London is one of my favorite cities in the world. My grandfather was English, so I grew up as an Anglophile. I love the history and the literature. I love shopping at Liberty, checking out bookstores, seeing plays, going to services and concerts at St. Martin-in-the-Field’s, and eating a proper scone (rhymes with on). In London, you are steeped the mix of the ancient and the absolute cutting edge. One reason that the city is so creative is its openness to immigration. People from all over the Commonwealth–that is, all over the world–see London as their home. People from outside the Commonwealth come, too, driven by either extreme wealth or extreme poverty.
Ben Judah writes about the modern London. It’s less British and more Commonwealth than it was even ten years ago. It is also far more European. Romanians arrive almost as slaves, forced to beg to pay for their passage. Poles come to do construction. Middle-Eastern princesses come for the summer social season, almost like the English aristocracy once did, while their Filipino maids plot their escape. Nigerians preach about Jesus while Pakistanis convert pubs into mosques. Judah goes out (occasionally undercover) to find out who the people of modern London are. While he covers a huge range of economic and educational backgrounds (with a close focus on the poorest of the new arrivals), almost all of his interviewees show grit and heart.
This Is London was published in 2016, before Brexit. It doesn’t talk about that vote, but it does show some of the tension that ethnically British people might have felt. London has long been a global city, but it is no longer an ethnically British one. As an American who is, in part, ethnically British, I see this as an advantage. I believe that when different people come together, something new and wonderful develops. England enjoys better food, better music, and better literature from its immigration, and I love that.
The United States is very much an urban country. Our elites and their social lives are centered on the cities. This is a commercial nation, and commerce requires proximity. Although the US has vast acreage of rich agricultural land, the country has always been something less-than. In England, meanwhile, the wealthiest people were all based in the country, with land that their ancestors were granted by the king. They came to London for meetings of Parliament and the social season that accompanied it, but the heart of the nation’s soul was the countryside. When the Queen goes hunting or Kate Middleton goes shooting, they aren’t slumming or trying to show off their folksy realness. Instead, they are behaving in a right royal fashion, given that for centuries, only royals had the right to hunt.
So the cities were never as fancy. London has always had slums and strivers. Judah has done great reporting on the current population. I liked this book about a city I love.
