Source: www.guardian.co.uk
LEICESTER, UNITED KINGDOM, January 2, 2009: Some time in the next five years Leicester will become the first English city where everyone is a member of some ethnic or religious minority. The schools are already there. By 2007, only 44% of pupils across the city were ethnically white. By 2015 at the latest, the adult population will be less than half white. Of course there are parts of every city in England where white people are a minority, but they are only parts. In Leicester this is the situation in the city as a whole. An enormous transformation is under way.
The largest community was, until very recently, Hindu; many Asian Muslims have been moving to the city, and the overwhelming majority of the Asians here came from families which had first emigrated to east Africa in the early 1970s.
Talking to people around the city, two things are obvious. The first is that Leicester works, mostly, and diversity is genuinely popular here; the second is that it is unique.