“Nobody expected Leicester to become the most multicultural city on the planet”. So wrote TheIndependent, the English left-wing newspaper ten years ago. “Leicester in 1972 looked into the crystal ball and did not like what it saw: that within a generation or so it would no longer be a city dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Christians. In the past 40 years, Leicester has become the symbolic city of multicultural Britain, a place where the number and size of minorities are astounding: 55 mosques, 18 Hindu temples, two synagogues, two Buddhist centers and a Jain center are seen as not a recipe for conflict or a millstone around the neck of the city, but as a badge of honor”.
There are places that have visited the European future before others: Malmö in Sweden, Trappes and Roubaix in France, Neukölln in Germany, Molenbeek in Belgium, Ceuta and Melilla in Spain. Leicester in England is also one of them …
And last month Leicester burned.
