Asylum Galore! Or, Passport to the Kingsway

Good grief. This is a terrific, amazing story. Congratulations to Rachel Stevenson and Harriet Grant. It’s almost like an Ealing comedy except, of course, you know, serious. And, I think, really rather wonderful:

At first sight, the Kingsway seems an unwelcoming place. Wind whips around the 15-storey tower blocks, the windows in the lobby doors are broken, the corridors are gloomy and bare. Remnants of police incident tape flicker from lampposts and prominent surveillance cameras add an air of menace to its pathways. There is little to dispel the sense that this is one of Britain’s forgotten pockets of poverty.

But when hundreds of asylum seekers were placed there to live – often for years – while their cases were processed, they were warmly embraced. “We had been really going downhill – a lot of antisocial families were being put here. But after a year of the asylum seekers coming, the atmosphere became completely different,” Donnachie says.