Britain's rural Muslims

Rethinking integration

Sarah Hackett

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526110176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Immigration has long been associated with the urban landscape, from accounts of inner-city racial tension and discrimination during the 1960s and 1970s and studies of minority communities of the 1980s and 1990s, to the increased focus on cities amongst contemporary scholars of migration and diaspora. Though cities have long provided the geographical frameworks within which a significant share of post-war migration has taken place, Sarah Hackett argues that that there has long existed a rural dimension to Muslim integration in Britain.This book offers the first comprehensive study of Muslim migrant integration in rural Britain across the post-1960s period, examining the previously unexplored relationship between Muslim integration and rurality by using the county of Wiltshire in the South West of England as a case study. Drawing upon a range of archival material and oral histories, it challenges the long-held assumption that local authorities in more rural areas have been inactive, and even disinterested, in devising and implementing migration, integration and diversity policies, and sheds light on smaller and more dispersed Muslim communities that have traditionally been written out of Britain's immigration history.

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Wiltshire: diverse Muslims, unexplored communities

Wiltshire is by no means the first area that comes to mind when discussing migrant communities in Britain. Acting as a gateway to the West Country, it is a county comprised of historic market towns, picturesque villages and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is renowned for the Stonehenge and Avebury World Heritage Site, Salisbury Plain and Cathedral, the Kennet and Avon Canal, Silbury Hill and the Marlborough Downs. Its rolling green hills are pebble-dashed with crop circles, Neolithic long barrows, a plethora of historic houses and gardens, walking trails and the famous white horse chalk hillside carvings. Its romantic, mystical and ‘quintessentially English’ feel has made its landmarks and villages the ideal settings for a range of Jane Austen film and television adaptations and historical period dramas. Daniel Defoe’s early eighteenth-century encounter with ‘a vast continued body of high chalky hills, whose tops spread themselves into fruitful and pleasant downs and plains, upon which great flocks of sheep are fed’, ‘divers pleasant and profitable rivers’, and ‘a chain of fruitful meadows, and rich pastures… interspersed with innumerable pleasant towns, villages, and houses’, still rings true today. Indeed, one could be forgiven for thinking that Wiltshire really does boast ‘the most pleasant and fertile country in England’.¹

In economic terms, Wiltshire has long been renowned for its history of farming, its wool trade, and its cloth, paper-making and iron-working industries. The nineteenth century witnessed a growth in light industry, including bacon-curing, tanning and glove-making. It was without a doubt the town of Swindon that experienced the most direct and visible change as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Being chosen in 1840 as the location for the Great Western Railway’s railway works transformed it from what Michael Harloe called ‘a small, possibly declining town on top of a hill in rural Wiltshire’ to one that began to enjoy economic growth.² Other Wiltshire towns also experienced economic development as was seen through the Bowyers meat company in Trowbridge, the Harris bacon factory in Calne and Ware Bros. Ltd., a tanning firm in Salisbury, which all have their roots in the nineteenth century.³ Today, Wiltshire’s economy is grounded in design and technology, advanced manufacturing, and farming and agriculture. It has been home to a number of global companies, including Dyson and Honda, it has a significant military presence, and its rural economy is comprised of a range of heritage and visitor attractions.⁴

At the time of the 2011 Census, Wiltshire had a population of 680,137, of which 209,156 lived in Swindon. Major areas of settlement include Chippenham (45,337), Trowbridge (41,715), which is the county town, and Salisbury (41,682), Wiltshire’s only city. Other key towns are Devizes (36,326), Amesbury (32,874), Warminster (24,454), Melksham (24,079), Royal Wootton Bassett and Cricklade (23,755), Calne (23,196) and Marlborough (22,935).⁵ Wiltshire is a county with a large retired and ageing population, a low crime rate, a strong economy, a flourishing arts and heritage scene, and children who reach national levels of educational attainment. Yet it also suffers from problems and challenges typically associated with rural areas, including a high cost of living, poor transport networks, pockets of rural deprivation and isolation, and scarce private, public and voluntary sector services.⁶ Since 2009, local government in Wiltshire consists of two unitary authorities: Wiltshire Council and Swindon Borough Council.

In general, Wiltshire is a county for which there does not exist a bountiful historiography. Perhaps because it lacks its own university, and thus an academic centre for local history, or due to the popularity enjoyed by its fellow south-western counties, it has long been overshadowed by the likes of Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. Furthermore, the abundance of historical coaching inns and milestones, and the number of major roads and railway lines that dissect the county’s rural landscape, are evidence that Wiltshire has long held the role of thoroughfare between London, Bath, Bristol and Exeter, and thus has often been a place of passage rather than a destination in its own right.

There are nevertheless several reasons why Wiltshire is a pertinent case study for an assessment of Muslim migrant integration in rural Britain. Firstly, it is home to a range of settled Muslim minority communities who are rarely recognised as being part of the county’s post-war history and remain under-researched. These include Moroccans in Trowbridge, a Moroccan community frequently referred to as being Britain’s largest outside of London, as well as Bangladeshis, Indians, Pakistanis and Turks in Chippenham, Devizes and Melksham. Secondly, local government in Wiltshire has long been active in devising and implementing immigrant, integration and diversity policies; thus there is an abundance of unexplored archival material that will be drawn upon in subsequent chapters. Thirdly, despite their relatively small numbers, Wiltshire’s Muslims constitute proactive and vocal communities, and have long displayed both a clear sense of agency and self-determination, as well as a commitment to community cohesion and integration. Fourthly, both local government and the Muslim minority communities themselves have frequently stressed the rurality of their policies and experiences, respectively, thus making Wiltshire a valuable case study through which to explore the extent to which there exists a rural dimension to Muslim integration in Britain.

Wiltshire’s migration history and Muslim communities

Behind what is a somewhat romanticised image of a pure, static and unchanging rural county lies a history of migration and diversity that exists, but is rarely recognised. For example, research has shown that the black presence in Wiltshire dates back to at least the sixteenth century.⁷ During the seventeenth century, a small number of Germans and Poles arrived in Trowbridge to work in the town’s cloth industry, and Flemish weavers fleeing religious persecution settled in the town of Corsham. Furthermore, the county experienced Irish immigration during the nineteenth century. During the First World War, POW and work camps across Wiltshire, including in Chippenham, Chiseldon, Codford, Lark Hill and Wootton Bassett, held Austrian, German and Turkish prisoners, and Swindon offered refuge to Belgian refugees. During the Second World War, German prisoners worked on the Kennet and Avon Canal, and Polish airmen served at Yatesbury aerodrome.⁸ This history of migration and diversity continued into the post-war period and stretches beyond the Muslim communities that this book addresses. Archival material held at the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre, for example, shows that Wiltshire was home to substantial Italian and Polish communities during the 1960s, and received and supported Vietnamese refugees during the late 1970s.⁹

During the 2000s, Wiltshire has witnessed the arrival of a significant number of people from EU accession countries, especially Poland, and other ethnic minorities include the Black/African/Caribbean/Black British, the Filipino and the Nepalese communities. Yet despite the presence of these minority groups, like much of rural Britain, Wiltshire is predominantly white. In the 2011 Census, for example, 96.6% of the county’s population recorded its ethnic group as White, with much smaller groups identifying themselves as Asian/Asian British (1.3%), Mixed (1.2%) and Black/African/Caribbean/Black British (0.7%). The extent to which diversity in Wiltshire increased between the 2001 Census and that of 2011 can be seen in the fact that the White UK population went from constituting 96.2% to 93.4% of the total population in this decade.¹⁰ As might be expected, the situation in Swindon is different. At the time of the 2001 Census, 91.5% of people in Swindon’s unitary authority described themselves as White British. By the time of the 2011 Census, this figure had fallen to 84.6%. During this same period, the proportion of ethnic minorities increased from 8.5% to 15.4%, and the proportion of people belonging to the Asian/Asian British ethnic group almost tripled in size from 2.1% to 5.9%.¹¹

There are a number of diverse and well-settled ethnic minorities who constitute the core of Wiltshire’s Muslim population, yet their histories have never been documented. The migration of Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis to the county, like elsewhere in Britain, is linked to Britain’s imperial past.¹² As a result of both Britain’s post-war economic boom and their rights as Commonwealth subjects, South Asians, and often single males, settled in Wiltshire from the 1950s and 1960s, and were soon joined by a chain migration of other male workers, wives and families, and eventually the emergence of a British-born generation. The 2011 Census recorded 1,547 Indians, 215 Pakistanis and 595 Bangladeshis in the county. A large proportion of the Indian community can be found in Chippenham, Salisbury and Trowbridge, and there are smaller concentrations in Marlborough and Tidworth.¹³ The Pakistani and Bangladeshi populations live in towns across the county, including in Bradford-on-Avon, Calne, Devizes, Melksham and Salisbury.¹⁴ Regarding Swindon unitary authority, the population figures for the Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities at the time of the 2011 Census stood at 6,901, 1,292 and 936, respectively.¹⁵

Moroccan Muslims began migrating to Trowbridge during the 1960s and consisted largely of unskilled males and females from Oujda in north-eastern Morocco. They formed part of a wider wave of Moroccan migration to Britain, which saw communities emerge in London as well as in nearby towns, such as Crawley, Slough and St. Albans. Compared to South Asian Muslims, the Moroccan Muslim population in Britain is small and has received scant academic attention.¹⁶ The same holds true for the community in Trowbridge. They largely migrated to this Wiltshire town during the 1960s and 1970s to work in factories, with two of the main ones being the Bowyers meat factory and the Airsprung bed and mattress manufacturer.¹⁷ They have since become a little more residentially scattered, but remain concentrated in the Trowbridge community area.¹⁸ They have repeatedly been referred to in council documents, official reports and the press as being the largest Moroccan community in Britain outside of London,¹⁹ a claim that was perhaps most publically endorsed in a 2015 episode of Nigel Slater: Eating Together in which he travelled to Trowbridge to cook with one of the town’s Moroccan families.²⁰ Yet as has long been the case regarding other British Moroccan communities, it proves difficult to capture its exact size.²¹ A report issued by the South West Trades Union Congress estimated that Trowbridge has around 700 Moroccans.²² Recent newspaper article...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: Muslim integration in Britain – a theoretical and analytical framework
• 1 Wiltshire: diverse Muslims, unexplored communities
• 2 Local government policy: the early years, 1960s to 1976
• 3 Local government policy: race relations, multiculturalism and integration, 1976 to the late 1990s
• 4 Local government policy: anti-racism, equal opportunities, community cohesion and religious identity in a rural space, 1999 onwards
• 5 Muslim migrant histories, personal narratives and experiences of integration
• 6 Migration, integration and Muslims in rural Britain
• Conclusion: Muslim integration, the rural dimension and research implications
• Bibliography
• Index