London

I wrote this piece over ten years ago, and although there’s been many changes, London will always be London, one of the best cities in the world. I haven’t edited it much, apart from including the comment about gentrification………

 

I arrived in a London that had East End nightclubs, with dodgy bouncers as big as houses manning the door, 24 hour off-licenses and burnt out cars that doubled up as illicit playgrounds. Although gentrification had yet to curse the land, it’s always been a tale of two cities.

Margaret Thatcher once famously said that there was no such thing as society. When she barked these words, she couldn’t have been living in the same London that I know and love. Whether you live in North, South, East or West, everyone’s crammed together in a sprawling, filthy, difficult, wondrous mess, together, our place our fucked up, vibrant society.  A metropolis of villages, joined unusually like Siamese twins who share their vital organs but have different personalities. Chiswick has a notably different character than Wood Green and Hoxton is definitely not Chelsea. But difference breeds familiarity

The Edgware road runs about ten miles from Mable Arch to Edgware, center to suburbs, connecting three boroughs, and at least 20 identifiable ethnic communities, but it’s all London and we’re all Londoners.  Nobody thinks of himself or herself as a Hackneyite etc., when you live in London, regardless of where you came from, you’re a Londoner, you belong even if only on a temporary basis.  Don’t misunderstand me, in many ways I love Devon (where I’m from), but I’m personally more suited to a place that’s got hundreds of languages, just as many cuisines and problems.

Eight million people in 32 boroughs.

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Every shade, creed and nationality are represented, in this transient, on-going, social experiment. One that’s created unique London vibes. Global minds with local souls. Cultural hybrids, like Lego, building without rules. I’m not talking the type of soulless, sterile, cash cow building that people such as the Candy brothers do, I the real, cultural builders, the rule breakers, the pedantic, the renegades, the fearless, the forward thinkers, the people who really make London what it is.