Migration as Anchorage

On a temporary visit to London a Palestinian family found themselves unable to return to Gaza during Israel's 2008 war on their city. Understanding their stay in London as an act of 'anchoring' the family opened a Palestinian café and sought to make their lives - as individuals as a family and as a community - viable in the face of uncertainty. By following the stories of various family members as they struggled to recreate a sense of home this moving ethnography introduces the concept of anchorage as a novel lens to understand migration home and place highlighting the fluidity temporariness and serendipity of these experiences.