This is London: Life and Death in the World City

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This is the new London: an immigrant city. Over one-third of Londoners were born abroad, with half arriving since the millennium. This has utterly transformed the capital, for better and for worse. I've arrived late into London, almost after everyone else described in this book, so the city of "This Is London" is the only London I know, my city, the one I recognize and identify with. But to everyone else, it's a new city, a hidden and mysterious one, where the entire nations are shrouded in gloom and skulking in the dark, where the entire populations of cities the size of Newcastle or Glasgow can disappear from sight once the night buses stop running, or the night clubs are emptied. It does feel as though he is trying far too hard to demonstrate that the changes to London and the people that are arriving are nothing but a problem to those who have been there longer. Despite his protestation in the preface (this in itself tells you straight away the angle he is going for). he stares every day into this landscape, through five tube stops, over which the life expectancy of an average Londoner falls by eleven years. It’s when Judah sits down with someone and listens that the book really takes off. He is brilliant at getting people to speak: the London Underground cleaner; the Polish builder; the Egyptian heiress; the Filipina housemaid; the imam who washes the bodies of the dead; the teacher; the carer; the gang leader. Among the mass of migrant stories are recurring tales of the glamour of London as seen from afar, and the grime, fear, poverty and violence seen close up. We learn a lot about the work that migrants do and how they see the British. Mean, ugly, lazy, cruel, secretive and snobbish are among the words used about us, though there is respect for our constitution and amusement at how we’re always saying sorry.

Judah does an excellent job of humanising the dispossessed, in a book that every Daily Mail aficionado / racist Brexiteer should read to get over themselves. He goes to extreme measures to capture the voices of these people, posing as an itinerant worker and sleeping rough with his subjects to get them to open up to him. Servicing this infrastructure is an every increasing number of illegal or underpaid migrants who, along with the average working class British individual, are forced to live in increasingly squalid conditions owing to the government's ideological indifference to the failure of its precious "market" to provide decent accommodation for the average citizen. Disappointed hope is probably the book’s main theme, but the impact of demographic change is another. A number of those interviewed comment that the English are declining, even dying out; the pubs are closing, the Anglican churches are shutting; London is no longer an English city; etc. You may think this sounds like the content of a far-right political pamphlet, but the comments are all attributed to the migrants themselves, most of whom seem to hold views that are robustly non-PC, and to express those views less about the white English than about other minorities. There is no love lost at the bottom, as the author succinctly puts it. Judah, Ben (2 February 2017). "Exclusive interview: Emmanuel Macron on Brexit, le Pen and the teacher who became his wife". The Sunday Times . Retrieved 25 June 2022.

The book is divided into 23 chapters that each take the name of a different town or city, and essentially focus on the plight of one person therein. So in Budapest we find Ibrahim, a Syrian refugee who yearns to act, to attain financial success, to be a celebrity. There was whisky and palm-oil wine and red rice with plantain and Tyskie beer and sour cream soup and whole trays of cassava fufu and amala. I became a journalist because I love the experience of traveling around cities and continents and listening to people with very, very different points of view one after the other. So I wanted to write a book that had the closest possible feel to that—where you could read the book and you would meet, like me, one person after another from all over Europe telling their own stories in their own way and in their own voices. I don’t think there’s anything particularly special or interesting about the sort of “great white male wandering around” anymore. I think that’s a really outdated way of writing about things. How did you decide which people to include in the book? We found the numbers of half a dozen doss houses in Ilford, deep in east London, and settled into the first one we found. Nobody was working in the house. They were heading out for work at the touting spot everyday and mostly returning emptyhanded. It didn’t take long for one labourer in the house to tell us this place “is like Rahova” – the name of Romania’s most infamous prison. A name that, in Romanian, rings of hopelessness. Nevertheless he gives us some: London has 600,000 people living in it illegally. It is these people most Londoners barely see, and rarely hear from.

London can crush you'.'.'.'or London can transform you. You can rise up here. The white people, they are not stopping you,”

Summary

More importantly for the content though, Judah tells us in most areas he visits how many indigenous white Londoners are left in that particular locale. Yet we never meet any of them. The city is changing and whereas it’s important and necessary to get the experience of the new arrivals, it would make for a fuller picture if we knew what those Londoners who have seen the world grow around them think. Yes, of course there would be some racism, but there would be open minds as well, and by not having those voices Judah is missing the full picture. It would be fascinating to get the views of those who’ve arrived and those who were born there and stayed, to weave them all together and give a greater understanding of how this new London is trying (or not) to pull together. Welcome to Europe, the Europe of cam girls, covid-survivors, political refugees from Belarus, Ukrainian soldiers, French winemakers and many more. This book is not a politcal or demographical description of Judah. Just like as in >>This is London, Judah describes of people like you and me, people you could have been in another life or dimension, people you can identify with. Judah has written for The New York Times and The Sunday Times. He has been a guest on CNN, BBC News and Channel 4 News and is a contributing writer for Politico Europe. [25] Still, it's a really interesting book to debate; politically it holds its cards quite close to its chest, but the sense is that, look, much of 21st century migration spells overcrowded living, unscrupulous employers, miniature ghettoes and social isolation - it does not look good and the British don't look good for it either. That there is no 'British Dream', because there is no ladder on which to step up to settle and become more prosperous - so life stays transient and insecure. All of which he achieves, after a fashion, by becoming a porn star in his low-budget, self-directed videos that have apparently taken the Arab world by storm. His is an extraordinary story, recounted with such urgency and immediacy that the reader is projected headlong into a world about which most of us know next to nothing. A Latvian teenager is drawn into online sex work, an Ivorian migrant goes through hell to get to France