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This book will be the first to explore Britain’s distinctive culture of encampment. I analyze camps for Jewish, Polish, Hungarian, Anglo-Egyptian, Ugandan Asian, and Vietnamese refugees from the 1930s to the 1980s in order to rethink the larger story of the making of multiculturalism in Britain and to illuminate episodes of encampment in our own world. These camps, peopled by a fractious mix of British squatters, migrant activists of color, ex-colonial officials and volunteers, as well as refugees generated unique interactions and intimacies. Refugee camps in Britain allow us to understand the proximity of individuals and groups that scholars have traditionally kept separate: not only hosts and migrants, but also refugee populations across ethnicity and time. "Resettlement," I argue, could be deeply unsettling--both to its participants, and to the categories upon which historians have relied.