“It’s like this: Russian and Ukrainian people hate Polish and Lithuanian people. Eastern Europe peoples hate Indian people. Everybody hates the black people. Whites hate everyone . . . That’s just the way it is.”
This book is brave and has a story to tell. In the tradition
of those journalists who go out there and live the story Judah has put himself
into this story sleeping rough with Romanians, dossing down with Latvian
builders and getting to know African immigrants struggling on zero hour
contracts.
Throughout the book, which takes the reader on a tour of an
unknown London, facts and figures are given to back up a picture of a City that
in some areas is now dominated by a group of Londoners that would be barely recognisable
to most of those who lived here just a couple of decades ago.
What has changed is that the poor white working class
communities have left areas of London to be replaced by a mixture of immigrants
from Eastern Europe, Africa and beyond that have made the likes of the tube station at Hyde Park and Barking their own as they cling onto a perilous existence.
The message that came out of the book is that London has
changed, perhaps permanently, and is now no longer a place that even those
living here can quite understand. I have seen some of the changes in nearby
Woolwich, which gets a very brief mention, and have started to feel that the
London I started to know when I was a student here has maybe gone.
Because Judah speaks to drug dealers, prostitutes and those on
the fringes there is a sense of danger often. A sense that the underworld is
just waiting for those sitting in the big houses to slip up and then they will
come and take them. Maybe that was my feeling but after a while I did start to
wonder what the message was coming from this book.
If it is that London has changed and all sorts of invisible
people now live here then that came across fairly quickly. It did not need to
be so exhaustive. But if it was to try and convey a sense of London from West
to East, North to South, changing with traditional Londoners heading for the
hills then it also did that.
Maybe the readings of this book would differ if you lived in
or out of the capital but for me there was almost a moment of giving up and
wondering if it was worth staying here. If it has got so bad then why not just
pack the bags and exit like so many others appear to?
London is changing and this book provides a snapshot of what
is going on. But just like some of those other great exposes the world remains
fluid and this is already becoming history. It's important to recognise that
London is so mixed, not just in races but in terms of opportunities, but some
of the characters here will not stay as permanent fixtures.
You already sense that this is a book written pre-Brexit and
the sense of tension at the prospect of more Romanians and Eastern Europeans
coming into the capital is one that is already changing. The Polish builders
who have lived opposite me for 15 years are packing up and leaving and the
Romanian family at the end of the street have sold their house and are moving
on.
Other groups will come into replace them and it is perhaps
as a snapshot of an ever changing City that this book will take its place
alongside other records of the past as a guide to what it once looked like.
Judah has guts and can write with pace and in a way that
challenges the reader to open their eyes that bit wider to see what is often
not seen. If this can make some of the invisible visible then it will have done
its job.
