Complaints that ‘London isn’t what it used to be’ or ‘London is a hell-hole these days’ are hardly original or new, but reports keep giving succour to this perception. The news that the capital has recorded its highest-ever level of mobile theft will only confirm what nostalgics and those who regularly watch TV already know: that our once-great capital is overcrowded, overpriced, crime-ridden and barely English anymore. While this stereotype is founded on much truth, I think some redress is in order, not least an infusion of nuance. By way of putting perspective on matters, here’s my story.
London has unquestionably changed. But this shift has not been wholly for the worse
When I first revisited my native, home town of London in 2013, after five whole years away, I was horrified. This was scarcely the place that I knew and loved. It did indeed seem utterly foreign – both figuratively and literally. London had become an alien city.
Yet it’s not as if the city in which I had grown up, in Kensington in my childhood and teens, Hammersmith in my twenties, was a monoethnic, white citadel from a by-gone era. Far from it. The capital in the 1980s and 1990s was already a multiracial, international melting-pot.
My primary school, Fox, in Notting Hill Gate, both catered for the sons and daughters of ethnic minority immigrants who grew up in North Kensington, and for the offspring of West London’s diplomats and wealthy Arabs. At my secondary school, Cardinal Vaughan in Holland Park, every pupil was basically Irish, Spanish, Polish or Italian. There was scarcely a pure-blooded Englishman among us. This was the multicultural London of my youth.
In that interim period between 2008 and 2013, by which time I had decamped to the East Kent coast, matters had changed vastly. I should have noticed, but like the proverbial lobster in the boiling pot, I was too immersed to notice. Labour’s decision to relax migration rules in 2004 was already having tangible effects. By the time I left, the city was awash with a new wave of Polish immigrants, some who found employment as builders as decorators, others who had become barmaids at my local pub.
It took five years of exile, in a seaside town which had never even experienced postwar immigration, to take on board what a transformation had taken place. On that return visit, the number 9 bus from Charing Cross to Hammersmith was the first giveaway. It was thronged with people who didn’t speak English. Those who did so, didn’t speak it with a local accent. Meanwhile, most of my school friends had moved to the suburbs or left completely.
About that same time, Nigel Farage famously said that he felt ‘awkward’ when he could hear no English being spoken while on a train from London to Kent. I’m not proud to admit it, but I felt equally estranged, and it didn’t need a commuter train to arouse this feeling. London felt less like the capital of England, now more like the chaotic, dystopian, global anywhere of Los Angeles from the 1982 film Blade Runner.
Subsequent and increasingly frequent visits to London have made me revise my judgement. On reflection, it’s not all bad. Some things in London have improved. The Underground, for instance, has unquestionably got better, being a far cry from its nadir in the 1980s, when trains with stock dating back to the 1930s serviced dank, gloomy stations suffused with an air of menace.
People who live in London seem more polite too, more courteous on public transport than in my day, not least in the early-2000s during that craze for ‘happy-slapping’, of which I was a victim, or going back further still, when the Tube was a frequent venue for football hooliganism.
This transformation was made more evident when, last year, I started returning once more with the aid of wheeled walking frame (which I still need for longer journeys), having broken my hip in 2021. The frequent offers of help I received last month were something to behold. My hunch is that London residents these days go the extra mile to be polite, precisely in order to dispel the ‘London is unfriendly’ cliché that is rife in the rest of the country.
But surely offering help is just normal, civilised behaviour, you might say? Yes, that’s exactly my point. London is not as exceptional as some believe or fear. Passengers on the stairs of the stations of Ramsgate and Margate will offer you help likewise. These are places where levels of rudeness and unsociability can also match those in the capital. In East Kent, people also routinely put their feet on seats, play music loudly from their phones and cycle on pavements. Beggars and the homeless are as visible a sight on the streets of Canterbury as they are the capital.
In many other respects, time has thankfully stood still. There remains the British Library, the museums, the crowds going to football stadiums, those charming subsurface District and Circle Lines that give you intermittent glimpses of life above ground. There’s still too many tourists and too much graffiti. Exactly like the old days! But more to the point, to counter Nigel Farage’s famous remark and the malign stereotype attached to it, London is not a foreign island stranded in an English ocean. There remains loads of English people there, and many, many actual Londoners.
This is not to paint a rosy picture of the capital. This is a place beset by enormous problems, many linked to high levels of immigration: a housing shortage for the middle class and working class, a lack of community cohesion, an obvious feeling of foreignness in some areas. And the bus drivers have become appallingly rude.
London has unquestionably changed. The city is objectively different now – different from the rest of England, different from its former self. But it’s not been wholly for the worse. It’s a complicated story. How to sum it up? Perhaps with my own suggested new, attractive motto for the capital: ‘Come to London. It’s really not as bad as they say.’
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