I have lived in London longer than anywhere else. I moved out a few years ago, under Covid pressures, and have not moved back, as city life no longer appeals very much. But I still live near London, and work there, so that I am in town at least once a week. I know London well.
London is not a city in crisis. Of course it has lots of problems, of which the chief are probably the poor housing stock and the cost of living. But it is not an urban hellscape. Crime is not rife. The high streets are reasonably clean and peaceful, and often interesting. The parks—and not just the famous, central ones—are beautiful and well-tended. The Thames is magnificent. The great monuments and museums are kept in good nick. Public transport will get you where you need to be, eventually. The hustle and chaos of a great city have neither been neutered nor become unmanageable. To be sure, there is much to dislike—the City’s self-importance; the queasy sheen which mass tourism has spread over the West End; the drab ugliness of cheaply built residential sprawl. But none of this amounts to a crisis—a great city is by definition capacious enough to absorb much awfulness without being ruined.
The hustle and chaos of the great city have neither been neutered nor become unmanageable.
In particular, from an internal London perspective, the UK’s obstinately recurrent discourse about intolerable levels and types of immigration can seem baffling, because London has absorbed a vast number of immigrants—from everywhere and of every kind—and this has in fact been tolerable and tolerated. London is now a city where one meets without surprise a person from any nation on earth, of any faith or tradition, rich, poor, or anywhere in between. Most of the planet’s languages are probably spoken by someone here, most of its gods worshipped, most of its foods eaten.
It does not follow that London is a symphony of joyful cultural mixing. New harmonies certainly do arise, as do new discords. But by and large, one finds neither extreme: people live side by side, make closer contact where that is necessary or appealing, but are also largely indifferent to each other. To the outsider, London’s mixtures can seem thrilling and glorious, or repellent and frightening. But to Londoners themselves, they are in general just ordinary life.
London’s current model is also quite a natural fit for an enormous city, because, even without immigration, such cities are far too large and varied to form organic wholes. Dickens’s London, although almost exclusively English, was already a cosmos of little worlds, mostly separate, sometimes converging or colliding, sometimes repelling each other.
Even without immigration, enormous cities are far too large and varied to form organic wholes.
The specific Englishness of Dickens’s London will never return. The city’s new model works because it has to, because there is no going back. A change in political winds may reduce further migration into London to a trickle, but the millions who have come, and their children, and their children’s children, are here to stay. If a new homogeneity emerges, it will surely still meaningfully be “English”, but it will be something quite different from any English past.
Any working, peaceful model of cohabitation is worthy of respect: they are rare enough. But it is also delusional to imagine—as many enthusiasts for London and its ilk appear to do—that because immigration-saturated big cities can be functional, and sometimes happy places, they have cracked the one and only code of the good life within modernity. Everywhere does not want to be London, and perhaps it is only great cities, with their built-in variety and anonymity, that can function as global catch-alls. Certainly smaller agglomerations, with few or no outsiders coming in, can also be peaceful and liveable, and they have no intrinsic duty to disrupt what they have built, so as to be more like London. Neither, conversely, does London have such a duty of disruption, so as to be less like itself.
Yet national politics struggles to accommodate both models—and any in between—precisely because it attempts to “solve” immigration at the national scale, and so cannot easily adjust to a variety of local architectures. Immigration cannot in fact be “solved”, any more than there can be a definitive solution to how people ought to live together in general. We will always quarrel and be dissatisfied, however we arrange matters. Nevertheless governments must attempt to develop and implement an immigration policy of some sort, and, if immigration politics is to become less bitter and circular, this will require recognizing that modern polities can neither eliminate their Londons, nor expand them to embrace entire nations.
