London, please love yourself.
Memories from my time in London - the multicultural omertà, anarcho-tyranny and the need for a renaissance of self-confidence.
I moved to London about ten years ago. London was and is the place to go in Europe if you're young and ambitious, and/or your passport is frowned upon by metropolises closer to the heart of the current global Empire, like New York or San Francisco. Or if, like me, you're an eternal anglophile longing for the return of the old Empire and hope this time they don't skip the worthy, quite substantial and fertile landmass close by - Eastern Europe. We had such a good run with the Austro-Hungarians. I can only imagine what some higher-grade colonialism would have wrought.
In the London of 2015, the tech scene felt like the place to be. The whole area around Silicon Roundabout in Shoreditch was humming with energy, ideas, and, most importantly, money. As a non-technical person, my best bet was to get the most adequate job possible in one of the myriad functions acting as a translation layer between the brute autism of the engineering pit and base reality. I was not code-savvy enough for a product manager gig and had not stacked up enough impressive bylines at the time to be a "head of content," so I got a job in sales. It paid abysmally initially, so I went to Zone 2, where I still spent 70% of my paycheck on a flat.
My first home in London was in Walthamstow, in the North-East of London. I didn't roll the dice to end up there; it was where I knew someone, and they knew someone, and on and on - indeed, it was somewhat of a Romanian area. It taught me a bit about how ethnic enclaves in London work. A lot of it is airport placement. You'll find a lot of Romanians and Eastern Europeans living in Zone 2 in the North and East because they are closer to the major airports flying to Eastern Europe, Luton, and Stansted. One of the largest communities is along Edgware Road, not so coincidentally, the area of London where people can first get off the airport bus and look around for "room to let" signs. Then, once a seed community is formed, it acts as an anchor for others to join, a source for housing, jobs, and socializing for newcomers. Voila, enclave.
My first place was about a 35-minute train ride from Shoreditch, where I worked, conveniently and maddeningly located just next to the bus and train terminal. A rookie in matters of renting from slippery real estate agents, I did not realize that living next to a central bus station would involve putting up with the bloodcurdling screams of the unhoused almost every night. My least favorite local joker was a guy who loved belting out "Allahu Akbar" at regular intervals in the middle of the night.
Walking around the city was my recreation. I sometimes walked the 1.5 hours it took to get to work and, inevitably, stumbled onto places that were quite unexpected. Walthamstow wasn't a bad area, but it wasn't exactly great either. What surprised me was the heterogeneity. Like many places in London, it was a patchwork of quaint streets with long boulevards contrasting with streets composed of wall-to-wall vape and phone repair shops studded with little circles of individuals milling around. You had quiet, residential bits two blocks from absolute no-go spots. The magic dirt had not rubbed off well on many of these streets. There were carbon copies of Karachi and Dhaka next to areas like "The Village" in Walthamstow, a little island of gentrification with Chelsea-worthy shops and restaurants. The unpredictable placement of council estates also created a minefield for the hobbyist flaneur. To say London had entire no-go areas is a bit misleading. London definitely had no-go streets and no-go council estates, though.
One weekend morning, I woke up to commotion outside. Hundreds of people were in a procession on the main road, waving Pakistani flags and belting out chants. It wasn't a very casual weekend event. For some reason, obscured by my inability to comprehend Urdu, these people were angry. They had something to claim and were out there making themselves forcefully known. I remember feeling quite vulnerable. As my talent in picking real estate was yet to be polished by experience, my little balcony was dangerously overhanging the main road. I felt like the intensity, the frenzy, and the ominous nature of this protest should have created some reaction in the local population. I went to Twitter to see if anyone mentioned anything about the event. Who were these people? What did they want? As I would soon learn, many such events pass without a blip on the radar. I saw full-scale riots in Haggerston later in my time in London, which were also not documented anywhere. It was an eerie feeling, like a baseline of gaslighting on a grand scale.
This seemed like the price to pay to compensate for the fact that London was not a melting pot. It was composed of very different peoples and communities crammed together in a small space, finding ways to manage. The primary instinct was to stick with your own kind and mind your own business. A lot needed to be left unspoken to grease the inevitable friction between communities. To be a participant in the game, you had to refrain from speaking about the fact that there are trade-offs to constructing an elaborate tower of Babel in virtually every neighborhood.
Anarcho-tyranny in a place like London is, among other things, an outgrowth of the fact that after a certain scale, policing enclaves is impossible without breaking this multicultural omertà. As long as the tensions and crimes are contained within communities, there's no reason to intervene. If the crimes involve third parties, especially the British, the noblesse oblige of bureaucrats with no skin in the game kicks in. This silence is the universal lubricant that keeps the city going. And not just in London. The price paid for this silence was what happened in places like Rotherham and Telford and is probably still going on around the country. In the words of Lord Farquad, "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
Whenever I mentioned something positive about British history or anything about the virtues of the indigenous population, it invariably sounded out of place because I didn't preface it with sarcasm or the socially expected prostration. There was a specific tone I was expected to strike as a recent immigrant. I was supposed to be someone who knows her interests and navigates the inevitable racism but perseveres despite it. I was also supposed to be in the UK primarily for financial reasons, which would, of course, be understandable because the poverty of the place I left must have had at least some obscure link to colonialism. I refused to play along because, for me, it was clear that there was a reason why we were all in London. This was a cradle of civilization, beauty, innovation, and culture. I was a bit burdened by this unfashionable nostalgia for a past that, admittedly, wasn't ideal but was undeniably crucial to the quality of life everyone around me enjoyed. It was unfair for the British to be carrying this ridiculous burden of guilt despite all the gifts that their ancestors had given the world.
An outsider can have a free affection for a culture. They are not burdened by the fixations, humiliation fetishes, and virtue signaling baked into the culture's conception of itself. Because I come from a place lacking some particular virtues, noticing and appreciating them in the UK was easier. At the same time, for the outsider, the constant self-deprecation comes off as weakness. You can only call yourself criminal, cruel, and irredeemably colonial a few times until people start to believe you. I understand that this is a luxury belief and there are class advantages in holding it, but it’s utility may soon run out. In life, like in love, those who don't respect themselves will never get respect. They will attract mistreatment and people who scan the world for vulnerability.
The UK is full of creativity, intelligence, openness, broadness of spirit, friendliness, cooperation, moral fiber, and deep resources beyond sticks, stones, and precious essences found in the soil. I miss the people, their humor, politeness, and understated charm. Living in Romania has convinced my Anglo-transplant husband that these virtues are not necessarily human universals. There's a concept here called "nesimțire," with which he's now becoming very familiar. It could be loosely translated as "thoughtlessness," or "unfeelingness," or, maybe, more colloquially, acting like an asshole. Not that London doesn't have its fair share of individual assholes, but I wouldn't call that a culture. Low-trust countries often have a defect-defect equilibrium regarding interactions with strangers, translating into an odd combination of intense friendliness and hospitality for people you accept into your inner circle and a devil-may-care attitude to everyone else. Cutting in line, charging their cars at you while you're pushing a stroller on the crosswalk and weaving around at the last second, burning plastic trash in the neighborhood every day and denying it.
It's not as bad as it used to be, but nesimțire rears its ugly head every day in some form or another. There's a baseline of civility that we haven't reached here that was never a problem within the Anglo communities my husband grew up in. It's a strange and unexpected burden to living here, especially if you know better.
Though it was a sobering time and, in many ways, led to my dabbling in the dark arts of right-wing politics, I didn't think I'd miss London as much as I do. It still has the bones of a high civilization and could recover the heart of one. Even the immigrants crave it - believe me, I used to be one. However, it would involve new management, a feeling that you have a right to rule, and a bit of self-love.
Never feel guilt over things for which you are not guilty. That would eliminate much of "wokeness,"
What a wonderful ode to London, Alex.
Thank you.
It’s always bitter sweet reading people’s recollections of that mighty polis.
I still visit every year or so and marvel / grimace at its ongoing transformation from a vast network of distinct, interconnected, mostly native occupied low-rise ‘villages’ to the claustrophobia-inducing, financial services strip mine whose operators loom over the city
from the sky-piercing monoliths that have forever altered its skyline.
Barely a handful of people I grew up with there remain, the rest having long since fled to the countryside or abroad.
Perhaps my dear old father, the most Anglophile of Greeks, said it best when he remarked after a recent visit, “I went to London and didn’t once set foot in England.”