This is London: Life and Death in the World City
By Ben Judah, Picador, 428 pages, £19
George Orwell reflected in “Down and Out in Paris and London” (1933) that “There are, indeed, many things in England that make you glad to get home; bathrooms, armchairs, mint sauce, new potatoes properly cooked, brown bread, marmalade ... they are all splendid, if you can pay for them.” Orwell recounted them to a Romanian honeymoon couple on his ferry back from France, just before finding a bed in a filthy, beetle-infested boarding house in Bow, east London.
Even so, Orwell had easier nights than Ben Judah, who starts his progress through the new London class of migrants and foreign labourers by sleeping rough with Roma beggars in an underpass near Hyde Park. One of them is “scared of the dying English tramps in the tunnel. He hears them babbling at night ... He is frightened they could get up and stab him in one of their shrieking episodes.”
“I was broken by the policeman of this cruel London state,” complains another floridly, while a third declares that “all English girls are alcoholics ... They drink until they can hardly walk. They disgust me.” The Roma gang celebrates the begging talents of a woman member, explaining that “a cripple is the real juicer. And that if you can’t find a cripple you have to equip your crew with crutches to mimic a cripple.”
Judah hears a lot of scandalous talk as he journeys through the capital, encountering Romanian labourers, Ghanaian “pickers” who clean discarded newspapers from the Tube, a drug dealer who graduated from burgling Notting Hill houses to selling cocaine, a Nigerian immigrant policeman and Filipina maids working for wealthy Arabs and Russians in Knightsbridge. They bear witness in scabrous, uninhibited and blackly comic tones to London’s transformation.
These are the voices of the city’s periphery. In Orwell’s day, the grimmest poverty was found in the East End, an area shunned by suburban middle classes. Now, the “English currency of status in this city is Victorian brick” and cottages in Bethnal Green sell for £1 million (Dh5.3 million). London has flipped inside out, forcing migrants and casual labourers into pebbledashed flop houses in Neasden and Edmonton.
They agree on one thing — that the English are lazy. “Every time they need like a hammer, or the water it is having a problem, they are calling, calling, people who must do it for them,” says one Polish cleaner. As for welfare benefits, do not get them started. “Why do they give the benefits? Why £60 a week and a flat for free ... when he no work?” asks a builder.
The consensus ends there. Judah delineates layers of status in this cosmopolitan city within a city — those who arrive legally from the European Union and an estimated 600,000 illegals. Polish builders compete with Romanians and fear violent Albanian gangs; a house cleaner is paid £10 per hour while a builder gets £7 and a casual labourer touting for work less; the drug dealer complains that “good help is so hard to find”. Everyone looks down on someone else.
This is a revelatory work, full of nuggets of unexpected information about the lives of others. Judah’s refusal to censor or prettify those with whom he beds down and works does not make edifying reading (“I hate the weather. I hate the damp. Everything is grey and ugly ... There are niggers everywhere. The prices are terrible,” says one Polish labourer) but it is bleakly illuminating.
It recalls the journalism of Orwell, Katherine Boo in “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” (2012), about an Indian shanty slum, and Barbara Ehrenreich in “Nickel and Dimed” (2001), an exploration of low-paid US work. Above all, it evokes Studs Terkel, the Chicago radio host and master of talking to ordinary people and reporting their extraordinary life stories in books such as “Hard Times” (1970) and “Working” (1974). Like Terkel’s books, it is often gripping about how they endure.
Nearly all of the narrative concerns the employed rather than their employers, but when Judah finds an Egyptian heiress in Mayfair with “the lilting fuzzy accent of international schools”, her life seems equally mundane. Her best friend, a Gulf “princess”, is attended by Filipina maids but the princess’s absent father has imposed a curfew, and she whiles away her time eating McDonald’s burgers and smoking cannabis in her bedroom overlooking Hyde Park.
Judah’s writing is still a work in progress. This book follows “Fragile Empire”, his 2013 book about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and at 27 he gives the impression of being a man in a hurry. He can turn a lovely sentence but tends to overwhelm the reader with material. He starts in an oddly self-aggrandising way (“I have to see everything for myself ... I have to make up my own mind”) and keeps recounting how he took notes, as if no one believes him.
That might be because he was heavily criticised in 2014 over a lurid article in the “New York Times” about London being hollowed out by Russian oligarchs, in which he got some facts wrong. It is clear that he has done his work in “This is London” — only a true cynic would doubt it. But Terkel, master of deft editing to chisel off unnecessary detail and reveal a poetic truth, would have advised him to slow down and winnow down. He is a fine, intrepid reporter who could be finer.
In the circumstances, it is unsurprising that his subjects do not talk about enjoying themselves much. The cheeriest is the drug dealer, who learnt in his apprenticeship how to stab people without killing them (a detailed description is offered), and supplies cocaine to potential “Financial Times” readers — “baby bankers, fresh lawyers, Arab princesses, Russian types”. He says that he pulls in £600,000 a year.
It is more than the minimum wage on which others are stuck, although Judah reports that burglars target Polish builders who keep their untaxed earnings in boxes. Yet they have a bewildered respect for the UK’s rule of law and openness. “London can crush you ... Or London can transform you. You can rise up here. The white people, they are not stopping you,” says the immigrant police officer. London is tough; home is tougher.
–Financial Times
