Global Capital Left In a State of Unease
St. Paul’s Cathedral — but also with people representing 270 nationalities, 8.7 million inhabitants in all.
Brexit has thrown into disarray this great experiment in tolerance. Nobody can predict what the city will look like in 10, 20 or 30 years. If spontaneous travel between Europe and Britain no longer seems so simple, neither does the easy exchange of people, capital, jobs, businesses and languages. Perhaps more significant, it is no longer clear that these are meant to be admirable things, here or anywhere.
“London is a weird place at the moment,” said the writer Nikesh Shukla, whose book “The Good Immigrant” is made up of essays by nonwhite Britons about a country from which they feel increasingly alienated. “The government says it’s trying to get the country back, but in the process it’s losing the heart of its people in London,” Mr. Shukla said. “People feel uneasy because there are a lot of futures at stake. These are people who live in the city who contribute to society, who have families, social structures and financial commitments, whose futures are now in doubt.”
What happens next? No one really knows. Pro-Brexit Britons are happy, of course, even if headaches will follow. This is probably the noisiest and most complicated divorce in modern European history. London is still busy, the Tube is still packed and the pubs are still full. But the certainties that sustained a great city are no longer certain.
“You can’t live in an island and call it your oasis,” said Shirley Watkins, 83, who was waiting at St. Pancras the other day for a train to France. “I think it’s sad that we’re pulling out.”
I lived in London for more than 15 years, returning home to New York in 2013. The city changed a great deal in that time, and the city I left felt markedly different from the one I found when I arrived. It felt more open, more international, more enthusiastic, more exciting. The food got better, and places stayed open later. My neighbors seemed to come from a United Nations’ worth of countries, our differences somehow erased because we all shared them.
The city also grew a lot richer, which was not necessarily a good thing: The center of town became all but unaffordable. Russian oligarchs and other members of the world’s ultrarich elite dug up the streets to build subterranean complexes filled with swimming pools and parking garages for homes they planned to live in only a couple of weeks each year.
Europe, which had seemed like a distant concept, suddenly seemed right there on the doorstep. Crowds of French people and then Poles and Spaniards and, later and more contentiously, Romanians moved in. The rise of cheap no-frills airlines made air travel to Europe almost easier than train travel.
I’ve been back a number of times since I left, but it was during two visits in the past few months that I encountered something different: fear for the future and a questioning by non-Britons of whether they even belong here anymore.
“Even for those that haven’t talked about leaving, there’s something fundamentally ruptured in their relationship with the country,” said Ian Dunt, editor of the website Politics.co.uk. “When people say they’re very anti-immigration, no one thinks that’s directed at German architects or French lawyers. But even those people are beginning to feel that the country is becoming cold and mean- spirited and indifferent to their presence, if not openly hostile toward them.”
London is big and unwieldy and constantly changing. It resists easy definition.
Here, despite the anti- Muslim, anti- i mmigrant sentiments that helped fuel the Brexit vote, is London’s first Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, whose parents, a bus driver and a seamstress, came from Pakistan. Here are international financiers and playboys, Eurocrats and Eurotrash, as well as economic migrants from Spain and Portugal and other depressed European countries crowding into tiny flats on the edges of town and taking jobs in cafes, on construction sites, in hotels.
“In London I never feel like an outsider, because everyone’s an outsider,” said Paolo Martini, 32, a hairdresser I met in Kentish Town who comes from Brazil and has a Polish wife and a British ( by virtue of her birth) daughter. He has lived here for more than a decade; who knows what Brexit will mean for his family?
Part of what makes London different is how closely it all knits together people from different economic backgrounds as much as different ethnic ones. Every borough has its grand houses and its public housing projects.
“It’s not just me and you and rich and poor,” said Dara Djarian, 25, a real estate agent in Kilburn whose parents are French and Iranian. He compared the jumbled- up neigh- borhoods of London with the more uniform banlieues at the periphery of Paris, centers mostly for Arab immigrants. “Everyone’s all mixed up here.”
I looked down Kilburn High Road from his office and saw what he meant. A Polish delicatessen was next to an Italian restaurant across the street from a traditional London pub beside a Halal butcher shop. There was the Shah furniture store, a classic fish- and- chips place, a ladies- only hairdresser, some fancy coffee shops and the highbrow Tricycle Cinema, with a program that appeals to hipsters and cineastes.
Cristina Barba, who is 23 and Spanish, lives with seven roommates, including recent arrivals from Italy and Romania. “In Spain you feel like there’s a division between Spaniards and people who look differently,” she said. “But here, there is no division. Everyone just coexists.”
Is London lost? Not in the slightest, say those who voted for Britain to leave the European Union. They say that London is reclaimed.
Construction crews are still putting up buildings, monuments to London’s future, as if nothing has changed. But you can hear faint footsteps, too. Banks, investment firms and other companies are making contingency plans to move elsewhere. What then?
How do you define London? You don’t, really. “It’s an accordion breathing in and out,” the Canadian author Craig Taylor wrote in “Londoners,” his portrait of the city, de- scribing its ever-shifting population.
At the corner of Brick Lane and Fournier Street, down the block from a row of multimillion- dollar Georgian townhouses, sits the Brick Lane Mosque, a sprawling brick building. Built in 1743 as a Protestant church by French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution, it became a Methodist chapel in 1819 and then, in the late 19th century, a synagogue for Jews fleeing a different sort of persecution in a different part of Europe. Finally, in 1976, it was transformed into a mosque to accommodate the newest wave of immigrants, from Bangladesh. No one seems to think there is anything strange about any of that.
At the same time, no one is claiming that London is a utopia. Racism bubbles up, and so do the politics of race. Two years ago, the Bangladeshi-born mayor of the borough of Tower Hamlets was forced out of office after a court found that his campaign had committed election fraud in a number of ways.
It was an ugly moment, awash in accusations of racism. But people keep chugging along. “London seems to work, whether by accident or design,” said John Biggs, who took over as borough mayor afterward. “We work because we’re a pretty tolerant bunch and we knock along together.”
The terrorist attack in March became a Rorschach test of Britain’s views not only on the causes of terrorism but on the city itself. Led by Mr. Khan, the city’s mayor, many in London spoke of the diversity of the victims, and said it was wrong to vilify an entire religion for the actions of a Muslim extremist.
Yet in The Daily Mail, the columnist Katie Hopkins wrote that London is “a city of ghettos behind a thin veneer of civility kept polished by a Muslim mayor.”
Pro-Brexit views are hardening, and many immigrants — rich as well as poor — are wondering if there is any point in staying. What London will look like then is anybody’s guess.
“My main concern is that when the E.U. migrants are kicked out, and the students are kicked out, and all the banks that use London as a hub leave because they are no longer part of the E.U., who’s going to be left?” said Mr. Shukla, the author. “It’ll just be full of tourists who have come to see the queen, and Theresa May.”
Back at St. Pancras last month, nothing official happened to commemorate the moment the prime minister put Brexit into motion.
But in the station concourse you could hear piano music, courtesy of a program in which pianos are installed in public places for anyone to play.
Standing by the piano, Julie Walker and her husband, Simon, said they had chosen a piece of music that would express their joy that Britain was doing the Christian thing and, as they saw it, “cutting all the ties” to an outside world that threatens British self- determination. The song they requested from the pianist, Stewart Yeff, was Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”
It seemed apt, because it sounds like a song of celebration, but it is really one of mourning.