The housing crisis tearing Leicester apart

The South Asian neighborhood of Highfields in Leicester is made up of long, sloping streets of terraced houses, built largely between the Victorian era and the Second World War. At that time, Leicester was a major center of Britain’s booming textile trade, becoming Europe’s second richest city in 1936. Today, although many Highfields residents still work in garment factories, these are more associated with exploitative practices than prosperity. While parts of the neighborhood are still bustling, others have a ragged and timeworn character. The issues facing Highfields — particularly immigration, housing shortages and a crisis of government funding — are once again indicative of wider trends shaping British life.

The first of these factors, immigration, has brought Leicester into the national spotlight in recent years. Since the Fifties, when small numbers arrived from the Commonwealth, the city has increasingly become known as a place of different cultures and faiths. Some 20,000 South Asians came during the Seventies, not from India but East Africa, where they had settled under the British Empire. Leicester is also home to Somali, Polish and Romanian minorities. But in 2022, the city’s vaunted harmony was ruptured by clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Highfields and the neighboring Belgrave area. In a foreshadowing of the recent riots that followed the Southport stabbings, authorities in Leicester blamed the unrest on false claims spreading via social media, including rumors of attacks on places of worship and the attempted kidnapping of a Muslim girl. The major Peter Soulsby spoke of a campaign to recruit troublemakers from outside the city. But other accounts of the disturbances — including one I heard from a long-standing Gujarati resident in the city — have drawn attention to the recent arrival, via Portugal, of more assertive Hindus from the Indian regions of Daman and Diu.

The specter of sectarian politics returned at last month’s general election. In Leicester South, the constituency where Highfields is located, former Labor frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth saw his 22,000 majority overturned by an independent, the optometrist Shockat Adam, who channeled the anger of local Muslims over the war in Gaza. Ashworth complained that “I’ve never known a campaign of such vitriol, such bullying, such intimidation,” saying he was swept from mosques and chased down streets. Meanwhile, the only Conservative gain of the entire election came in Leicester East, apparently confirming the drift of the city’s Hindus towards the Tories.

These ructions may help to explain the suspicion I encountered in Leicester, from both council employees and members of the public. Many people did not want to speak to me or be seen speaking to me. Then again, I saw no signs of religious tension, with the exception of one angry diatribe about immigrants, and that came from an elderly Sikh man who had moved here in the Sixties. Leicester has also remained relatively peaceful during the popular anti-immigration protests and riots of the past fortnight. Most of my conversations pointed to a different, more material problem raised by immigration: the difficulty of finding housing in a city that is growing rapidly, even as its authorities struggle with overstretched resources.

Recent demographic data for Leicester presents a picture of remarkable change. The city’s population was estimated at about 380,000 last year, a rise of 15% since 2011. The increase in its foreign-born residents has been greater than its overall population growth, suggesting that the latter has mainly been driven by international migration. In a single year to July 2023, the equivalent of 3.6% of the city’s population arrived from overseas. But Leicester has only added 25,000 new houses since 2001, despite gaining four times as many new residents. It is now one of the most densely populated local authorities outside London, a density that its aging, low-rise housing stock is not well placed to handle.

One result of this is fierce competition in the rental market. Leicester’s prices are rising even faster than London’s. An estate agent in Highfields told me she had received 10 calls in a matter of hours for a two-bed house at £900 per month, which is above the city average. She also said she did not struggle to find housing for newly arrived immigrants, since they tended to have good jobs — often in the NHS — and to be hard-working, wanting to “make a better life.” It is more difficult, of course, for those in the gig economy. The father of one family I met, who is an Uber driver, told me they had been looking for a one-bed flat in Leicester for six months, having originally moved to London from India in 2022.