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

Thursday, 27 September 2007

No.155: Egypt


Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 27th September 2007

Milena, from Bulgaria, has introduced us to more people than anyone else, I'm pretty sure of that. One of her work colleagues, she excitedly told us in an email, was an Egyptian who had once been kidnapped. Well, we had to find out more ...

I interview Shaka sitting in his van, as he zooms round West London on his evening London Lite run (picking up the merchandisers stalls and umbrellas). He was indeed born in Egypt, although his parents were from Sierra Leone - a country he returned to when he was quite young. Shaka's story is a bit too complicated to go into here, but it's worth saying that the kidnapping story is true, and also that Shaka gave me a lift home in the van after his shift finished.
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