There is something happening in Britain at the moment which seems to me to illustrate a much deeper change in the country. It concerns the government’s increasingly extensive use of former army camps to accommodate asylum seekers, but the issue goes far beyond the camps themselves. It raises questions about immigration, integration, culture, and, ultimately, what we mean when we talk about England.
The government has been looking for ways of reducing the enormous cost of accommodating asylum seekers in hotels, and one solution has been to use army camps in various parts of the country. Many of these camps are not urban military establishments but training grounds situated beside large expanses of countryside, often close to small villages.
This has produced some remarkable situations. Communities with perhaps only 200 or 300 inhabitants have suddenly found themselves living close to facilities containing more than a thousand predominantly young, single men. Inevitably, this can produce anxiety and resentment, particularly in communities which have had very little previous experience of large-scale immigration.

It is important, however, to distinguish between understandable concern about the impact of such a sudden demographic change and the assumption that every individual involved represents a threat. People whose asylum applications are being processed are not automatically “illegal immigrants”, even when they have entered Britain irregularly. The legal position of an asylum seeker is considerably more complicated than that. Some people in these camps may also be there under different immigration arrangements, including detention or removal procedures.
Nevertheless, there is an undeniable pressure on the system. The asylum backlog has become enormous, and if applications cannot be processed quickly enough, accommodation becomes a continuing requirement. At the same time, the government’s attempts to reduce the number of people crossing the Channel in small boats have so far not prevented the continuing arrival of large numbers of migrants.
The camps themselves are sometimes described in inflammatory terms, but they are certainly not concentration camps in the historical sense of that word. People housed there are generally able to leave and return, subject to the rules of the particular accommodation. I have visited places such as Auschwitz, and there is obviously no meaningful comparison between a modern accommodation centre and a concentration camp.
But there have been incidents and complaints around some of these accommodation centres, and even relatively minor incidents can have a disproportionate effect in a very small community. A village accustomed to knowing virtually everybody who lives there can react very differently to the sudden presence of hundreds or thousands of unfamiliar people.
This brings me to what I have begun to think of as the two Englands.
The phrase immediately reminds me of Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations. Disraeli was writing about Victorian Britain and the enormous gulf between rich and poor — two nations living alongside one another but experiencing completely different realities.
My “two Englands” are different.
One England is metropolitan, particularly London: enormously diverse, multicultural and accustomed to people of different races, religions, languages and backgrounds living alongside one another. The other England is the England of many smaller towns and villages, particularly outside the great metropolitan centres. It is an England which, until comparatively recently, could still look and feel much like the England I knew as a child.

This is not to say that the second England has never contained immigrants or minorities. Of course it has. I myself am a product of two cultures, with an English father and an Italian mother. But there is a difference between individual diversity and the extraordinarily rapid demographic and cultural transformation which some parts of Britain are experiencing today.
For many people living in small villages, there has never been anything remotely resembling the multicultural experience of London. They have not spent their lives travelling on the Underground surrounded by people from every corner of the world. They have not grown accustomed to hearing dozens of languages in the course of an ordinary day. Their local community may still be overwhelmingly English in its origins, language and customs.
And then, suddenly, they find that the world has come to them.
Until recently, one of the things I particularly enjoyed about England was the ability to move between these two worlds. I could experience the extraordinary multiculturalism of London and then get on a train or drive for an hour or two and find myself in a completely different England.
I could arrive in a cathedral city and find the England I remembered from childhood: the cathedral, the cricket pitch, the tea shop, the local shops, the English pub, familiar accents and, above all, a feeling that the social world around me was recognisably English.
That distinction is becoming much less clear.
Even in some of the traditional cathedral cities and tourist towns, one notices changes. There is, for example, what I jokingly think of as the “Turkish barber syndrome” — the appearance of businesses and services which would once have been highly unusual in a small English town but are now becoming commonplace.
None of this means that such businesses or the people who run them are unwelcome. Change is inevitable, and Britain has always changed. The question is one of pace, scale and cultural continuity.
And this brings me to another change which I have noticed in institutions concerned with English heritage.
The National Trust, for example, has spent generations preserving the houses, gardens, landscapes and historic buildings which form an enormous part of Britain’s cultural inheritance. Increasingly, it is also trying to encourage a much more diverse public to visit and participate in these places.
I remember being genuinely surprised when I visited a National Trust property and saw a group of girls who, at first glance, looked almost like a group of nuns because of the way they were dressed. They were, of course, schoolgirls from a very different cultural and religious background, visiting as part of an educational outing.
My immediate reaction was one of astonishment.
I remembered the schoolgirls of my childhood in England: tunics, gym shoes, hockey, straw hats and school ties. I remembered a world of uniforms, school rules and school meals — institutions which, whatever one’s family background, required you to enter into a common culture.
This is particularly significant to me because I was not entirely English by background. I had an Italian mother and an English father. Yet when I went to an English school, I did not arrive wearing an Italian straw hat and expect the school to accommodate my Italian identity. I wore the school uniform. I followed the school rules. I ate the school meals. I learned the customs and conventions of the institution.
And when I went to hear an orchestra, I did not suddenly pick up a mandolin simply because I had an Italian mother!
I was being acculturated.
That is the word which seems increasingly important to me.
Integration does not necessarily mean abandoning one’s original culture. I did not cease being partly Italian because I was educated in England. But I was expected to become part of a common English institutional culture. There were rules, expectations, traditions and conventions which applied to everybody.
Perhaps the great question facing Britain today is whether that principle of acculturation still operates.
The issue is not whether people of different origins can become English. Of course they can. Britain has demonstrated that repeatedly throughout its history.
The issue is whether England still expects newcomers to become part of a common culture — or whether, in the name of diversity, the traditional culture increasingly has to adapt itself to accommodate every new arrival.
That is a very different question.
And it is why the army camps, the small villages, the changing cathedral towns, London, the National Trust and even my memories of the school uniform are all connected.
They are different manifestations of the same phenomenon: the gradual disappearance of the clear boundary between the two Englands that, until quite recently, I felt I could move between so easily.
Perhaps what we are witnessing is not simply the end of one England and the arrival of another.
Perhaps we are witnessing the creation of an England in which the old distinctions between metropolitan and provincial, traditional and multicultural, newcomer and established population are becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
And that raises a much bigger question: what exactly does it mean to be English in the twenty-first century?
That is the question I want to explore.

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