Discursive integration through spatial segregation: how Polish migrants racialise British cartography to claim belonging

This article examines how Polish migrants in the UK negotiate belonging by constructing a racialised spatial imaginary centred on a mythologised English past. Based on qualitative data, it argues that migrants engage in race-making through racial cartography: reconstructing a symbolic socio-cultural order and mapping it onto geography. They deploy this cartography as discursive integration – a vernacular practice in which migrants claim belonging by mobilising racialised categories to align with a white Christian majority, often at the cost of distancing themselves from other minorities. “Posh” districts, villages, and suburbs are constructed as positive, clean, safe, and authentically English – implicitly coded as white. Conversely, multi-racial urban areas are framed as negative, dirty, and un-English. Through alignment with a mythologised white English past, Polish migrants claim symbolic whiteness and a place alongside the white majority. The article contributes to debates on integration, the spatial dimensions of racialisation, and ways migrants reproduce racial hierarchies.