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, 18 October 2007

No. 181: Laos


Full story to follow...

Alex Horne - 18th October 2007

Following a tip-off from a very helpful correspondent called Marc, I headed down to a pub called the Racing Page in Richmond this evening. The train was bursting with commuters. In fact, the only person in my carriage not wearing a suit and tie was the drunk-ish old-ish man next to me who spent most of the journey impressively listing the Eastern European countries who've most recently joined the EU and concluding that they should all return to their homelands because he hadn't invited them over here. He then looked at my yellow shoes and concluded that I'd almost certainly bought them in Oxfam. I didn't agree with him.

Toi presumed I was there to talk to his dad. 'He's quite a famous Laotian chef and artist', he explained. 'A lot of people come to talk to him about his recipes.' But I was more than happy to meet his son, a chatty 29 year old who'd arrived in the UK aged two and grew up in Worthing, just like my mum.
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