Vu Quang Hoang Tu was drawn to London by its buildings. As a student in Hanoi he saw a photograph of Westminster in a book and conceived the idea of studying architecture in Britain.

On arriving a little over a year ago, he sent an excited e-mail to his younger brother: “The architecture is so different from Vietnam. Now I see it with my own eyes, it is very great, very beautiful.”

“He loved buildings. Architecture was his life,” his uncle, Lai Phu Thanh, says.

One afternoon a fortnight ago the 25-year-old student died under the wheels of a Tube train at Earls Court Underground station. Police are still trying to piece together exactly what happened: some teenage members of Queen’s Park Rangers Football Club were reportedly “play-fighting” on the platform, when one of them fell on to the rails, taking Tu with him.

The young footballer, Harry Smart, 17, was badly injured with a fractured skull and a punctured artery in his leg, although he is now out of hospital. Tu was killed.

Mr Thanh flew to London last week and is waiting to take the body of his nephew home to Vietnam.

Sitting quietly in a kitchen in North London, the uncle tells a story of an ambitious and inquisitive young man whose parents saved for many years to send him to Britain, and whose family’s dreams were founded on his future.

It is a story not so different from that of thousands of others seeking education and opportunity in Britain; it is exceptional only in the horrible tragedy of its ending.

Tu was brought up in a Vietnam still slowly emerging from the devastation of war. “In general, after the war, we had to work hard to build a family, build a country,” his uncle, a teacher at a technical college in Hanoi, says.

“Slowly, life got better, a little bit at a time.”

Tu was attracted by the promise of how much better life could get, with a little money, an international education, and a lot of work.

His mother, the sister of Mr Thanh, worked in the blood laboratory of a large city hospital; his father had recently retired from his job as an accountant with the Hanoi municipal government. They began saving for the future of their elder son long before he was born in 1981. “He was a good boy. Thirsty to learn very many things,” Mr Thanh says. “He was always asking me questions, asking, asking . . .”

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