This is London: Life and Death in the World City

by Ben Judah

This is London in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers, witch-doctors and sex workers. This is London in the voices of Arabs, Afghans, Nigerians, Poles, Romanians and Russians.This is London as you've never seen it before.Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2016Shortlisted for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage 2019'An eye-opening investigation into the hidden immigrant life of the city' Sunday Times'Full of nuggets of unexpected information about the lives of others . . . It recalls the journalism of Orwell' Financial Times'Ben Judah grabs hold of London and shakes out its secrets' The Economist

Genres: Nonfiction, London, Travel, British Literature, Politics, Sociology, History

433 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 7, 2016

About the author

Ben Judah was born in London. He studied at Oxford University and has travelled widely in Russia and Central Asia. His writing has featured in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Evening Standard and Standpoint. His first book, Fragile Empire, was published by Yale University Press in 2013.

Reviews

[Baba · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the blurb and the media that support it, this is a very important book telling the shared (with the writer Ben Judah) stories of first generation migrants in London in 2014 and 2015. The voices of a Filipina maid, Nigerian policeman, Polish shop worker, a gentrifying White Englishman, A Saudi princess, Afghani's, Somalians, Romanians and more. To me this felt like it was looking for stories and words to fit the negative post-apocalyptic view of London the writer wished to depict (and still failed). To me this read like fascinating stories of non-London born people finding a life and home of some sorts in London, and still freeing empowered and free enough to share their story. Ten years on, now in 2026, London is still here, so much for picture the writer wanted to paint, and still will be here next century:).

Where I live in South London (of which several areas of, where covered in this book), almost everyone gets along; there is definitely a significant lack of new migrants and homeless people; crime has gone down year after year etc. This book shares interesting 'outlier' migrant stories, but let's face it, no matter when or where you go the vast majority of migrants are doing the low paid and often demanding jobs that locally born workers will not. People can disinform and twists stores as much as they want, but the numbers can't be denied. Don't get me wrong, I do think current rates of migration are unsustainable and that the system is being abused, but let's look to fix the system for the right reasons and not ones propagated by far right disciples, fantasists and/or foreign, mostly Russian, Chinese or Indian bots. The book gives insights to some migrant lives, and as a 50+ year South Londoner, judging by the migrant stories I have personally seen or heard, I would take all of the shared stories as just a small part of the big picture. Still an entertaining and seemingly deeply reported Four Star, 8 out of 12 read.

2026 read

[Paul Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first time I saw Euston Station
The rails were shining with the rain
My bags were light but not my expectation
Stumbling from the all-night train
And when I came to Euston Station
I thought my life was paved with gold
And with a million other hungry strangers
I lay my head down in the cold

Here is a stupendous feat of journalism : one man does London and brings it back alive.

You’ve seen the travel books and documentaries – London: City of Pomp and Circumstance (cue Beefeaters and busbies); London’s Theatreland!; London: Art Capital of the World… and all of that.

This book is not that.




This is London: city of a very great many poor immigrants. London : city of not that many white people any more. So no Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace, but the London where 57% of births are to migrant mothers, where between 1971 and 2011 the white British part of the population nosedived from 86% to 45%. By page 300 Ben Judah has spoken to people from Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ghana, Grenada, Somalia, Pakistan, Philippines, Dubai, Saudi Arabia…. You get the picture – but not a single Cockney. Like rhinos they’re dying out and the ones left are fleeing. This kind of population shift is certainly not unique to London. But Ben describes the British soap EastEnders, largely populated by the BBC’s version of the white working class, as “a creepy racist fantasy” and now I have accompanied Ben from Victoria Coach Station to Hammersmith, Elephant and Castle, White City, Beckton, the Arab quarter formerly known as Knightsbridge, and onwards, I understand what he means.


Woa, Liza,
See the coster barrows,
The vegetable marrows
And the fruit piled high.
Woa, Liza,
Little London sparrows,
Covent Garden Market where the costers cry.
Cockney feet
Mark the beat of history.
Every street
Pins a memory down.
Nothing ever can quite replace
The grace of London Town.

Ukrainian girl :

It’s like this: Russian and Ukranian people hate Polish and Lithuanian people. Eastern European peoples hate Indian people. Everybody hates the black people. Whites hate everyone. That’s just the way it is.

Do you hear the jaunty tones of Tom Lehrer, singing his naughty song “National Brotherhood Week” from 1964?

Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics,
And the Catholics hate the Protestants,
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

But rescuing us – if just for a little while – from the sour misanthropy which Ben’s book is, admittedly, wont to foster comes a (Polish) registrar, who waxes lyrical about the weddings she has officiated :

Polish nannies with Portuguese DJs. Lithuanian cleaners with Romanian builders. Ghanaian pickers [they clean the Tube lines, very bad work] with Columbian scrubbers. Nigerian drivers with Polish waitresses. These are the special ones. … the ones that can only happen in this City where love is really free. But there are more and more of them.

So, you know, there’s a little yin for the racist yang.


Finchley Central is two and sixpence
From Golders Green on the Northern Line
And on the platform, by the kiosk
That's where you said you'd be mine



At the beginning of this great trek Ben is inclined to irritate the reader with his horizon to horizon total hip knowingness. There is nothing about anyone’s culture that Ben doesn’t know, you can’t tell him anything. Here is Ben at a Nigerian party:

The entertainment flown in from Abuja, the singers lost in the rising drums, the calling saxophones and the subtle keyboards, as the businessmen in tailored suits, their pocket handkerchiefs so perfectly pleated, dance with their wives under the chandeliers, as they smile with perfect teeth at the women in origami headwraps, and whoop and clink and spray the musicians, the way they always do at the best Nigerian parties in Belgravia, flicking with one palm over the other - $1 bills, then $10 bills – over the shoulders of the most exuberant dancers, over the heads of the most beautiful girls

You see how Ben lets you know he’s been to the best Nigerian parties in Belgravia already, so he knows what they do? There’s a lot of this kind of back door bragging in Ben’s book. But after a little eye-rolling you are completely ready to forgive him. Because – however he’s managed to do it in his 28 years on earth – he really does know all this stuff, and not from other books neither.

If I wore a hat, I would doff it.

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling
Flowing into the night
People so busy, makes me feel dizzy
Taxi light shines so bright
But I don't need no friends
As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset
I am in paradise

Ben lets his describing eyes and interviewees do the yakking and he doesn’t editorialise much, except he can’t let some things go:

London can’t admit it is addicted to skunk, because London can’t admit it is addicted to coke. This is a city that can’t own up that so much cocaine gets snorted at the weekends that the water authorities notice its presence spiking in the sewers on Tuesday afternoon. This is a city that pretends this £10 billion industry does not exist : by leaving its on-the-go distribution to the people it gives the least of a shit about : teenage boys, especially black teenage boys.

They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.
"They've great big parties inside the grounds."
“I wouldn't be King for a hundred pounds,"
Says Alice.

The insights and sharp observations fly out from these pages and will rearrange your reality. Ben contemplates a fellow tube traveller:

he stares every day into this landscape, through five tube stops, over which the life expectancy of an average Londoner falls by eleven years.

Ben on how easy it was to rob the houses of the rich in London :

Moses would climb over the alarm onto the ledge. These fools loved covering their houses in columns and creepers. These idiots also loved then vintage Victorian windows : it was as if they wanted you to get in. And then with a dash he’d rush to the hallway and flick open the door; and Lucifer would be smiling in the orange dark. Holding out that sack.

Wait - where have you seen that very scene played out before? Oliver! – that’s right. With the boy himself opening the front door from the inside, and Bill Sykes waiting with the sack. It’s a very London tradition.

Then the winter comes down
And I can't stand the chill
That comes to the streets around Christmas time
And I'm buggered to damnation
And I haven't got a penny
To wander the dark streets of London

Ben talks to a Polish labourer:

”Why do they give the benefits? Why £60 a week and a flat free for the lazy pig?” Polish people have little time for the white working class. They think they do not know how to look after themselves. They think they talk like black people. They think they look sick.

Burglars love Poles because they are paid in cash and hide it in shoeboxes. When they see builders and cleaners moving in over the road, they are already laughing. They can sometimes make £5000 from one bedsit. And they know the Poles will never call the police.

It’s true that Ben sometimes overwrites a little bit

There was whisky and palm-oil wine and red rice with plantain and Tyskie beer and sour cream soup and whole trays of cassava fufu and amala.

And gives us a trailer for what surely must be his first novel

Gone : all those stories nobody will ever write power ballads about, gone, all those gangsters that nobody will ever make blockbusters about, gone, all those cornershop war heroes, winking like owls, laughing, their mouths full of khat, their pupils bulging, and wanting to tell anyone who would listen about the jeeps of the Puntland front and the dust of the Ogaden campaign.

As Ben flits round the vast metropolis, his flowing tide of (in general) pretty unhappy interviewees can begin to sound like William Blake

I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear

But.... all that said, this book is brilliant. 100% recommended.



Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear

With thanks to :
The Oyster Band
Noel Coward
Tom Lehrer
The New Vaudeville Band
The Kinks
Shane McGowan
A A Milne
William Blake
TS Eliot

[Alec Mcallister · Rating 1 out of 5]

Depravation tourism for middle class literati. This is voyeuristic poverty porn. Judah's writing style gleefully encourages the apocalyptic atmosphere with his overwrought purple prose. I wouldn't trust him as a reporter either. He seems more interested in creating a particular mood and finding stories to suit it. At heart this is tabloid stuff wrapped up in faux social concern and a blizzard of similes and metaphors to give it literary cred. Pity because there is a great book to be written about London and its new populations and the changes brought about for good and for ill. This book isn't it though.

[Maru Kun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Update: Ben Judah has made a film about the lives of migrants for Vice; the link can be found here: Vice: Life as a Migrant in Post-Brexit Britain

Homes in Mayfair now employ more domestic staff than in the Georgian era. Unlike in the days of 'Upstairs Downstairs' these staff are there to keep clean and provide security for properties that are empty except for a few weeks of the year. As one of the interviewees in this book explains:

"...look, what's happening in London mate...Tube Zone 1 used to belong to the rich English...Tube Zone 2...that was the old immigrant land...Tube Zone 3, 4, 5...that used to be posh or working class suburbs. But what's happening now is Zone 1's being sold to the Russians, and Zone 2's being bought by the poshos...pushing the migrants into white land. That's why there's beef..."

In the UK excepting rail privatization it is difficult to find a better example of failed neo-liberal policies than housing policy in London. Ninety percent of the UK population cannot afford the average UK home; over the past few decades London's historic character has been ruined by the ceaseless building of luxury apartments almost exclusively purchased by foreign investors who have little intention of living in them for any period of time (unless they have to go on the lam and flee their home country).

Servicing this infrastructure is an every increasing number of illegal or underpaid migrants who, along with the average working class British individual, are forced to live in increasingly squalid conditions owing to the government's ideological indifference to the failure of its precious "market" to provide decent accommodation for the average citizen.

This book looks almost unique in its realistic documentation of how migrants experience living in London in the early twenty first century so should be commended.

[Geevee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ben Judah has written a interesting book that makes one want to turn the pages. At it's heart is misery, poverty, hardship and indeed hope as people describe or show the author how challenging, troubling and difficult their lives are.

For me too it held parallels with other ages of London where communities changed as people moved in and out and lived (some barely existing) and worked to grasp their dreams. London as a metropolis has always had dreadful poverty, concentrated living and crime, prostitution and drugs (or alcohol - think gin and Drury Lane).

But where Ben Judah differs is he is showing us 21st century poverty, crime and destitution as unpalatable or unnerving as it is drawing unstated but ever present links to the 19th century studies or writing of Mayhew, Booth and Dickens or the early and mid 20th century of Jack London and Samuel Selvon or the wider academic study of "Poverty, wealth and place in Britain, 1968 to 2005" by Dorling et al.

The wide range of peoples - again a more constant for London than many people perhaps appreciate - was sizeable and varied but some appear again and again: Poles, Romanians, Ghanaians, Nigerians, Afghans, Iraqis, Somalians and Sierra Leoneans - as opposed to Jews, Italians, Indians, Pakistanis, Vietnamese or Ugandans of early years (and many still present in the areas the book covers).

What was fascinating though and of course connected to the mix of peoples but also alongside modern culture of music and film are the changing accents and speech of British white and black Londoners with their cockney slang or Caribbean drawl to "street" where "you get me, innit, like, bruv, bare, bunning, dizzle, dem, dat, legit and chillin" all abound and feed and create the new Londoners' vocabulary.

There is a lot of hurt and hate in this book as one community, and for this read country of origin/background, colour and religion, thinks another is weak, crooked, violent, racist or lazy.

There is however, hope of and for humanity. Perhaps that is no better summed up by Hajji who washes dead muslim bodies before they are buried in the New North Road - London's muslim cemetery - not because he is paid or even wants to but because people ask for him a sthey know he does it with care and love; or Femi, the big but gentle Nigerian, who dreams of working dressed in a suit sitting at an office desk who tends London's sick - mostly the people with dementia who needs his help with feeding, bathing and going to the toilet keeping the safe and calling them sir (or madam) as they slip away from a London that is ever changing as it has done since the Romans first made it a trading post.

[Edita Joughin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Highly unfair picture of immigration. This book screams racism and focuses only on negative things of immigration. To suit small minded readers.
I'm Lithuanian living in the Isle of Man. According to the writer I should be a cleaner, speak about 10 words of English and hang around only with other immigrants or Lithuanians. But the truth is I speak and write in English well, I studied my diploma and passed my exams in English, I have only one Lithuanian friend here, I watch English TV and read a lot of English books. The writer assumes every immigrant is a cleaner, works in a supermarket or factory.
Throughout the whole book there's not once mentioned a good immigrant, a success story or smart people. I know Lithuanian scientist and doctors working in London, engineers and teachers, creators and musicians and plenty of other clever people.
This book is negative, depressing, ones opinion. This book is not about London.

[Jake Goretzki · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a commendable and often pretty brave piece of reportage. He's put in the legwork and lived it. It's unrelentingly bleak (this one sure isn't celebrating success stories) and often gruelling. At times one feels: couldn't you pick a few people who weren't drug dealers, massive racists or crack addicts? Maybe not (as a side note: the most racist person I have ever met in the UK was a Lithuanian removal man in 2014 who told me that he always refused to do jobs for black people because they were 'animals'. This is what happens when you grow up without political correctness. Russia and swathes of Eastern Europe are approximately 50 years behind the UK on race - and the UK ain't even that great, right).

Still, it's a really interesting book to debate; politically it holds its cards quite close to its chest, but the sense is that, look, much of 21st century migration spells overcrowded living, unscrupulous employers, miniature ghettoes and social isolation - it does not look good and the British don't look good for it either. That there is no 'British Dream', because there is no ladder on which to step up to settle and become more prosperous - so life stays transient and insecure.

It's a strong reminder of how London has rippled out and 'Zone 2' is now 'Zone 4'. That sense of a kind of 'hollowing out', such that icons of suburbia like Neasden (gently mocked in Betja's Metro-land as lower middle class pasture) and Del Boy's (zzzzz) Peckham would be, well, unrecognisable to their writers of today. (As David Aaronovitch says, Judah forgets that this is partly down to said cohorts moving to new towns, 'the countryside' (sic) and social prosperity in the second half of the 20th century; they'd left Norman Tebbit's Edmonton decades ago).

Some of it is squalid too because the cast is plain squalid - and would be anywhere. Crack whores in Ilford are tragic because crack whores are tragic. A Lithuanian who only speaks to Lithuanians, watches Lithuanian TV and shops in a Lithuanian supermarket is an ignorant bumpkin wherever she's from. A few mis-steps meanwhile: I get that Judah had to go undercover, but the idea of pretending to be a troubled Romanian to get the lowdown on a West African spiritualist felt just a little silly. I can't imagine anyone would have fallen for that one.

Still, it's a fine sweep. Curiously, the most powerful chapters for me were ones that were more about 'life', nation non-specific. The section in the dementia hospital was deeply moving - the fragile elderly dealing with 'mess' - total gut-punch, that; the Hajji mortuary washer who felt the dead were talking to him and had watched life whistle by so many times. Those were actually the triumphs and tragedies.

PS I like the 'net curtains' theory. I have a similar one about bins and broken drying racks. West Green, Tottenham Hale and Edmonton are a graveyard of broken drying racks.

[Andy Lopata · Rating 3 out of 5]

In many ways this is an eye-opening and fascinating book. Judah really gets behind the stories of the people we walk past on the street with our eyes averted. He turns the homeless and slum dwellers, the care givers and prostitutes, the nannies and the wealthy a real face.

You can clearly see the impact immigration has has on London and its population, both new and old. This book may confirm many existing prejudices or shift opinion, either way. It certainly stimulates thought.

What, for me, lets the book down is the writing style. Judah seems to have swallowed a creative writing text book. He never uses five words to describe a person or scene where fifty will do and has an obsession with the colours of the sky. It becomes very tiring and makes the book drag.

Fascinating and frustrating at the same time

[F.R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I live on the London/Surrey borders. I commute through Waterloo and into The City of London each day. Yet this travelogue through London today was a page-turning, eye-opener – taking me to places I never knew, never considered and in some instances never imagined. Ben Judah has clearly found himself fascinated by changing London, and has made a pilgrimage to the immigration hot-spots to record their lives in the city. But he’s not just interested in writing about them in some distant journalistic ivory tower, but wants to actually experience what the people he meets experience. So, he sleeps with Roma under Hyde Park Corner, he dosses down eight to a small room with Poles in the East End, he rides the N21 bus out from the Old Kent Road right into the bright lights of the City. In all of these stories he is talking to people, getting to know them and relating what they think with compassion, empathy and understanding.

It makes for an epic story of a city that’s changing, of neighbourhoods which have become unrecognisable in a generation. It opened my mind to a massive part of London I was largely unaware of.

Undeniably though, there are some flaws.

For starters, it’s over-written. There’s a pompousness to the way Judah crowbars in over-wrought imagery into each chapter, a tick which starts off peculiarly amusing but swiftly becomes really irritating.

More importantly for the content though, Judah tells us in most areas he visits how many indigenous white Londoners are left in that particular locale. Yet we never meet any of them. The city is changing and whereas it’s important and necessary to get the experience of the new arrivals, it would make for a fuller picture if we knew what those Londoners who have seen the world grow around them think. Yes, of course there would be some racism, but there would be open minds as well, and by not having those voices Judah is missing the full picture. It would be fascinating to get the views of those who’ve arrived and those who were born there and stayed, to weave them all together and give a greater understanding of how this new London is trying (or not) to pull together.


If you get chance, please visit my blog for book, TV and film reviews - as well as whatever else takes my fancy - at frjameson.com
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Or follow me on Twitter or Instagram: @frjameson.

[Kexx · Rating 1 out of 5]

A mish mash of literature and lives - just couldn't get into it at all - clearly an important subject but written, I assume, for the Author's benefit and the pretentious middle classes so they could say "I read this!" This is voyeurism at it's worst.

[James Calbraith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've arrived late into London, almost after everyone else described in this book, so the city of "This Is London" is the only London I know, my city, the one I recognize and identify with. But to everyone else, it's a new city, a hidden and mysterious one, where the entire nations are shrouded in gloom and skulking in the dark, where the entire populations of cities the size of Newcastle or Glasgow can disappear from sight once the night buses stop running, or the night clubs are emptied.

There's a post-apocalyptic feel to this London, much like the one the city has experienced once before: when the Saxons inhabited the ruins of Roman Londinium. Like the colonists in the Martian Chronicles, the new migrants inadvertently fill out the abandoned niches, as they empty out; through some odd convergent evolution, the ethnic tribes replace the old London tribes and classes. The Essex Cockneys; the slumlords and shopkeepers of the Metroland; the petty criminals and pawnbrokers of Shepherd's Bush; the tramps of the subways and the untouchables of the estates; the burgeoning post-Thatcherite middle class; even the degenerate aristocrats of Mayfair. They're all still here, as they always were, but as ghosts, as parts played, better or worse, by actors arriving from all around the world among the old, tattered decorations of the past. This is London as if it was New York - a city of no particular ethnicity or origin, built onto a blank tabula rasa of a damp Thames marshland.

There's nothing anyone can do about it - or indeed should. These are processes as old as history. People leaving. Other people moving in. Exploitation and self-realization. Despair and pursuit of happiness. The only thing you can do is observe it as it happens and describe it for posterity - and Ben Judah, with his knowledge of the outside world and its many languages, with his keen eye for detail and with a neutral, but largely sympathetic outlook, is just the man to do it.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books about the city of London & its people have always fascinated me & Ben Judah takes a look at the people we never see or hear. They are the homeless, the gang menbers, the sex workers & many more. Judah gets some excellent interviews, but although it is an extremely good book it is probably the most depressing one I've ever read on the people of London. I can highly recommend This Is London as it's certainly well worth reading, but it is not perhaps one that I would describe as enjoyable.

[Olivia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly this book could have formed part of the UKIP manifesto, harking back to the good old days of White Britain when other races were nicely segregated in their areas in London and everyone knew who really ruled. I struggled to see the point of this book beyond immigrant voyeurism. At his wish to not be swayed by statistics, as he so proudly points out in the first chapter, there is no context for why he is telling these stories or any actual measurable impact to London as a result of them.

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exceptional book. One where I think, there's not much hope for us as a world and yet there is hope not in rainbows but in the everyday grittiness of getting through. I have NO IDEA why, but it left me feeling the same way as I did after reading the Primo Levi books. They're in no way connected except perhaps by the stark peeling back of a human being, leaving only the bare thing beneath. That doesn't make sense, oh well.

[Tariq Mahmood · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is brilliant, reads like a thriller although it is a collection of short factual stories it gels wonderfully together presenting a huge canvas London's underbelly, of its poor invisible immigrants. Each story gives a unique insight, a unique perspective, from the Romanian beggars, to the body washer Imam. I listened to the Audible version which was extra brilliant as the narrator was able to dramatise the various dialogues enhancing the effect.

[Andrew Tseng · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ben Judah paints a picture of destitute immigrant London pushing out the white English natives.

In Judah’s London, Romanians, Albanians, Polish, Filipinos survive on London’s streets. These are the office cleaners, the drug dealers, the illegals, the beggars. The people packed into overcrowded tiny spaces. These are the people pushing out the old English from their zone 3 homes, having themselves been pushed out of their inner city bedsits from a gentrified central London.

As a compendium of tragic stories, of destitute individuals living on the breadline with hopes dashed: the stories are told with compelling urgency, sucking us into the lives of those we might ignore or walk by.

But as a book that wants to shine a light on immigrant London, this book is deeply flawed.

Judah opens with the words: ‘I have to see everything for myself. I don’t trust statistics.’

He is not one for statistics, and yet he quotes them. Sometimes negligently, as per The Guardian’s correction:

‘This article was amended on 20 January 2015. A previous version referred to “the 55% of London’s population that isn’t British”. This was a publishing error included in the book that should have read “white British”; it has been amended in this review and will be corrected in a reprint of the book. The subheading also incorrectly stated that more than half of Londoners were migrants. This was an error and has been corrected to “nearly 40%”’

More subversive however, is that he fills his book with stories of immigrants, some rich, mainly poor, but all uncomfortable with their lot. It’s almost as if he has sought out those who meet his criteria of pitiful living.

Are all immigrants really dejected and leading miserable lives? Do all the native white English find London an alien city?

If this were a dystopian tale then it might have a moral claim. But presenting these curated tales as representative of London life, whilst eye opening in their tragedy, borders on misrepresentation.

Where are the stories of true refugees of foreign persecution? Where are the stories of foreign students arriving with the right funds to study and live? Where are the stories of overseas professionals bring their expertise?

This is London, but this is not my London.

[Karen Wellsbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having lived in London pretty much all my life and worked here as well, I thought I had seen pretty much all states of life.
I worked in Beckton for 8 years (one of the places Ben Judah visits in the book), lived in Peckham and now work close to the Lea Bridge Road - I'd consider myself liberal and inclusive, and after reading this I felt like I'd been walking round in blinkers for more than half my time. I'd ad to that especially if you drive.
This is reporting at it's best, it doesn't judge and tell you what to think, but the lives and hardship that some people will endure to live 'The British Dream' can at tines be hard to take.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first two sentences of the book are “I have to see everything for myself. I don’t trust statistics”. Fair enough, although the author does quote some statistics, the most significant being that between the census dates of 1971 and 2011, the population of London identifying as “White British” fell from 86% to 45%, a trend that is only going to continue. It’s in that context that author Ben Judah paints us a picture of London’s recent migrants, told largely through their own words.

This is a thoroughly downbeat book. We all know that newly arrived migrants start at the bottom, but the 400 pages of this book are filled with story after story of violence, drug addiction, prostitution, homelessness, exploitation, crime and poverty. The stories are depressing even when they feature those on the top rung of the economic ladder, such as Arab princesses and the trophy wives of Russian oligarchs. The book does have the merit of educating someone like me about the new London, and I recognise that it took considerable determination and indeed courage to put it together, but I must admit that I found the last 100 pages or so a bit repetitive. I was also troubled by one chapter in which a teacher in a deprived area describes numerous examples of child abuse but appears to have done nothing about them. Any one of the examples quoted would have been grounds for a referral to the proper authorities.

Disappointed hope is probably the book’s main theme, but the impact of demographic change is another. A number of those interviewed comment that the English are declining, even dying out; the pubs are closing, the Anglican churches are shutting; London is no longer an English city; etc. You may think this sounds like the content of a far-right political pamphlet, but the comments are all attributed to the migrants themselves, most of whom seem to hold views that are robustly non-PC, and to express those views less about the white English than about other minorities. There is no love lost at the bottom, as the author succinctly puts it.

A worthwhile book, not least because it provides a more balanced picture of migration than the arguments advanced by our two political tribes, for whom migrants are either all persecuted victims fleeing war and oppression, or alternatively a lot of thieves and benefit cheats looking for an easy life on the back of the British taxpayer. As always, the truth is more complex.

My rating is on the harsh side, and if the rating system were less blunt I would have given it a 7/10. Grim reading though.

[Sarah Warner · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Economist, Guardian, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph and Financial Times I strongly challenge your reviews of this book - a true example of harmful, hurtful and divisive journalism. To give such high accolades to a book that can only be described as “voyeuristic poverty porn” with a side of “depravation tourism for middle class literati” (as Alec McAllister, one of this book’s reviewers so aptly describes it) is deplorable. Judah is out to paint a certain picture of London and is on a mission to find stories that suit his narrative. His weapon of choice: fake social concern to lure his victims into his apocalyptic trap filled with assumptions and generalisations.
This is not (our) London.
This is your London, Ben.

[Maryam Hussain · Rating 1 out of 5]

v disappointing

"Judah has a tendency to name his subjects by nationality ('an Afghan' or 'an illegal', rather than a person) as if he's uncovered some sort of exotic species, the actions of whom are reduced to a consequence of his or her nationality or immigration status. And most of the areas he describes are far from the smoggy, Dickensian slums he desperately wants to portray."

[Barrowsend · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a miserable , soul-destroying book. This is NOT London.

[Em Anderson-Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a book to start the year with.

On the back cover of This Is London, there's a quote from The Economist noting that 'Judah grabs hold of London and shakes out its secrets'. That is exactly what this book felt like - a Pandora's box of tragic, ignored stories, tipped onto the table and left to be gawked at.

This Is London was a raw, bleak, observational expose of modern day London, a sociological study of those we see but do not listen to. From Polish Builders and Afghan Shopkeepers to Egyptian Princesses and Ghanaian Tube Pickers, Judah uses this portfolio to traverse the invisible map of immigrant London and deep-dive into diasporas so often dismissed. At times it was gossipy, juicy, bewildering, and provided the reader a unique opportunity to be a fly-on-the-Belgravia-wall. Most of the time, however, the poverty, despondency and bitterness that nestled between the pages of This Is London was disarming. This book truly hammered home the reality that the English Dream exists, and is as damaging as its American counterpart.

[Schopflin · Rating 3 out of 5]

There so much slum picturesque in this book that I started to think the glowing reviews were inspired by guilt. The writing is incredibly manipulative and the book switches genres from romantic fiction to thriller depending on the interviewee. And the overall 'these Londoners will never assimilate' message is constantly contradicted by the stories wthin. But for all that, it's an immensely compelling read. And while I found Fran Abrams' 'Below the breadline' far more convincing, this book is also full of revelations. Some of the shock value genuinely comes from the facts relayed rather than the writing style.

[Nikolai · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you like Daily Mail you will love this book.

[Ffiona · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book written in a flowing/poetic journalistic style, it's intention is to inform us about the real life situation in London.The mainstream media plays an important role in how the public understands issues, such as immigration.In the UK a liberal/progressive political ideology dominates and affects the framing, meaning we tend not to hear the opposing anti-immigration argument,we mostly hear that immigration and diversity is a very positive thing that greatly benefits both the immigrant and the country they move to.This author gives us the other side of the story.

Ben Judah is not taking an anti-immigration stance in this book,he makes sure he pays some homage to the god of PC in his writing.His sympathetic descriptions of immigrant hardship are intended to remind the majority of Londoners that their comfortable lifestyles are built on the back of a near third world labour market-this is tantamount to guilt tripping his readers.Yes, it's not helpful to resent the poor who are only trying to better themselves but that does not mean the general indigenous population should be responsible for the historical sins of elite aristocracy & the modern day globalists.It is the globalist elites that should be having their consciousness raised, because they are the ones exploiting,impoverishing and damaging the countries the immigrants are leaving.

Some immigrants regard us as morally defective: "all English girls are alcoholics'.'.'.'they drink like pigs. They drink until they can hardly walk,they disgust me.” Personally I can understand how some immigrants with high moral standards are repulsed at the least attractive aspects of our culture, they see our decadence and feel disgusted. They are right to look down on us.The author meets a Polish woman who works as a registrar, recording births and deaths.She describes the new London where fifty seven percent of births are to immigrant mothers,when she enters the names of the recently dead, they are nearly all of them old white British. A policeman tells the author: "The English are vanishing. London is no longer an English city at all" and another migrant comments: "The English are dying.They are declining fast".London has lost thousands of white British people to the rest of the UK while more than a million people of other ethnic backgrounds have moved in.The falling number of white British in the capital is known as white flight - the indigenous population forced out of their neighbourhoods by foreign migrants.They are leaving the city because they are not willing to live in an environment which has changed beyond recognition.The social reorganisation of London has caused uncertainty and great stress to the indigenous population,they are trying to master uncertainty and anxiety by using a withdrawing strategy,this gives them an illusion of control.It is not only indigenous white British citizens who are suffering, Judah gives accounts of immigrants who thought the streets of London would be paved with gold & money was growing on trees, only to find themselves exploited and resented mainly by other immigrant groups.These people didn't want to uproot themselves from their own land to settle in the capital,they did it out of economic necessity,some of the people he spoke to were very unhappy here and expressed a desire to return to their own country.

It is very clear to see that the population of Britain have all been ideologically brain-washed by people hostile to the traditional Christian culture of Europe and the West,their brain washing message continually instils shaming guilt depicting our Christian past in a negative distorted and misleading ways,constantly referencing colonialism, slavery & implying Britain has a long history of being mean nasty and hostile to non Christian minorities and therefore now is the time for us to make amends because they deserve some reparations.Moses the foul mouthed drug dealer & thief has conveniently embraced grievance politics and feels he has the privilege to guilt those who might condemn his criminality.He is able to justify & comfort himself with the postcolonial ideology narrative. "What was the British Empire [censored] based on? drugs,sugar and opium..so don't you ever,ever,give me any of dat moralizing [censored]"

In the West we all live under the rule of non-discrimination.Recently Donald Trump implied Islam posed a mortal danger to the US & therefore immigration ought to temporarily stopped.There was a public outrage in Britain that included a large petition to ban him from entering the UK, there was even a heated parliamentary debate on the issue of barring him. Such is the neo marxist/progressive belief which says that the most morally wrong thing anyone can ever do is to have a critical view of a foreign group & to want to keep that group out.These people actually feel it is evil to think (thought crime) that some people are more unlike us than others, because that would also be a violation of the politically correct orthodoxy that all people are equally like us. The equality principle of the progressive says immigrants must be permitted to access our society, changing its very nature.These people think of themselves as campaigners for global justice,and no one should be allowed to disagree with them.

“London can crush you'.'.'.'or London can transform you. You can rise up here. The white people, they are not stopping you,”

Whites will not be stopping the progressive agenda because they have been subjected to social engineering,due to that engineering, they themselves agree that it is perfectly acceptable to shame white people for expressing any pride in their racial identity or empathy for their own group - inevitably this leads to a despairing kind of learned helplessness:the only way they can gain approval or self esteem is to be totally self-sacrificing of their own best interests.Indigenous Londoners feel they don't have much control of the current situation,if they speak out they risk vilification and censure so they try to accommodate and do what is expected of them.They try to rationalize the situation repressing their real feelings because they fear the social sanctions of behaving otherwise. Proponents of cosmopolitan collectivism strongly disapprove of nationalism. Neo marxist progressives think nationalism is synonymous with hatred towards foreigners.These pathologizers feel more comfortable assigning blanket blame to the indigenous population than to any other racial group.

"The split now is more:immigrants and natives.And there are millions of them... flooding in"

Integration sounds great in theory but in reality it is a utopian unrealistic ideal propagated by naive do gooders.Anthropology shows us that humans naturally live in tribes and will make war with other tribes.Strange things can happen when competing groups are put together in the same geographical area.Human beings have what is known as a binary instinct.Its a primitive response that kicks in when people feel threatened in some way,they immediately start dividing things and classify them into ,good bad,friend enemy,safe dangerous etc .This is actually a natural human instinct response.Us versus them binary divisions turn off empathy and it has nothing to do with racism either,it is a wholly natural phenomenon.Groups of people feel compelled to compete for space resources and control so I honestly dread to think what the future holds for us.Under the right circumstances,the thin veneer of civilization that we all take for granted could so easily be taken away.

Our country is in the midst of a demographic transition. The ethnic majority is evolving to become a non traditional & non white majority nation.British people (anxious not to offend) are very relaxed about the enormity of the coming change-the shift from being a majority to a minority.Inevitably this change will result in two,or possibly three ethnic groups, who are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed to each other living in the same land mass. What could possibly go wrong.

[Herschel · Rating 5 out of 5]

London is an immigrant city, and one that is increasingly hard for its residents to get a grip on. What do Hackneyites know of Harrow?

“London is a patchwork of ghettos”, says a Nigerian man to our correspondent. Judah, a Londoner in his 20s, has realised he doesn’t recognise his home city and decides to stop and take stock.

He is at pains to show his working: he tells us when he is making notes or when he has pressed record on his phone, as if talking to strangers in London is so unlikely as to be unbelievable.

“I have to see things myself”, he tells us on page 1. “I don’t trust statistics”.

Nevertheless he gives us some: London has 600,000 people living in it illegally. It is these people most Londoners barely see, and rarely hear from.

He beds down with Roma beggars in Park Lane. Many are handing their takings directly to the local enforcers of loan sharks back in Romania. But they have their own systems of classification: “The English, they are the meanest…, the Arabs and Moroccans, they shout at us. The Chinese, they sometimes give”.

He visits the wealthy too: trust fund princesses who are near-prisoners in their Knightsbridge penthouses where they smoke weed and plot how to throw off their minders.

Despite a professed attempt to present his findings as dispassionate fact-gathering, Judah's slant is towards the pessimistic. He admits “I don’t know if I like the new London or if it frightens me”.

But there are also moments of dark humour. One Afghan man realises that having crossed a continent, braving a hail of bullets from Turkish border guards and the Channel crossing, he has ended up working in a shop in Neasden. But even so, in his words: “The Neasden it’s a rubbish in the London… But it’s like a peace beauty in this world…”

This is London is an important contribution to a very live debate in Britain about integration and overall levels of immigration. The fact that it is so rare to read from or hear these voices in everyday media is a problem in itself. Judah has a sure touch and no small amount of literary ability and this is an important piece of journalism from which he wisely refrains from drawing overall conclusions.

[Liam Keogh · Rating 3 out of 5]

4 stars for the research, 2.5 for the content.

Some of the early chapters are really good and suggested a great deal of promise, despite others being weaker. Sadly however the better chapters became less and less frequent. It was hard to tell what Judah's point was, not just in what was being said (fair enough the stories could and should be very different) but often what was happening just seemed to belong to a different book. I was waiting for him to come to the point, for this avenue to lead to something but they never did.

It does feel as though he is trying far too hard to demonstrate that the changes to London and the people that are arriving are nothing but a problem to those who have been there longer. Despite his protestation in the preface (this in itself tells you straight away the angle he is going for).

Others have pointed out the issues with his prose style and they are correct. His constant attempts at metaphor and simile are both unnecessary and unsuccessful.

Overall this feels like a book from someone with something to prove. That he is brave in his level of investigative journalism, that he is a skilled writer and that London is so much the worse for the recent changes. The former of the three is the only one I can grant him, but sadly it is a little wasted when the end result is a poor read with no discernible point.

[Cate · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a few reviews complaining about the writing being excessively journalistic and poverty porn, and I have to agree.

Some fascinating stories but they are mostly hidden amongst far too much scene-setting descriptions of the skyline, the activities of incidental background extras, his opinion of things people are thinking (without much justification) or just the weather.

It just reads as a series of unconnected journalistic interviews, which could each be cut in half by removing all the fluff. It's also unnecessarily graphic at times - particularly when describing tube suicides and prostitutes that have been attacked. Just seems to be an attempt at shock journalism and sensationalising the stories for a middle class readership.

I also felt the different stories were too disjointed; other than all being non-White British living in London, there doesn't seem to be a clear thread. For example, clearly moving through the London map or by social hierarchy, or even moving through people by nationality or job. Perhaps it is attempting this as it does reference a lot of street names, but for those who don't know London that intimately, this isn't clear.

[Helen Marquis · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating view of the life of immigrants in London, from the Romanians sleeping in the underpasses of Hyde Park Corner, to the wealthy club kids with absent parents, Judah's encounters with the often harsh realities of life as a stranger in a strange land.
Judah does an excellent job of humanising the dispossessed, in a book that every Daily Mail aficionado / racist Brexiteer should read to get over themselves. He goes to extreme measures to capture the voices of these people, posing as an itinerant worker and sleeping rough with his subjects to get them to open up to him.
At points, his facts do tend to the extremes to back up his narrative, and you could be mistaken for thinking that London is filled with hateful unwelcoming xenophobic arseholes, but that's just a small unpleasant minority. His slightly one-sided outrage, while justifiable, does present a somewhat biased view. A more balanced approach could have potentially won over more people and brought a bigger audience on board. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating read and highly recommended.

[Faisal Chaudhary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having lived or worked in about 3 areas documented in the book I found Judah's work informative and at times resonating with things I had heard and seen. At other times he tends to go off on a tangent with the background stories and I cannot help but feel some of the writing is deliberately sensationalist. For example there is a constant obsession with race and ethnic divisions but the London I know and work in seems to be moving past some of those old tribal borders. Perhaps this is the point, people will always view London from their own lens.

Some of the stereotypes that are enforced in the book, about Romanians in particular, need to be countered with some positive stories about these communities. Otherwise the book risks being quoted selectively by the far right to push a racist narrative.