The surprising truth about Albanians in Britain
Jonathan Margolis meets the immigrants from the Balkan country who have joined London’s professional classes
In a traffic jam on the M4, a black Mercedes SUV draws up alongside me. Through its tinted windows, I see the driver is wearing dark glasses. He looks slightly sinister. As he slips ahead, I notice numberplates identifying the car as Albanian. He may have been a surgeon or a professor, but I am prejudiced enough to doubt it.
I’m reminded of my first visit to Albania in 1985, when it was Europe’s North Korea, with no cars at all other than those for top Communist party officials. Travel was also banned, brown state-issued trousers the only clothing permitted for men, and speaking to a foreigner was punishable by a visit from the dreaded Sigurimi i Shtetit security police.
Albania’s tobacconist-turnedrevolutionary leader, Enver Hoxha, considered the Soviet Union and China insufficiently communist and turned his country into an isolated, paranoid outpost. In the late 80s, it was one of the last countries on Earth where you could still find busts of Stalin in public squares. Never mind gleaming SUVS: the only consumer luxury we saw was a rusty toaster in a shop window surrounded by a gawping crowd.
Today, Albania is a democracy, a candidate for EU membership and a Nato member. But it is riven with corruption and nepotism. It comes 110th out of 180 nations rated by
Transparency International’s latest corruption perception index. Albania is also notorious as a source of large numbers of supposed refugees.
Arguments rage over their numbers and the legal status, but Albanians and their cousins, the ethnically Albanian Kosovars, often provoke ire in Britain. “Not a single Albanian should be given asylum nor allowed to apply for it,” one Telegraph reader commented recently. “Straight to the airport and home.”
But, I wondered, and not disingenuously, are there normal, decent Albanians who will become proud British Albanians? I was keen to get a more rounded view of Albanians in Britain. My small journey of discovery began at the Illyrian Grill House, an Albanian restaurant in Palmers Green, north London, in a suburban street which turned out to be a kind of Little Albania. First lesson was that Albanian businesses don’t shout about being Albanian. “Mediterranean” is the usual description. Second is that the Illyrian serves a massive and delicious Albanian breakfast, with homemade sausage, Albanian cheese, fried eggs, olives and fried peppers jostling for space on the plate.
It is full of nice families, two of the men wearing Arsenal shirts. The charming staff, all Albanian and in partial national costume, were welcoming. That evening, my partner and I returned for a copious and jolly dinner to meet the co-owner, 33-yearold Olti Bokciu. We sampled dishes such as grilled sea bass marinated with oil and white cheese and an Albanian classic, Tave Dheu – beef liver cooked in a clay dish with peppers, tomatoes, garlic and (more) cheese – all accompanied by an excellent Albanian red wine.
Bokciu, a serious young man 10 years in Britain, was amazed that I had been to his country before he was born. He has a business degree and also owns a building company, contracted to work for councils. He prefers Albanian and Polish workers but was proud to tell me he’s taken on an English manager and wants to give jobs to more local people. The restaurant, open just 18 months, was a lockdown project.
Most customers are Albanian. There are pictures on the walls of great Albanians such as Mother Teresa, national costumes in museum-style display cases, and a wooden bust of the national hero, Skanderbeg, a 15thcentury warlord.
Does Bokciu see his future here? “Of course I’m going to stay. I have two brothers also here, they have wives and kids in school. Everything I have, I have because of this country. That’s why in my office I have UK and Albanian flags side by side. In this country, there’s as much work as you want.” In two hours of conversation, we did not hear one complaint. Few British-born people could hold out that long without a moan about Britain. Also, he would not let us pay – Albanian people are famously hospitable.
The lack of grumbling was the same in my next conversation, with Adelina Morina, a 43-year-old accountant for a global software company. Morina was born in Kosovo and came here in 1992, aged 13. When I explain my reflex suspicion about the Tirana-registered Mercedes on the M4, she smiles and shrugs. “There’s good and bad everywhere,” she says. “I encountered prejudice when I entered the workplace. People didn’t have confidence in me and things were difficult until I proved myself and they saw my potential.”
She heartily concurs with Bokciu’s pro-british outlook. “I’ve spent more than half my life here. I love it. This is a land of opportunity. You may not want to take them, especially if the pay is not great, but the work is there if you’re prepared to do it. My parents taught me right and wrong, and you can’t condone illegal immigration. But it is easy to understand why people risk so much to come here. Albania is beautiful, but you don’t feel any protection from the law, or from the health system. There’s no proper infrastructure.” When she was a young single mother in the 2008 financial crisis, she says, she did three or four jobs at the same time to be able to raise her child.
Does she socialise with Albanians here? She is close to her sister in Hertfordshire, a senior manager in pharmaceuticals, and sometimes goes to the nearest thing to an Albanian pub – the Queen’s Arms in Kilburn, which, I was surprised to hear, is owned by the parents of Rita Ora, the Kosovoborn singer. The pub serves Albanian food and has live Albanian music. “It’s a comfortable environment,” Morina says, “and it’s nice to speak Albanian. But not too often.”
Next, I am in the Kings Road in Chelsea to meet Klentiana Mahmutaj, a charismatic 44-year-old barrister born and educated in Tirana, and perhaps – after Rita Ora and fellow singer Dua Lipa – the most high-profile Albanian in Britain.
In Tirana, her father was a printer, her mother a mechanic, but both became opponents of the Hoxha regime. The young Klentiana became fascinated by British history and now, years later, is married to a British barrister and has a son named William, after Pitt the Younger.
As a lawyer, she has prosecuted for official bodies, including the Environment Agency, the Serious Fraud Office and the Metropolitan Police – and is proud, as a foreign-born woman, to have the security clearance to allow such sensitive work. “In Albania, the nepotism is such that I wouldn’t be able to be a lawyer,” she says.
As a centrist conservative active in human rights, Mahmutaj is conflicted by the Albanian immigration question. She appreciates that prospects for Albanians in their own country are limited by corruption, but insists the UK must get to grips with its borders. She favours a pragmatic policy of being open to incoming Albanians likely to be useful to a Britain chronically short of labour.
None the less, she objects to the media and politicians implying that all Albanians are criminals by highlighting the ethnicity of the few convicted. “Factually it’s not incorrect, but to stereotype and paint everybody from that country with the same brush and vilify them must be wrong. But I’ve never felt subject to racism or xenophobia, which is incredible. When I share stories with other Albanians in continental Europe, they don’t have similar experiences.”
“Albanians are talented people,” she says. “There are only 3.1 million of us in Albania, but we’ve made huge contributions here and around the world in academia, in science, in medicine, in banking. It falls on each of us to scream about being Albanian rather than hide it.”
Like Olti Bokciu, Mahmutaj has an Albanian flag in her office. “Britain is home and this is my country, but it’s very important to be reminded of who you are and where you come from.”
‘This is a land of opportunity. The work is there if you’re prepared to do it’