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FACTBOX: Britain's top refugee inventions

by Emma Batha | @emmabatha | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Monday, 20 June 2011 12:28 GMT

Fish and chips, Marks and Spencer, and the Mini ? symbols of British life created by refugees?

Where does fish and chips come from? If you answered Britain you’d be wrong. This is just one of the many symbols of British life that were actually created or introduced by refugees.

The following list was compiled by the U.N. refugee agency to mark Refugee Week 2011. This year is the 60th anniversary of the UN Refugee Convention created to save the lives of people being persecuted in their own countries.

 1) Fish and chips were brought to Britain by Jewish refugees expelled from Portugal in the 17th century

2) The creator of the Mini, Sir Alec Issigonis, was a Greek refugee who fled from Turkey in 1922

3) Marks and Spencer was co-founded in 1884 by Michael Marks, who came to the United Kingdom as a Jewish refugee

4) Around half of the workers who built the Southbank Centre in 1951 were refugees

5) The new British sculpture art scene owes much to Anish Kapoor, son of a refugee from Baghdad

6) Sri Lankan refugee MIA has led the British hip-hop scene. She was nominated for an Academy Award and named in Time Magazine’s Top 100 most influential people for her political activism

7) The history of psychology and psychiatry would be very different without Sigmund Freud, who fled the Third Reich and lived in London

8) Hampton Court was designed by Daniel Marot, who came to Britain after fleeing France in the late 17th century

9) Richard Rogers, son of a refugee, and Eva Jiricna, a refugee from Czechoslovakia, were both integral in the building of London’s Millennium Dome, as well as the Lloyds of London building

10) Both Patak’s and Tilda rice were founded by refugees from East Africa

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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