Immigrant London used to be found within Tube zone two. It used to be about Bangladeshi Spitalfields and Jamaican Brixton. Right through the 20th century, one trend held steady: immigrants began in the decaying inner city, while the white working class moved out to Kent and Essex. 

This is not how immigration works any more. Oxbridge hipster-imposters have colonised Shoreditch. It was more convenient for their cycling habits. And when the Victorian terraces were no longer a parade of Bangladeshi rag shops they made rather fetching open-plan offices. This has pushed immigrants to outer London. 

There is a whole Eastern European city in London. This city is bigger than Sheffield, with more than 500,000 people. More than half are from Poland. More than 80 per cent have arrived since 2004. These are people from Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and the other poor countries that joined the EU then or later. This is a city working in basic jobs. But it also has its Russian aristocrats and tens of thousands of professionals, not to mention its refugees from Bosnia and Kosovo. 

Most live in zone three. Places like Beckton. Here old whites sip Carling lager resentfully in the afternoon pubs. Escapees from the inner-city degeneration of the 1980s, they have been dealt a cruel turn of fate by the metropolis. The DLR dream brochure they bought into has turned into a place less than 50 per cent white British. Unable to afford a reverse white flight, grittier types take to wearing England football shirts at every occasion. Eastern Europeans make up about 20 per cent of the Beckton population, Bangladeshis a further 25 per cent. 

I entered a hangar-sized Lithuanian supermarket. Lithuanian mothers pushed trolleys down aisles of pickles of mindboggling size. There were tables of activists getting out the vote for a Lithuanian fracking referendum. Blue tracksuits lounged in the Lithuanian café-grill. There was everything a Lithuanian might need.