By Sarah Lyall
“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?”
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, describing its ever-shifting population.
Karan Chanana, the chairman and CEO of Amira Nature Foods, second from left, spoke with guests at his home in the Belgravia neighborhood of London.
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 that is a palimpsest of London in all its practicality.
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 (and denials) 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. Tower Hamlets encompasses not only Brick Lane but also luxury building complexes and some of the poorest housing estates in the country, so he has a lot of different constituencies to contend with. “We work because we’re a pretty tolerant bunch and we knock along together.”
Like the Brick Lane Mosque, London is facing another incarnation, if an uncertain one. 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, from many different countries, 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’s reaction to the bombings only emphasized the chasm between the capital and the rest of the country.
London, she wrote, is “a city of ghettos behind a thin veneer of civility kept polished by a Muslim mayor whose greatest validation is his father’s old job.” Far from getting along, she said, people hate one another.
Later, on Fox News, Ms. Hopkins broadened her idea of division, placing Brexit in the context of a worldwide pro-nationalist, anti-immigration movement extending straight across the Atlantic. London is “Obama on steroids,” she said; the rest of Britain is “essentially Trumptown, where I belong.”
It is strange to me that some Britons who live outside London seem to mistrust and feel alienated from it, given how essential, and central, the city is to the country and how much people like it when they visit. But the things London is proud of also make it an easy target. In 2012, Theresa May, then the anti-Brexit home secretary and now the pro-Brexit prime minister, said that diversity of language in the capital was helping rip apart the nation.
“You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country,” she said. “This isn’t fair to anyone: How can people build relationships with their neighbors if they can’t even speak the same language?”
The rift between what she said and what Londoners think shows why London is struggling so much right now.
“The idea is that we’re all who we are, and we’re all in it together,” said Victoria Prescott, who teaches English and film studies at the Deptford Green School in Lewisham. The students speak 40 different languages at home but acclimate quickly, she said, through immersion courses in English.
The school emphasizes strength in diversity, and to visit it during the morning recess is to see a playground full of students of different colors and cultures all intermingling as if their differences did not matter. But of course it’s only part of the story. Rebecca Cummings, Deptford Green’s deputy head teacher, mentioned one of her neighbors, an older Brexit supporter bitter at the very things the school celebrates.
“She’d say, ‘I’m sitting in the doctor’s surgery waiting forever next to a Somali immigrant with four kids,’” Ms. Cummings said. “That’s London, too.”
Those feelings are now taking root in the city. 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. The trains to Paris did not stop running. Nobody’s passport was rescinded at the gate. 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.
Being the concluding part of this article we first publish last week saturday. It was originally published with the title: Will London fall