As Germany, Italy and Sweden crack down on migrants, we discover a squalid tent metropolis outdoors Calais the place 1,500 are ready with one goal – as a result of each one in Europe now thinks Britain is their finest probability

In a suburb of Calais are two disused warehouses – one yellow, one orange – which together stretch the length of a football pitch.

It is the most shocking place I have ever visited. Inside, packed like sardines, are the squalid tents of 1,500 migrants, hoping to cross the English Channel as soon as they can.

The stench of urine is unbearable: the men all share just a handful of toilets.

I meet pitifully thin inmates – the vast majority living here are Sudanese – who crawl out of the tents and beg me for antibiotics and other medicines. Some have tuberculosis, hepatitis B or HIV.

‘The French won’t give us medicines. But we know when we get to England, we will receive them free,’ a 38-year-old Egyptian man says, showing me his medical records on his mobile phone.

Every day at 1pm, a white van turns up to hand out rice and chicken takeaways to the migrants, who queue in their hundreds outside the warehouses for free food donated by a refugee charity.

But mainly, these beleaguered and abandoned Africans survive on the hope of reaching Britain.

Most of those in this hellhole have been thrown out of Italy, which they reached by boat from Libya.

And Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is tightening her country’s borders – this week she promised anyone entering Italy illegally on boats in future would be refused sanctuary.

‘We will defend our identity: God, homeland and family,’ the populist premier has said. ‘There is an ongoing process of Islamisation in Europe, which is very distant from the values of our civilisation.’

At the centre of the warehouse is a space between the crush of tents. It’s a prayer area, with a dozen or so copies of the Koran in a neat pile and an Arabic-style rug on the floor. Here, the migrants – almost all Muslim – worship each Friday.

Few, even among the residents of Calais, know the men are living here.

Pictures have never been taken inside since the migrants took over the place last autumn.

Only after the Mail went there this week and offered the migrants a few packets of cigarettes and chocolate bars we were invited in.

Meloni is not alone in wanting to stop the migrant crisis sweeping Europe, with its cultural and economic consequences. The same mood of hostility is rife in Germany and Sweden, which welcomed without question asylum seekers a decade ago.

Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump’s new administration has begun rounding up illegals and deporting them back to their home nations in Latin America.

In Britain, however, Keir Starmer’s government scrapped the Tory government’s main deterrent – the risk that migrants would be sent to be processed for asylum in Rwanda – and has not replaced it.

More than 24,000 have been trafficked on boats across the Channel since Labour came to power last summer, and the Home Office has earmarked more than £500million to manage and care for newcomers for the next decade.

Along the coast in Dunkirk, a 17-year-old Afghan called Albert, tells me he lived in Sweden for three months but was ordered to leave three weeks ago.

‘Stockholm refused me asylum,’ he says in good English. ‘I had nowhere else to go but here – to reach the UK on a boat. I can’t return to Afghanistan. Every migrant in Europe now thinks Britain is their best chance.’

I learned of a male in his twenties from Kurdistan deported from Germany after three years, living in a refugee house in northern France, waiting for a boat to England. ‘He speaks German, considered himself settled, and is shocked at the cruelty of what happened,’ one of his friends told me.

I also learnt the fate of Iraqi asylum seekers Mohammed, Nour and their four children, who were stuck in France last year after Germany deported them.

In an interview just before Britain’s General Election, they said they were homeless in Dunkirk, and that they had nowhere to go but Britain – and would get there in a trafficker’s boat.

This week, the family’s Facebook page showed a new picture of a red London bus on Westminster Bridge by the Houses of Parliament.

‘They are pleased to be in England. They went across the Channel,’ explained one of their friends this week. ‘They got their UK asylum quickly.’ Today, thousands wait in the northern French port cities.

In Dunkirk on Tuesday, I watched a group of 80 Iraqis, Kurds and Afghans, with full shopping bags and with a few of their children holding cuddly toys, walking along a busy street to catch a bus to the beach for a boat to the UK.

Back in Calais, at the warehouses, I talk to Hamza Ibrahem, 26, from Sudan. He tells me: ‘There are 1,500 of us here, almost all from Sudan and neighbouring South Sudan. All of us came to Italy from Libya. When Italy turned its back on us, we travelled here, as Britain is our last and only hope.’

His countryman, Ismail Mohammed, 27, arrived in Italy two years ago from Libya. He was deported back there and put in jail.

Somehow, he made it to Italy again for a second time last year. ‘The Italians didn’t want me or any Africans. I don’t have friends or family in Europe. I had nowhere to go. So I left,’ he says.

‘I did what most Sudanese do: I came to Calais. I have tried to jump on lorries to England six times. I would buy a place on a boat if I had the money. I am lonely in France. My only hope now is to reach London, where I have a cousin.’

Ismail, the son of a market trader in Sudan, is a polite young man. He is trying to learn better English and guides me carefully through the tightly packed melee of tents as we chat.

‘My family do not know I am living like this in France. I daren’t tell them how bad it is. It would upset them.

‘When I get to England and I am given a room in a hotel, then I will be proud. I will say to my father the truth. I will continue to study as a computer engineer in your country,’ he adds.

For now, Ismail and other inhabitants of this wretched sprawl of tents spend their days plotting how to cross the 21 miles of sea to reach the White Cliffs of Dover. Thrown out by a once welcoming – some would say naive – Europe, they are counting on Britain’s wide open doors to save them.