LONDON: Lost among the fruit stalls and colourful chaos of London’s Brixton market is a small bronze plaque which serves as a reminder that last month’s bombings were by no means the first in the British capital.

“To commemorate the victims of the bomb which exploded on this site on Saturday, April 17, 1999,” it reads, recalling the 39 people injured by a nail bomb planted by a self-confessed homophobe in this predominantly black neighbourhood.

“A community under attack will not be divided. Together we are strong.”

The defiant words have been echoed many times since July 7, when four suicide bombers blew themselves up on London’s transport network, killing 52 people.

Londoners have boasted that their city’s strength lies in its diversity and that its rich array of racial, religious and ethnic communities will help it combat terrorism.

But some question just how united London really is and how much integration there is between blacks, whites, Christians, Jews and Muslims in areas such as Brixton, scarred in the early 1980s by some of the worst race riots in British history.

“I’m black, my friends are black, my neighbours are black,” said Nerys Jacobs, 22, shopping for sunglasses in Brixton market. “It’s not racism. It’s just the way it is round here. It’s who you grew up with, who you went to school with.”

In a speech following the July 7 attacks, Britain’s leading campaigner for racial equality Trevor Phillips argued that London is becoming more divided along ethnic and racial lines.

Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), painted a picture of a city where hundreds of different communities live side by side — largely in peace — but, due to fear, mistrust and misunderstanding, seldom interact.

“Those who live in London tend to assume that year by year people of different races and ethnicities are becoming closer and less trapped by their communal origins,” he said.

“It’s a nice hope, but wrong. In fact, we are, generation by generation, drifting apart.”

In the 40 years since Britain introduced its first major race relations laws, Britons have become “more unequal by race and ethnicity (and) less likely to interact with people not like ourselves”, Phillips said.

A tour around London’s boroughs suggests there is some truth in those observations.

In Lambeth — which includes Brixton — and in Hackney, northeast London, more than a quarter of the population is black. In Tower Hamlets, in the east, a third of the population is Muslim.

Make the short trip across the River Thames from Lambeth to the up-market borough of Kensington and Chelsea and the contrast is stark. Here, many of the black and brown faces are those of street cleaners and domestic workers, not residents.

A CRE survey last year found that most white Britons could not name a single non-white among their 20 closest friends.

In London, fewer than one in six could name two non-white friends even though statistically, if all things were equal, most Londoners would have seven or eight non-white friends.

Perhaps more disturbingly, given that three of the four July 7 bombers came from the same ethnic Pakistani community in northern England, the CRE found that Britain’s black and ethnic Asian communities were even more insular.

Young Britons from ethnic and racial minorities are much more likely than their parents to hang out with people like themselves, it said.

No one suggests London is as ghettoised as many US cities or even some other European capitals. In his speech, Phillips argued that the British capital was more integrated and tolerant than Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp.

Marie-Claude Gervais, a director at Ethnos — a London-based consultancy specialising in research into ethnic minorities — said she felt London was “miles ahead” of other European cities in the extent to which its communities interact.

“If you go to Paris, for example, every street cleaner has a black face or is from the Maghreb community,” she said. “In some cities in Europe these communities seem totally marginalised.”

Harry Goulbourne, professor of sociology at London’s South Bank University, said many of London’s apparent racial and religious divisions were actually more to do with wealth, social mobility and Britain’s notoriously entrenched class system.

That is evident in education, where a growing number of white, middle-class Britons are moving to areas with well-regarded schools and pushing up house prices there.

Their motives may have little to do with race or religion but the effect is the same — it leaves black and ethnic Asian children in schools with poor reputations, exacerbating not only ethnic splits but those between the qualified and unqualified.

Income disparities feed into the vicious cycle. In Islington, which is 74.4 per cent white, average weekly pay last year was 820 pounds ($1,480). But in eastern Newham, where only 34.8 per cent of the population is white, weekly pay was 524 pounds.

No one can doubt London’s diversity: more than a quarter of its 7 million inhabitants were born abroad and its 200 ethnic communities speak more than 300 languages. But in Brixton’s bustling market or the well-heeled residential streets of Kensington it’s a diversity that is far from apparent.

“We are moving in the wrong direction,” said Phillips.—Reuters