Last month journalist Peter Whittle wrote an article for The Sunday Times titled “How my neighbourhood was lost to the multiculture”.

It’s the story of the transformation through foreign immigration of the London suburb of Woolwich. Whittle writes eloquently of how such immigration undoes a sense of community and undermines the particular attachments which individuals have to the places they inhabit.

According to Whittle, in the 1970s the area,

“had something that amounted to a collective identity.

“Now it appears to me fragmented, with different ethnic communities existing side-by-side, sometimes uneasily, sometimes violently and always with a sense of nothingness in the air ...

“Sometimes now, in streets I’ve used since my Sixties boyhood, I’m struck by the sense that this place no longer provides my identifiable roots, that now I am simply one of many who happen to live here, with no greater claim to it sentimentally or historically than the next man.”

Such anonymity might be what people are looking for when they choose to live in the teeming metropolitan centre, but in a suburb that has shaped much of your life, it’s a hard feeling to negotiate.”

Whittle then adds an important point, that this is a process which people feel they have no choice about (so much for liberalism giving us unimpeded individual choice!),

“the golden elite who run the country still don’t hold much with the idea that there might be millions throughout the country who are tolerant in their approach to these issues and detest extremism, but who are deeply concerned about the way in which their neighbourhoods might be affected by such far-reaching social and cultural changes, over which they have no control.”

He ends by noting that diversity in everyday life often triggers feelings of alienation,

“The truth is, if you celebrate difference enough, eventually nobody will feel the same about anything. London, for example, is home now to more than 150 different languages – a fact evidenced on my regular crowded train journey home.

“While for some this might flatter a sense of cosmopolitanism, is it not possible that for others, in an everyday context, it can lead to an unconscious alienation? ...

“We may congratulate ourselves endlessly on the creation of a melting pot, but we should be careful that it’s not achieved by the estrangement of many.”