Beyond the glitter

This Is London: Life and Death in the World City. By Ben Judah. Picador; 426 pages; £18.99.

LONDON, a city famous for Hyde Park, Harrods and giddy house prices, has undergone a quiet revolution. So says Ben Judah, a young foreign correspondent now turning his eyes towards his home town. He begins his new book with a confession: “I was born in London but I no longer recognise this city…I don’t know if I love the new London or if it frightens me: a city where at least 55% of people are not white British, nearly 40% were born abroad and 5% are living illegally in the shadows.” “This Is London” is Mr Judah’s journey to rediscover his city.

The author throws himself in at the deep end, spending anxious nights huddled in an underpass not far from the unimaginable wealth of Mayfair, in the company of homeless Roma beggars. Many of these men, and they are almost all men, are indentured slaves. Having lost their jobs at home, they borrowed money to travel to London and are now forced to beg to pay off their debts.

From here, Mr Judah grabs hold of London and shakes out its secrets. He has a gift for ingratiating himself into very foreign surroundings and teasing out stories. He meets a bored Middle Eastern princess, who passes her days in a haze of skunk, an Afghan shopkeeper who entered Britain hidden in a lorry, and a Punjabi minicab driver who exhausts himself washing bodies by night at his local mosque. These Londoners achieve varying degrees of success at making a life in the metropolis.

Most of London’s immigrant population shares the same obsession: the city’s economic hierarchy. Mr Judah meets a Nigerian who had escaped work in a sweaty hotel laundry room to join the police, a rare example of upward mobility. But he still sees race as destiny: “In London you’ve always had the Africans at the bottom of the pile along with the West Indians…Then you get some Afghans. Then the eastern Europeans coming up…Then you get the Asians. Then you get the Irish. Then you get the whites…And at the very top you get the rich…Where there is no race.”

The perceived failure of London’s many ethnicities to mix has geographical consequences, which add to Mr Judah’s disorientation. He visits Neasden, an area in the north-west of the city that used to be a picture of white suburban contentment. But the English have departed: “They want to be central, they want to cycle—they want the city.” London’s oldest inhabitants are pouring back into the centre, so that former inner-city terraced slums now offer craft beer and organic food, whereas the suburbs with their net curtains have become overpopulated tenements for the city’s migrant labourers. Standing in front of the demolition of a landmark housing estate, Mr Judah realises this migration may also have a political dimension: “Thirty times all over south London I have written down in street interviews that someone thinks the government wants to push poor black people out of the centre.”

For those without sufficient means to enjoy London’s wealthy and rejuvenated centre—most of the men and women Mr Judah meets—the city is frequently as disappointing as it is difficult. He observes: “They come to London inspired not by a dream of how great things could be, but by the knowledge of how much worse they can be.”

“This Is London” is not prescriptive; there is nothing here about how to lessen the grinding poverty or improve the rights of low-wage workers. But Mr Judah has done an important service in capturing the voices of those swept to the margins by economic forces beyond their control.