A new high-status opinion just dropped: London is fine. From their converted Edwardian houses in the leafy suburbs where you won’t get a burger for less than 15 quid, London’s preening opinion-shapers have taken to X to say all is well in the capital. Ignore the ‘Trumpist’ talking points about London going down the swanny, they cry between glugs of pinot noir – life’s never been better! One envisions the grimaces of people on the other side of town when they see such hot takes pop up on their mobile phones that they cling to for dear life lest some wanker on a stolen Lime bike should snatch them.
The internet is fizzing with this big question: ‘Is London a shithole?’ What’s funny is that proper Londoners have this discussion all the time. Sometimes we say it is, if we’ve had a rotten day, and other times we’ll be squaring up to any funny-accented outsider who talks shit about our city. But now the London question, like everything else, has fallen into the doom-loop churn of the culture war. It’s become fodder for digital posturing. ‘It’s a crime-ridden hellhole’, says the Very Online right. ‘It’s fine’, say rich liberals in airy flats. Not for the first time, both are wrong.
The most wrong – or certainly the most annoying – are the ‘London is fine’ lot. There’s a Marie Antoinette vibe to their digital missives. ‘Let them eat sourdough bread!’, they might as well cry. It’s typified by Lewis Goodall of The News Agents, the podcast for rich, glum liberals still not over Brexit. London, he said, is being falsely talked down as a dreadful place where ‘crime is completely out of control… fare evasion is completely rampant… [and] the Tube is looking like Gotham City’. It’s all ‘exaggerated’, he says.
I’m going to put my neck on the line and propose that Mr Goodall’s London life is rather more plush and cossested than most others’. A couple of years back he told the Evening Standard he lives in Norbury, a very middle-class and – sorry, Lewis – soulless suburb in the south-east where crime is low and deprivation virtually non-existent. Apparently he feasts on ‘Gallic fare at Pique-Nique’ – no, me neither – and loves tucking into ‘pelmeni’ in Soho with his equally starry media pals. Thankfully, for thickos like me, the Standard explained what pelmeni is: Russian dumplings.
He does boxercise in East Dulwich. He loves gardening because ‘it’s the opposite of modern life’. He wants to ban cars. Right, so he’s that London. The other London. The London I didn’t even know existed until I hit my 20s. The London where you’re unlikely to encounter a crackhead on a night bus – mainly because you can afford Ubers – or a mumbling masked prick saying, ‘Gimme your phone’. Goodall’s co-host, Jon Sopel, agreed with him that London-bashing is a ‘Trump import’. That’ll be the Jon Sopel who lives in Belsize Park, gets to work via a ‘beautiful walk across Primrose Hill’, buys his suits from Richard James on Savile Row and tells anyone who’ll listen that ‘Duke’s has the best Martini’s in London’. I wonder where he skis?
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Author: Ruth King
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