Two were in their twenties, the third in his early thirties, and they all had dark brown skin, jet black hair and were casually dressed in sweatshirts, jeans and brand-name white trainers. The bench was in the Rose Garden, a quiet area of the Paddington Recreation Ground in Maida Vale, north-west London. The park had once been a place where elderly ladies walked their dogs and mothers watched their toddlers take unsteady steps, but now it was a meeting place for the various immigrant groups crammed into the damp flats of nearby Kilburn. On any one day there would be clusters of young men from Kosovo, from Bosnia, from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from West Africa, a veritable United Nations of refugees who had fled to Britain for a better life. They had quickly discovered they were not welcomed by the majority of the population. They were hated because they were a different colour, because they spoke a different language and wore different clothes, but mostly they were hated because they refused to integrate.
