When I arrived here in 1972, one of 30,000 Asians with British passports ejected out of Uganda, we did have to confront overweight Smithfield butchers who stood outside the airport spitting out abuse, but many other people in this country took us into their homes, gave us warm clothes and became trusted friends. And, as Paul Foot wrote in 1965: "Commonwealth immigrants in Britain, before they became playthings of party politics...were greeted with general friendliness and hospitality."In the Sixties, it became trendy to befriend soulful intellectuals and artists fleeing communism and military dictatorships. We must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone from every part of our Empire." Enoch Powell encouraged nurse recruitment from the West Indies. Swarthy princes, seriously clever students and other children of the Empire also came over, bit by bit laying the foundations of the fertile cultural mix we find today. After the war, Britain accepted persecuted Jews and others and was proud to do so.

Offering refuge was considered virtuous, especially for the signatories to the 1951 Geneva Convention. Tories such as the MP Sir David Maxwell Fyfe said in 1948: "We are proud that we impose no colour bar restrictions... Henry Mayhew recorded the presence of Indian jugglers, herbalists and magicians on the streets of London. Way back in 1601, Elizabeth I demanded that "blackamoors" should be "discharged with all speed, out of these dominions", but the command was quietly ignored by the migrant ex-slaves and servants, many of whom had settled down with white women and had children. People have always been received into this country as asylum seekers, immigrants and workers. Our most recent asylum legislation means applicants awaiting decisions are denied benefits, and appeals procedures have been made harder, especially for those from the so-called "safe countries" It was not (altogether) ever thus. They may claim to be genuine immigrants and refugees, but to him most are cheats, scroungers and, above all, aliens who are bound to defile all that makes this country British.

As unprecedented numbers of people - an estimated 50 million refugees - are uprooted around the world, this fear and hatred of the outsider has been growing, actively nurtured by some tabloid newspapers and Tory politicians. The British Bulldog is an increasingly nervy beast: snarling and snapping at dark strangers, sniffing them out in the back of stinking lorries, protecting his territory from people whom he believes are a threat to his good life. What will this mean? London, supreme metropolis of an eclecticism which includes comfort but eludes prediction, is very tantalising on this question. Because the city is so old and new, so traditional and experimental, because it has sucked up the whole world but only half-digested it, because it doesn't know where it's going, because its intelligence is directed away from itself, because it is unknowable, London is the most up-to-date place there is..

What a crashing bore they all are in their single-minded modernism.In the future, any place or person that is only one thing will appear lifeless and dated The next phase in evolution is multiple identity. Even these brand-new triumphant cities of the Pacific Rim - Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Seattle. And everywhere else seems slightly old-fashioned after London. Even its squalor becomes stylised into a kind of desperate Dickensian cuteness: squat chic. But, unlike the Continentals, no one slavishly follows fashion in London Instead, they make fashion Everyone looks different. Barricades? Where could you put them? People would just go round another way It's impossible to have such big adventures in London. But, if all else fails, the city uses its secret weapon: naffification London consumes fads, ideas, cultures at the highest speed.