Consecutive British governments have adopted a stance towards the refugee whereby the interests of the state supersede the interests of those seeking asylum. The focus is on borders, externalisation and security of the state itself, suggesting that the politics of hostipitality, and thus hostility itself, is the overriding response to the asylum seeker. This led Gerasimos Kakoliris (2015) to ask, ‘what is left of this principle of hospitality today, or ethics in general, when fences are erected at the borders, or even ‘hospitality’ itself is considered a crime?’ This approach to hospitality reinforces the masculine state power as the source of the practice with the focus on security, suspicion, borders and protection. Yet as Mireille Rosello (2001: 10) argues, the constant referral to the power of state hospitality ‘hides the fact that literal acts of hospitality are constantly going on, but at the private level’.

This chapter is an exploration of everyday practices of hospitality at the private, local level (drawing on the distinction between the public and the private sphere), examining the practices of hospitality that take place in local communities. The chapter engages with various actors such as charities and individual citizens who have undertaken practices of hospitality towards the guest, rather than the traditional focus of hospitality at the state level. In undertaking this approach to hospitality at the local level (or what can be understood as the Third Sector), this chapter is based upon thirty semi-structured interviews with individuals who engaged in practices of hospitality from mid-2015 onwards, in what has been termed the ‘summer of welcome’ (Simsa et al. 2018). This community response emerged due to events occurring within the European Union and the Mediterranean Sea, as well as in response to the British government's inaction at that time. In doing so, the chapter draws on the interviews to examine the practice of hospitality through two positions. First, as an internal practice of hospitality that is rooted in local community support, and second, identifying a range of external practices of hospitality that emerged, that were externalised beyond the territorial border of the state by community actors.

In examining internal practices of hospitality, it is noticeable that nearly all activities recorded were situated and organised via what can be referred to as small community groups, grassroots aid groups and local community activism.