When Gerhardt joined our small team of social anthropologists at Brunel University in 1986 he immediately set himself up nearby in Southall, which had become a centre of South Asian immigration, and began a long-term field study. His teaching at Brunel merged with his fieldwork. Gerhardt drew students into doing field projects in Southall, notably Marie Gillespie, who became a close associate and dear friend. As he became familiar with this diverse segment of West London he began to develop a critical account of ‘multiculturalism’ in his lectures and seminars. He juggled the absorbing fieldwork with enthusiastic teaching and turned out to be an unenthusiastic but very effective administrator, his anarchist sympathies somehow combining with bureaucratic nous.
When his Southall fieldwork was completed he was ready to move on, choosing a post at the University of Amsterdam in preference to a chair in a German university (too hierarchical). We missed him terribly at Brunel, but were cheered by the rapid publication of his monograph on Southall (Contesting Cultue: Discourses of Identity in Multi-ethnic London) which appeared in 1996. Then, like anthropologists and sociologists all over the globe, we were extremely impressed by the theoretical development of his insights in The Multicultural Riddle in 1999, which quickly became widely influential.