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.

Michelle Obeid is a Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She is also the author of Border Lives: An Ethnography of a Lebanese Town in Changing Times (Brill, 2019).