We would like to thank first and foremost the contributors to this volume and their interlocutors including Michael Keith who was kind enough to accept Ben Gidley’s invitation for an interview. A special debt of thanks goes to Amber Herle and Jessica Binks for their help editing various papers in this collection and a great many thanks too go to Maxwell Donnewald for the translation of Hanane Karimi’s paper. We would also like to thank both the Annual Review editorial team, specifically Olga Breskaya and Giuseppe Giordan and the Brill Production editor Thalien Colenbrander for their help and patience during a very complicated period. Many of the contributors to the volume met at the Higher Education, Research and Innovation Department of the French Embassy in London in May 2019. The two-day seed meeting that we organized at the Embassy was a crucial building block in the elaboration of a proposal that led to an Open Research (ora) project, “encounters: diversity & distance in urban Europe: religion, culture and social model”, funded by the anr, dfg and ukri. Thanks to the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity for funding the Open Access publication of the ‘Introduction’.