In Aston, a predominantly ethnic minority area of Birmingham, Pardeep Modhvadia was quite frank last week about how insulated his life can be from mainstream white British culture.

“We are very much involved with our mosque and events in the Asian community,” said the 34-year-old IT consultant whose wife, Nazia, is 33. “Many of these events involve Asians exclusively and it can be easy to get wrapped up in Asian culture and not embrace other communities around you.”

Modhvadia admitted that he and his wife “mainly only see Asian people”, partly because of religious and family ties.

“I don’t think we are as segregated as some people say, though,” he added. “It has always been this way. However, since the London bombings you can get an unfriendly reaction from white people who do not know you.”

There are plenty of those — because white people, even those living in the same area, are equally unlikely to know many fellow citizens from across the cultural divide. Among them is James Parker, a 24-year-old mechanic, who lives in the same area of Birmingham with his girlfriend Chloe, 22. He, too, was straightforward about the ethnically restricted ambit of his life.

“Our friends are mostly white,” he said. “I knew a lot of Asians in school and they mainly talked only to each other and would sometimes speak in Gujarati — it was like their own club. So everyone kind of divided into their own racial groups.”

He added that the community “had been more segregated since the London bombings”.

Is this the true face of modern Britain? Is it diverse but divided; integrated in theory, separate in practice? Trevor Phillips, head of the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), believes so.

In a bold and controversial speech this week, he will warn that Britain is “sleep-walking” its way to a society of segregation, ethnic enclaves and potential conflict.

“We are becoming strangers to each other and we are leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream,” he will say.

Some districts, he will add, are on their way to becoming “literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and from which nobody escapes undamaged. We could have a different future. But if we want that different future, we have to face facts now”.

According to Phillips, the facts are deeply uncomfortable and largely unspoken. Ethnic communities, he says, are increasingly concentrated in “ghettos”. Although there has been some integration, notably in London and the southeast, the popular image portrayed abroad of Britain as one big happy melting pot is false.

Not only do ethnic minorities largely live in separate areas, they are typically segregated at school and socially — and it is getting worse. “When we leave work, most of us leave multi-ethnic Britain behind,” Phillips will say.

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