I find it here pretty difficult to make friends, true friends... it is pretty difficult to build up a relationship, a true relationship. There are a few exceptions to that. But I think a lot of people are, just like, stand on the surface, but you can’t rely on these people... most of my closest friends would be like in France or in Luxembourg.(Damien)

In this quote Damien, a French banker, who previously worked in Luxembourg before relocating to the United Kingdom in 2007, suggests how difficult it is to build ‘true’friendships in a new location. With a few exceptions most of his relationships during the last five years in London have remained ‘on the surface’. His most enduring and supportive relationships are with family and close friends in France and Luxembourg. How can a migrant get beyond the ‘surface’to build deeper relationships in new places? This raises questions about how migration both shapes and is shaped by embedding in different relationships in different places. What opportunities and challenges do even the most highly skilled migrants face in negotiating processes of embeddedness? How does relational embedding impact on spatial attachment and how might these forms of embeddedness shape future migration plans? The concept of embeddedness has been widely used across a range of disciplines to explain migration. As Findlay and Stockdale argue, migration has ‘increasingly been interpreted in terms of the temporal