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.

*
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!

*

We are still looking for people from three countries:

Marshall Islands; Palau; Tuvalu.

*
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!)

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

*

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.

*

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

Tuesday 23 October 2007

No.187: Guinea-Bissau


Full story to follow ...


Owen Powell - 23rd October 2007

With only a day to go, I feel like I am inundated with non-working phone numbers for people from Guinea-Bissau. Finally, I have some luck with a number sent across by Jamie from the Mayor's office (oh yes, for this final week, we've got the big guns in).

I meet Nayanka at SOAS where she studies Politics and Development. Born in France, but the proud owner of joint Guinea-Bissau/Portuguese nationality, she is a suitably cosmopolitan person to allow us to reach the point where we can say that people from every African nation (more than a quarter of the world's countries) live in London. We've also met people from every European country, every country in the whole of the Americas (North, Central, South, Caribbean), and every country in Asia. After tomorrow, we hope we can say the same for the Middle East. It's just Oceania that's proving a little harder ...

No comments: