By 2006 the Albanian mafia was dizzy with success. They had conquered the brothels and stolen the parking meters. But then they overreached. The harvesters had chopped up Westminster into two. The deal did not hold. Meeting in a basement hangout in East Acton where they played cards and listened to Kosovar pop, the meter bosses confronted each other. It ended in a shooting. 

Too many girls were being trafficked into Britain. Brothels were spreading from Bayswater into Kensington. The police swooped and arrested the Albanian dons. They were shocked. They had never expected long prison sentences. They needed a new business. They took a minicab to Green Lanes to speak to the Kurds. They had a modest proposal.  

Kurdish London began as little fruit and veg and halva shops in Haringey in the 1980s. This was a time when the Turkish generals banned every word in Kurdish. The slightest affiliation to the rebels could see you strapped to a metal surface in a dungeon as the Turkish police switched on the military junta's anthem. This dissecting table would heat up until the screaming, cooking Kurd would confess to anything. The warbling cassette player always played the same song: "Turkey is my Paradise". 

The rebels would come along Green Lanes shaking tin cans and asking for the shopkeepers to give money for the revolution. At first they happily gave them notes from their child benefit. This quickly became a protection racket. They still made their demands in Marxist mantras but the Kurdish resistance had gone into forbidden business: the heroin route passing through the Turkish mountains. 

Green Lanes looks dowdy today. This is misleading. Those dimly-lit and bare-table cafés are really headquarters of billion-dollar businesses. The Albanians shuffled in. They began the offer with the usual                     platitudes — "As fellow Muslims" — but cut straight to the chase. They would help the Kurds get the gear across the Balkans for a share of the profits. The alliance held up for a couple of years. 

The Kurds themselves were snared in the early 2010s. The clans of Green Lanes fell upon themselves. Dons were gunned down while having their beards trimmed. Kurds and Albanians decided it was time to make the big money. They went into property. The money was laundered through car-washes in Tottenham. But the estate agents asked no questions.

Albanian London despises the mafia. Pints are raised to their downfall in Kilburn pubs. These are honest people furious that criminals have tarred their name. These people love Britain more than UKIP ever could. This is because Albanian London is one of refugees. Fathers named daughters born in the UK after sisters tortured by Serbian para-militaries in Kosovo. Children are taught about Tony Blair granting them asylum which saved them from war and poverty.   

Poles and Albanians talk about Britain as a "mini-America". But there is no British dream. East Europeans came to London not inspired by a dream of how great things could be, but by the knowledge of how much worse they can be. Talk of Britishness draws a blank face. Immigrants say, "Britain is a land of opportunity." But they do not feel particularly welcome. As if they are living in a spare room. 

Londoners navigate the city by way of pubs. Polish builders, not so much. They cannot afford it. This only isolates them farther. At 6.30pm, exhausted builders crack open cans of Zywiec on the Central Line. Everyone sneers at them. The Poles go east to Wood Green and Leyton. The Lithuanians take the DLR to Beckton. 

Drinkers and stoners gather at dusk on Beckton's artificial hill above the retail park. Measures have been taken to keep people out. High metal fencing rings the perimeter. Inside, brambles and nettles have eaten up everything. The curve of the hill exhibits crushed beer cans and rusting trolleys. At the top there were nine pieces of corrugated iron shoved into the earth, the size of shields. 

There was a battle in Beckton. Lithuanians had broken into this derelict site one night and painted the shields in the Lithuanian colours: yellow, green and red. This had enraged the local whites. They gathered in a local pub and vowed to fight back against the immigrants. They stole in the same way and painted the shields as England flags.