It’s a long story. It starts with the Romans who everyone knows never did anything for anyone, except in capitals. LONDON. It starts with me, growing up in W8, riding my bike around the block. Grey paving stones. I used to take the Number 10 bus to school and it cost 8p for a child’s fare. The conductor turned his ticket machine with a hand crank so that the gears whirred and printed purple numbers on a ticket slip. The numbers did not correspond to any date, time or route. I used to add them up and take them away from each other to practise my maths.
I had a best friend at school, but no community. I was a bit lonely. Kensington was never a neighbourly neighbourhood. I graduated from university in 1992 in the middle of a recession and there were no jobs so I left for New York. I returned in 1996 and on arrival immediately fell into a depression. I emigrated from west London to north, Highbury N5, and had to find a whole new set of friends and buy trousers and trainers. Arsenal won the Premier League and FA Cup double in 1998, but London was boring after New York, too spread out to gather friends spontaneously, numbing Piccadilly Line commutes, nowhere to get a drink after an evening movie. I left again after two years and didn’t really come back. Tbilisi, Tehran, Baghdad, Beirut, Paris, Cairo, Jerusalem, Boston, Paris. People would say to me: aren’t you frightened in those scary places and I would reply: “there is nowhere in the world more terrifying than getting out of Ladbroke Grove tube at 11 o’clock at night and walking under the Westway flyover among the clots of milling young men jabbing each other and drinking from cans and then having to walk home down one of those dark residential streets with rapist-friendly garden hedges on either side.”
I did not like London.
My dad was in hospital this year and during his convalescence this spring, I found myself spending longer in London than I had in many years. The referendum was in the air. I lived in Paris at the time and complacently soothed my French friends’ anxiety that Britain would leave the European Union. I told them: “don’t worry, it’ll be like Scotland, people will vote for the devil they know, for stability over uncertainty. It’s just Tory party infighting.” In London I took a straw poll among my friends. Mostly they were, like me, for “Remain,” a few were “Leave.” It was interesting that I couldn’t have guessed which was which. The American oil-trading Trump supporter was a remainer, the Danish-Jewish-British banker married to a Turk wanted Britain to leave. One Sunday afternoon, apropos of nothing in particular, I took the tube to North Greenwich to see the O2 because I realised I had never seen it before. It’s huge! And there’s a cable car across the river! A great crowd of families was enjoying the day out at a food fair, picnicking on grass verges and walking up the roof of the Dome on a viewing staircase.
I walked along the Thames footpath towards Greenwich. The tide was going out exposing stony mud beaches, the scrim of flotsam, briny stench of estuary wash seaward. Rusting abandoned jetties jutted into the river at intervals like conceptual sculptures in Tate Modern. Little white balls abounded, which I couldn’t figure out, until I realised the tall netting was not a bird sanctuary but a golf driving range. Corrugated fencing, heaps of sand and stones. This was the beginning of the Greenwich Peninsula development, a huge project to build a new neighbourhood for more than 30,000 people. Further along I could see a few already completed blocks, each with a glass balcony.
I wandered amazed. I have spent my life exploring and reporting other cities; but I have never explored or reported on my own. A foreign correspondent had come home to a city that was now unfamiliar. I got out at Whitechapel tube station one afternoon and into a great bustling Asian throng, saris and salwar kameezes, full-flowing niqab, hijab, golden nose rings and the long beards and the carefully shaved moustaches of the very observant. A curry cloud hung in the air and all the market stalls were selling strange knobbly cucumbers and herbs I had never seen. How to understand what has happened, is happening? Sitting on a tube and realising that there are several conversations going on and none of them in English. Do we mind, do we notice, do we care?
According to the 2011 census there are a million more people in London than there were in 2001. But look back over the decades, and it turns out that London’s population for the last hundred years has fluctuated between 6.6m and 8.1m. The same number of people are now living in London as lived in London before the war. But in the 1930s, less than 3 per cent were born outside Britain; today more than one third are.
London has changed.
I was shocked, as many were, by the result of the referendum. A couple of days later I was sitting in a café and got talking to the man sitting next to me. He shook his head, “I don’t understand what happened. Assumptions have been overturned. It’s like I don’t feel comfortable in my own skin.” I nodded. I too felt that my country felt suddenly alien. My city, however, bathed in late-June sunshine, was glorious. Sixty per cent of Londoners voted to remain. In Lambeth the figure was almost 80 per cent, the highest of any region in Britain except Gibraltar, which is not in Britain.
How do we reconcile London’s multifarious multicultural minarets and mezze, with the Brexitland outside the M25. The rest of the country voted for a nationalist retrenchment; Londoners started talking about secession. Only half joking.
One July weekend, a fortnight after the referendum shocker, I went to the second, rather sparsely attended, “Remain” demo in Whitehall. “EUROPE INNIT” was the slogan.
“No one is illegal!” said one man wearing a T-shirt with the European flag on it—although one of the yellow stars was missing. I saw a placard that read: “Fuck this I’m moving to Scotland” and got talking to a Canadian woman who had lived in London for 20 years who was passionate about the unfairness of the vote.
As I left the demo, I walked past a policeman advising a lady carrying a bunch of rhubarb that she should try it raw because it was good that way. Outside the old War Office building, I overheard a tour guide: “And this is where Winston Churchill said never give up during the Blitz. Now we are going to go to our last stop, Trafalgar Square.” On Trafalgar Square, I saw a pedestrian crossing light that lights green with a transgender symbol instead of a walking man.
The Greater London Authority had organised an open-air festival with food tents and a music stage to celebrate Eid at the end of Ramadan. A mad homeless person was splashing around in one of the fountains and wouldn’t be moved on, but otherwise everyone mingled happily. I popped into a tent to see an exhibition entitled “The Art of Integration.” From the stage an enthusiastic microphone voice announced, “that’s what’s amazing about today. We’re all from London and we’re all from different places too.”
A couple of weeks later, I went to City Hall to listen to the Mayor’s Question Time. I thought I might get a sense of what issues are of concern in London. Sadiq Khan, London’s new Mayor, is second generation Pakistani British. A new London face, a Muslim. Some hay was made of this when he was elected, but Londoners were not much exercised. Does it matter any more? Gender, sexual orientation, religion, skin colour have become almost politically moot in the capital. It’s like harping on Theresa May being a woman, when so are Angela Merkel and Nicola Sturgeon and Hillary Clinton.
“As a proud feminist,” began Sadiq Khan, as he announced that he had opened an initiative to close the pay gap for women within the Greater London Authority. There was plenty of discussion about Brexit, but it’s really too early for London to respond when the national government has not yet set out its plan. Khan said he had started a hashtag #Londonisopen to show that “The one million foreign nationals who live in London will always be welcome.” The Assembly members are a mix of Conservative, Liberal Democrat, Labour, Green, white, black and Asian. On this point there was no dissention.
I wanted to talk to people about London’s multi-ethnicity, but I found it strangely awkward to talk to strangers. After all, isn’t part of the reason why we like living in big cities is that we can go about our business with no one bothering us? The following Sunday, I came across Lebanese Festival Day on Paddington Green. A singer on a stage was belting out Lebanese pop songs, people were dancing the dabke in a circle and families were sitting on the about eating shwarma. There was a backgammon tent and a line of kids for the Mr Whippy van. It was all very convivial. I lived in Beirut for a year. I have lots of Lebanese friends. I kept meaning to sit down and get talking to people about London, but I felt a bit awkward. I didn’t go to the community centre in Chinatown that I meant to either, or to the one in Bow where I saw on the internet that they “aim to promote understanding between all sections of the local community, offering a setting for multicultural, inter-generational and inter-faith exchange.” It should have been an obvious stop. Yet I demurred. I walked along the Whitechapel Road, thinking to stop in a café and chat, but somehow I didn’t; the cafés were kebab places, or didn’t have chairs. I walked a little north. It was the last day of school and a throng of schoolchildren in red blazers were escaping into the side streets. The girls wore grey uniform trousers or grey uniform baggy pantaloons and tunics. Some were bareheaded, others had grey uniform headscarves. “Imran! Imran! Imran!” called one boy after a friend.
I walked towards Brick Lane where the demographic changed to hipster. A group of tourists were listening to a street art tour. In the windows there was still a scrim of “Remain” posters. I noticed Kerbela Street off Cheshire Street that was subtitled in the Bengali alphabet. In Shoreditch there was plenty of cappuccino, but as I sat in a café decorated with Keith Haring wall doodles on a button upholstered leather Victorian high-backed armchair, among the tattoos and green stripy hair and shaved heads, I realised I didn’t feel like striking up conversations there either. Different tribes, I thought, and none of them mine.
"There's a Tyler Brûlé magazine emporium, the Frontline Club for war reporters and a mosque"Disconsolate, bemused, I went back home to Paddington.
My parents moved to Paddington eight years ago and refurbished a warehouse building that had once housed the horses and carriages for the handsome cabs that serviced Paddington station. St Michael’s Street is located in a strangely forgotten nether region, a small, relatively ungentrified grid of streets bordered by the Araby Edgware Road, St Mary’s Hospital and the grand swank of Connaught Village where Tony Blair lives. Our street is mostly council or housing association houses. A lot of properties around here are owned by the Church. There’s still a sense of working-class London. Dave at number 21 was born in Paddington and has never left. Debbie is a carer for Alzheimer patients and lives in the house that has all the crazy lights at Christmas. She told me, “We’re all in each other’s houses round here.” There are two pubs, the Royal Exchange, where old men watch the racing and the Alexander Fleming (he discovered penicillin at St Mary’s, now more famous for being where Prince George was born) which is where Debbie drinks and is often full of construction workers in steel-capped boots who come down from the north during the week and board in the rooming houses on Norfolk Square. (“I’m a steeplejack from Newcastle,” said one when I asked.) There’s a Tyler Brûlé design magazine emporium café called the Kiosk, the Frontline Club for war reporters, a Kurdish mosque, a really good fish and chips place and several shisha cafés. “Microcosm,” I said to a friend, describing it. “Sargasso sea,” he replied.
Life, London, is in the conversations. The funny thing was that although I felt intimidated in Whitechapel and Shoreditch, I seemed to find it easy to door stop people on my own doorstep.
On Friday after prayers, the Kurds in the Salahuddin Community Centre mosque told me they had no problems in the area, except they’d had an incident with a plain-clothes policeman who had taken the memory chip out of their surveillance camera without anyone’s permission. Minkey and Philip, a friendly couple in their fifties, an artist and pianist, live in the adjacent mews. Minky has a sprawling wisteria and a burgeoning shrub garden in pots overflowing the cobblestones and I got talking to her one afternoon when she was watering her plants. She told me she had grown up in Libya so the call to prayer was very familiar but she knew some of her neighbours didn’t like it. Inevitably, perhaps, they lamented, there was a sense of us and them. Minky pointed out that a lot of the shisha cafés seemed to be for men only.
Philip said, “I sometimes go to Valerie’s on the Edgware Road. Between seven and eight in the morning it’s entirely English, but at about 11 am the demographic has changed completely.”
Osama, an Iraqi who was granted asylum having fled Saddam Hussein’s regime in the late 1990s, took over the Scenario Café a year and a half ago. “Everyone around here is very friendly,” he told me, “except for the doctor next door who complains about the shisha.” Taher behind the counter made me an Arabic coffee. In the tradition of Arab hospitality, Osama refused to let me pay. Taher was Egyptian, from Cairo, and I asked him if he liked London but told me had only been here “un mois” and didn’t speak any English yet.
Johan took over the Pappiland Café on my corner from a Somali guy a couple of years ago. Johan and his wife Noura, their 12-year-old daughter Paris and smaller son Adam, are Swedish Kurds. They came to Britain to get treatment for Paris because she had a complicated heart problem that couldn’t be treated in Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan (where they had moved back to) or in Stockholm where they went to see a specialist. Paris doesn’t like her new school, an academy in St John’s Wood.
“Everyone screams and shouts. My maths teacher doesn’t do anything, he just sits there and talks to his friend. And there’s violence. I saw two girls fighting each other and swearing at each other. One of the teachers tried to break them up and they just hit him. Nearly all the students are Arabs or Kuwaits.” She has found some kids who share her mixed identity: “Like my friend from Bangladesh, Tasmina. People are always asking her where she is from and she always says: ‘I was born in Britain and my parents were born in Britain and I’m British and then they say, no, where are you from originally?’ I know how she feels.” Paris and her mother were uncomfortable about the religiosity of many of the students. “Adam comes home talking about halal and haram and asks if he can eat pig meat,” Paris told me. In Sweden, her mother thought, people were more equal and less segregated because religion was kept out of the classroom. Her husband Johan agreed.
“In Sweden people from different backgrounds have the same education. We saw refugees and they changed. There is integration. Here, no.”
“Here everyone keeps their culture,” added Noura, “Indian, Chinese. Here the Arabs walk around like they were in Saudi Arabia.”
All the same Noura told me, if she were British she would have voted Brexit. “Safer, more rules, less people coming.”
There are no generalisations to be made about London and us denizens. For a while I harboured a theory (with the caveat that all theories are wrong) that just as London is a collection of villages, its peoples tend to live in their own like-minded, and sometimes ethnic, bubbles. Thomas, my barista friend who works at the Frontline, is 23 years old and comes from a small town in Slovakia called Spišské Podhradie. He showed me a picture of it on his mobile phone: a pure Habsburg dream, little red pitched roofs clustered beneath a white stone castle on a hill, forests waiting in the wings for fairy tales and picnics. He had played professional football in a minor league in Slovakia, but he had wanted to stretch his horizons. Of course, he said, he has English friends “to have a beer with,” but he lives in Mill Hill with two Slovaks who come from his home town and he plays football in an amateur league made up of Czech and Slovak teams. “Sometimes we include foreigners in the teams,” said Thomas, a little sheepish, ironic, “British people or Hungarians or people from Poland or Uruguay.”
Paddington is a railway terminus. It has long been an area of transience and transition. Waves of immigrants have washed up here. First came the Welsh, then the Irish in the 1960s. Kathy has been behind the bar at the Royal Exchange Pub for over 20 years. She came to London from Donegal in the late 1960s, and ran pubs in Bromley, Portobello Road and Wembley with her husband. Her husband was from County Meath; he died six months ago. Kathy says she’s still involved with a lot of Irish associations and community groups. “Every county has their own organisation. We used to put on festivals, but the council cut the funding. Because of my husband I’m involved in the Meath Association of London. Now we raise money for charity. We pick one, like St Luke’s Hospice, or motor neurone disease. We had one of our members suffer with motor neurone. Last year we had a raffle and buffet that raised £700. And there’s the Irish Counties Association that meets once a month in Camden Town. It’s a whole big family group, everyone knows each other.”
Philip and Minkey first bought their mews house 40 years ago for Minkey to use as a studio. Back then the area was seedy and a little villainous; prostitutes stalked the hotels along Sussex Gardens and the streets around Praed Street were full of porn shops. In the 1970s and 1980s the area was full of Cypriots who came after the war with Turkey in 1974 that divided their island. “Cypriots, Spanish and Portuguese. There used to be a very good little Portuguese grocer on Southwick Street.”
Andreas is third-generation Greek Cypriot; he grew up above the fish and chip shop and still owns property in the area, although he now lives in Golders Green.
“If it wasn’t for the Turkish occupation,” Andreas told me one afternoon sitting with a coffee outside the Pappiland Café, “almost all the Cypriots in London—there are 300,000 of them did you know?—would have gone home. My dad’s land was in the north.” Andreas had a gold chain around his neck with a medallion of Alexander the Great and a cross for his Orthodox religion. He married a Cypriot too and he speaks Greek. I asked Andreas what he did, who were his friends, his London life. He’s a Chelsea supporter. “Well my friends—you’ll laugh but they’re all second- and third-generation Greek Cypriots. You know, its just easier, you can drop a word of Greek in and everyone understands.”
"We are very happy to be here. This is a free country. Safety, security. Nice people"We were sitting with George, who Andreas described as “grandfather of the neighbourhood.” George bought the building that the Pappiland Café is in for £16,000 in the 1950s. He is 88 years old and apologised that he only has one tooth left because he’s been undergoing radiation therapy for a growth on his neck and the treatment made all his teeth fall out. He remembered when there were still stables on St Michael’s Street and the neighbourhood kids used to play in the hayloft. We got talking about Brexit. George voted out.
“For the days when you worked and came home and a fiver was a fiver.”
“But that’s got nothing to do with Europe,” said Andreas who had voted remain. “Everything got out of hand,” said George, “you can’t tell us you want a straight banana.” Andreas thought that the refugees and migrants were the better educated part of the European work-force. “The Poles are bloody hard workers. And the Romanians.”
“They’re good thieves as well.” George winked. Andreas laughed: “Don’t confuse the Roma with the Romanians!” What was it a friend of mine said over iced coffee in Clerkenwell when I was talking to her about London bubbles? She said: “But then when people fall in love the bubbles collide and merge. People end up having relationships with the other and people in London are very accepting of that.” London: the great pic ‘n’ mix. Integration, first generation, second generation, third. Does it matter in the end? Whenever I asked people what they liked about London they almost always answered, “the diversity.”
I asked Thomas the Slovakian how he felt as a European living in London after Brexit. “I’m not really worried about it to be honest,” he said. “Perhaps I should be more but I am young so I don’t care. I don’t really want to go home, I didn’t come to London to just go back home again, I came here to find out what I want to do.”
Fabio is one of the baristas in the Kiosk café where I often work in the mornings. He is from Rome and came to London seven years ago and studied broadcast journalism here.
“So why on earth would you leave the eternal city?” “Everyone always asks me that.” Rome, he said, was dysfunctional, terrible transport, only two underground lines. “And Italy is a fairly racist country. Yes, I am gay and that’s part of it too. Italy is a very macho culture and that makes a difference to my quality of life. In London I can go anywhere walking with my boyfriend holding hands, kissing. I went to New York recently and I noticed that we were being noticed a lot more than in London. I don’t feel noticed in London.”
“And now post-Brexit?”
“After the referendum, I realised that the rest of the country is not that different from what I left in Italy. It was quite disappointing, in a way. But I am still not planning to leave because London clearly took one side. If London had been more divided, I would not feel welcome here and there would be no reason to be here.”
Bubbles coexist in a bubble bath. Osama at the Scenario Café is Sunni. His friend Ali, sitting outside with a shisha pipe, was Shia from the south of Iraq. I listened to them discussing the Middle East and Islam and terrorism in a way that would be politically charged and almost impossible in their home country.
“I hate what they did in France,” said Osama, “these people are not Islamic. What they do is very bad for Islam.”
Ali agreed: “Yes, here it is better there is a separation of religion and politics, like in the time of Saddam there was one good thing: there was no politics allowed in the mosques.”
Osama said to me: “We are very happy to be here. This is a free country. I have been here almost 20 years and I never had a problem. Safety, security. Nice people. It is because you have rules.”
I realised that I had talked to 20 or more people in my Paddington patch and fewer than the fingers of one hand were English-English. George, it turns out, was in fact born in Mosul because his father worked in the oil fields in Iraq. His mother was a Sephardic Jew. He didn’t come to England until he was nine and didn’t speak a word of English. Then I remembered that I am not English either. My mother is American and my father is from Perthshire and would have voted for Scottish independence if he had the chance. I have lived in Lebanon and Iraq and Egypt and Jerusalem. Maybe I had to go away to come home. Because now the Arabic smells of the Edgware Road, with its wafting shisha-shwarma smoke cut with the tang of fresh orange juice feels as home to me as the fug in a Piccadilly Line tube and the joy of a lager and lime standing on the pavement outside a pub on a summer evening. When I was abroad I always hated it when people asked me where I was from. I understand now why Paris, a 12-year-old Swedish-Kurdish-Londoner with a burning ambition to be a scientist, hates having to define herself too. We’re just us, just here. In London.
