Welcome to the road with the fewest English speakers: Residents reveal what they really think of their neighbours

 

The long rows of tiny Victorian terraced houses are like hundreds of others around the Midlands, the North and any of the towns and cities whose occupants powered Britain's industrial past.

But Mornington Street, in St Matthew's, Leicester, can 'boast' something the others cannot.

It is, according to official statistics, the road with the lowest proportion of English speakers in the UK. It's hardly a surprise to find that dubious title is claimed by a street in Leicester.

After all, according to the 2021 Census, only 57 per cent of the city's residents were born in England, down from 65 per cent in 2011.

Over the decades, Leicester has been the destination of choice for generations of incoming Bengali, Indian, Pakistani and Somalian migrants, along with many others, each finding groups of their own people, already settled in particular areas of the city.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer rattled many of his own Labour MPs this week with his 'Island of Strangers' speech, compared by many to Enoch Powell's infamous 'Rivers of Blood' oratory, delivered in Birmingham in 1968.

No doubt Starmer had in mind areas like Mornington Street and the pocket of streets around it where the Census found that 43 per cent of the over-16s speak little or no English.

And although he refused to put a cap on the number of migrants coming to Britain, the PM was adamant about the need for those who do come to assimilate.