Ari’s Reviews > This is London: Life and Death in the World City > Status Update

He wanted to slip off into the desert, assume new identities, sever his friendships, burn his clothes, speak seven languages, sleep late, speak verse, see Paris, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested.

Here was the golden city he dreamt of in African shanties. He was finally here. But he was discovering that migrants like him clean, wait and guard the golden city. Never really to enter. Here he was swilling down the tenderloin-steak plates of hedge-funders and commodity-hustlers. As close as he could get: but hardly there.

There is a whole African city in London. With more than 550,000 people this would be a city the size of Sheffield. And it has grown almost 45 per cent since 2001.
African London is rich and poor: a city where I have seen May. fair champagne fights and single mums rummaging through food banks. […] But for the most part the hundreds of stories I hear are from a poor city: of scrubbers and security guards.

I need to know what it feels like to be invisible. I need to know what it means to become unseen on plutocratic boulevards. I need to know what it is like to be glared at like a mangy half-man. This is why I am wearing beggar's clothes: worn out, third-hand brogues, thin joggers, a torn puffa jacket and a tight woolly hat.
The couples flinch and avoid me in the flow.

I have been coming to the coach station every morning now for weeks: counting the buses, and pacing up to strangers - first dozens, then hundreds - recording what they say into my phone.
[…] this is what life is like, morning after morning, at our miserable Ellis Island. The point from which our society is changing.