| Notable British Sri Lankans Nimal Mendis, Nigel Barker, Anton Balasingham, Dimitri Mascarenhas, Albert Moses, Vernon Corea, DJ Nihal, Amara Karan, Neville Jayaweera, M.I.A. |
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| Total population | |||
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| Sri Lankan residents ~500,000 (2011)[1] Sri Lankan-born residents 67,938 (2001 Census) 106,000 (2009 ONS estimate) Other population estimates 110,000 (2002 Berghof Research Center estimate) 150,000 (2007 Tamil Information Centre estimate) |
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Sri Lankans in the United Kingdom or British Sri Lankans refers to people of Sri Lankan heritage living in Britain. British Sri Lankans comprise of migrants from Sri Lanka and their British-born descendants. Ethnically, they may include Sri Lankan Tamils, Sinhalese people, Burghers, and Sri Lankan Moors. Migration from Sri Lanka to the UK has been a result of historic links between the two countries and the Sri Lankan Civil War.[3]
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Sri Lankans have been migrating to Britain for several centuries, up from the time of British ruled Ceylon.[4]
The UK was the first country with established immigration from Sri Lanka and took in many of the early Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. Sri Lankan immigrants can be divided into three types of immigrants that have come to the UK.
The first type came from the 1950s to the 1980s the Sri Lankan diaspora consisted of a very settled group of people who followed a migration model of a single journey with a settled home at the end of it. Many of these people who came are well-educated and very well off economically and have become established in British society. During the 1960s, understaffing in the UK’s National Health Service opened up the opportunity for many Sri Lankans to become doctors and consultants; others managed to secure other white-collar jobs.
The second type of Sri Lankan immigrants consists of mostly young men who are less educated and often traumatized by their experiences from the war zones and remain on the fringes of British society. These immigrants would have left Sri Lanka in the late 1980s and 1990s.
The third type is a smaller but growing one, which is mainly the young people living in the second or third generation in Great Britain, who are comparatively well-educated and have experienced today’s democratic pluralism and a more middle-class British society.
Before 1983, when the Civil War started, social spaces for a Sri Lankan elite existed, there were hardly any ethnic boundaries and all ethnicities attended Sri Lankan High Commission receptions and the frequent intra-school sports competitions organized by Sri Lankan schools alumnae. During that time the public perceived the Sri Lankan community as one of the most successful immigrant communities in the UK. Especially during the 1970s, political organization increased among both Tamils and Sinhalese.[5]
In the 1960s a larger community of Sri Lankans developed when they migrated to the UK for employment opportunities. In the 1980s with the start of the Civil War and a result of persecution many Sri Lankans fled to the UK to seek asylum.[4]
Some of the Sinhalese community have been against the public display of support for the LTTE in the 2009 Tamil Diaspora protests in Westminster, London.[6] Some of the Sinhalese community in the UK have faced violence from some British Sri Lankan tamils over the ethnic conflict in the Sri Lankan Civil War. Several Sinhala owned Fried Chicken Shops in North London and a Sinhalese Buddhist temple in Kingsbury were vandalised in 2009.[7]
The 2001 Census recorded 67,938 Sri Lankan-born UK residents,[8] and the Office for National Statistics estimates the equivalent figure for 2009 to be 106,000.[9] However the British High Commission in Colombo estimate up to 500,000 residents in the UK.[1] Most Sri Lankans live in London. The vast majority of Sri Lankan-born residents in the UK live in the capital, London estimated to have 50,000 in 2001 or 0.7% of the London population, with smaller populations in the West and East Midlands.[3] The Tamil Information Centre estimates that, as of 2007, 170,000 Sri Lankan migrants were resident in the UK.[10]
The number of Sinhalese people in the UK is not known as the UK government doesn’t record statistics on language and the Sinhalese have to classify themselves as either Asian British or Asian Other.
The main and oldest organisation representing the Sinhalese community in the UK are the UK Sinhala association.[11] The newspaper Lanka Viththi was created in 1997 to provide a Sinhala newspaper for the Sinhalese community.[12] In 2006, a Sinhala TV channel called Kesara TV was set up in London to provide the Sinhala speaking people of the UK a TV channel in Sinhala.[13]
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