Do 'no-go' zones for non-Muslims exist in Britain, as the Bishop of Rochester claims? Olga Craig reports from some of Yorkshire's Asian-dominated areas
It has been more than 40 years since Tim Carbin walked the length of Oak Lane, the Bradford backstreet of his boyhood. Then, when he lived with his grandmother Florence Pawson, a matriarch within the community, his task after school was to run errands.
Down to Foster's, the baker's, for a loaf of bread and a pound of bacon from Donald Gilbank the butcher. "And mind it isn't too fatty," Florence would tell him.
Mr Carbin, then 13, knew all the local storekeepers by name, just as he knew the families in the surrounding terraces.
Yesterday, outside number 95A, his grandmother's former home, Mr Carbin gazed in bewilderment as he scanned his old haunt.
Not surprisingly, the stores of his youth had gone: such has been the change in our shopping habits over the decades that they have given way to supermarkets and fast-food outlets.
But that was not all that had changed irrevocably in Oak Lane. Among the new stores, the clothes shops sell Muslim dress, the butcher stocks halal meat and even the local takeaway advertises halal pizza.
"I feel like an alien, like I'm on a street in Karachi," Mr Carbin says, awkwardly.
"I don't feel I have anything in common with this area. It's like I've never been here before. I knew it would be different but I knew, too, that I would feel uncomfortably like I don't belong."
He now lives just 10 miles away, in the north of Bradford. He hasn't returned because Oak Lane, like so many similar areas of so many northern cities, is now an almost exclusive Asian Muslim community.
Mr Carbin is far from a racist, however. Well educated and widely travelled in Muslim countries, he has the utmost respect for the Islamic religion. What is worrying him is that Britain's increasing espousal of multiculturalism has led not to an integrated society but, instead, to ghettoisation, with white-only and Asian-only communities existing cheek by jowl but with little or no common ground. And that, he believes, could have an ominous outcome.
He is, clearly, one of those about whom Michael Nazir-Ali, the Bishop of Rochester (Britain's only Asian-born bishop), wrote in The Sunday Telegraph last week: the increasing number of native white Britons who believe many of their streets have now become "no-go" areas.
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