So, I looked up the city of Leicester on Wikipedia and there were like these different maps showing which neighbourhood is white dominant, hindu dominant, etc. etc.
What I want to ask is how exactly does this happen?
Like you buy houses when you’re done meeting your neighbours? Or does someone who sells houses refuses to sell it to someone outside their community? How exactly do these communities self-segregate themselves?
I have never been to UK in my life but I was just kind of interested about how exactly does this process takes place.
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It’s mostly desire driven, people want to live near their friends and family – who are usually culturally similar to themselves. This naturally causes some level of segregation.
If you’re of a particular cultural, ethnic or religious background and you’re moving to a new city and there’s one supermarket that caters to your culture’s cuisine and one place of worship for your religion you might want to live near these because it will be convinient. So if a few people do that and then someone decides to open a cafe that specialises in a type of pastry that people of that culture enjoy eating for brunch, you might do it in that area. Which attracts more people and so on and so on. There’s probably loads of other reasons, but this is how some areas will grow.
It’s not a UK thing though. Happens in pretty much every country.
It’s a gradual shift where new people to the area tend to move to where there are others of the same culture.
Typically when immigrants arrived in the 1960s, they’d rent or buy the cheapest accommodation, which tended to be in certain areas of town already. People were super racist then and didn’t want their house prices affected, so gradually moved away and/or didn’t choose to move there when vacant property arose. That created more cheap accommodation, conveniently located next to people from the same country, so the pattern repeated itself. As immigrant communities developed they established shops, places of worship, etc. That attracted more people of the same background/religion because those facilities and community connections are useful. Hence the communities that still exist today became established.
Have a look at [Rex and Moore](https://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/3/12.html) – the TLDR; is that as one ethnic community enriches itself and moves out, another one moves in to take its place.