Hello!

This is a project that Owen Powell and Alex Horne started on October 24th, 2006 (United Nations Day), and finished on October 24th, 2007. Our aim was to prove that London is the most cosmopolitan city in the world, by endeavouring to meet and chat to a citizen from every country in the world who currently lives and works in London.

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We managed to meet people from 189 countries. According to the UN, there are 192 countries in the world, so we've proved that at the very least, London contains over 98.4% of the nations of the world!

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We are still looking for people from three countries:

Marshall Islands; Palau; Tuvalu.

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The final encounters during our year appear below, but to follow our story from the start please click on the links under 'How we're doing' on the left-hand side.  The countries appear in the order in which we found their representative. (Any country with an asterisk * next to it has a brief account of the interview - longer versions will appear in the future!)

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To find out more about the project, including our self-imposed rules, then click here.

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Follow this link if you have the urge to see us looking awkward on Channel 4 news.  Or just below you can see us when we were half-way through the project being interviewed by George Alagiah on BBC World.

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Please email us on worldinonecity@hotmail.com if you want to get in touch, or if you know any shy Londoners who are also Tuvaluan, Palauan or Marshallese.

George Alagiah interviews us on the BBC

Saturday, 21 July 2007

No.117: Sierra Leone


Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 21st July 2007

When Patricia is in London, she says she's from Sierra Leone, but when she went back to Sierra Leone earlier this year (for the first time in over twenty years) she felt like a foreigner. "Most of my friends," she laughs, "tell me that I'm such an English lady."

We meet in a bookshop cafe the day after the latest Harry Potter has come out, and Patricia's two young daughters look suitably excited. "I tell them that they are lucky to be growing up here," she says. "I moved to London when I was eleven - if I had stayed in Sierra Leone through the civil war there, then things would have been very hard for me."
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