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

Monday, 22 October 2007

No.186: Niger


Full story to follow ...

Owen Powell - 22nd October 2007

Ibrat from Uzbekistan knows I'm on the lookout for a person from Niger (a 'Nigerien', as I later learn - not to be confused with a 'Nigerian', somebody from Nigeria). He asks around at the BBC World Service where he works, and locates Elhadji, who works in the Hausa department.

Elhadji is now pretty settled in London, his family is here (including his third child, only five months old) and he's been at the BBC for nearly ten years. But journalism wasn't his first career - as he was good at science in school, the government gave him a scholarship to study Mining Engineering, in what was then Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1980s. "There weren't many other black Africans around," he says, "so it was sometimes quite difficult. London feels far more mixed and welcoming."
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