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Queens is famous throughout the world for diversity and tolerance. But really it's what we have in common that makes our neighborhoods work, our students succeed, and our families able to care for children and grandparents as they can.

I have often found that no matter where I meet people in the world, there is a path that leads back to Queen's.

The Royal Family have always had an interest in a number of different areas of society. We are a part of society.

Don't get me wrong - I love London, and still have an apartment there.

I grew up in a semi-attached row house in Queens in New York. And my family and my grandparents and my father's from Brooklyn, and so you're essentially an outer boroughs kid, you're growing up.

The average Londoner knows just one neighbour. I travel a lot, and I'm always surprised by the strong sense of community in some countries. We've lost something fundamentally human, and we don't even realise it.

You know, I do speak the Queens English. It's just the wrong Queens that's all. It's over the 59th Street Bridge. It's not over the Atlantic Ocean.

There's a simple arithmetical logic at work. Build more unaffordable and not always architecturally sympathetic apartments, watch the rents rise, the tarts leave, the small shops, production offices and design studios close down, and hey presto, we have another fashionable London suburb indistinguishable from the rest.

Growing up in Connecticut, all the Colonial houses looked alike. In Los Angeles, the diversity is so extreme, it's baffling.