyond its reaches can feel like leaving one country for another, swapping multicultural tolerance for a roll of the dice. But over the past couple of weeks, for the first time in my life, I have feared that the city’s bubble might burst.
In Hampshire, where my mum and grandparents grew up, a police officer was injured as 200 people surrounded an Aldershot hotel housing asylum seekers on 31 July. Similar activity flared in Rotherham and Leeds while I visited family in Sheffield on 4 August. In Belfast, a city close to where my great-grandfather was raised on a farm, a girl was filmed gleefully yelling the P-word as riots exploded across the Northern Irish capital.
