This is London: Life and Death in the World City
Abstract
REVIEWS 95 This is London: Life and Death in the World City.ByBEN JUDAH. Pp. 423 + 99 photographs. London: Picador, 2016. £18.99. ISBN 978-1-4472-7244-1. Hardback. It is something of a cliché that London, in its relationship with the rest of the United Kingdom, functions as another country. It works differently, it plays differently and it frequently votes differently. In This Is London, foreign correspondent and Russia specialist Ben Judah turns his gaze closer to home to examine the city he was born in, one that has undergone profound demographic changes in the last 25 years, and in which 40 per cent of the population was born abroad. Judah does this very effectively by allowing migrant London to speak for itself. Hopes, fears, jokes, prejudices and observations are recorded. There are the Arab princess and the Filipina maid, the Nigerian aristocrat and the Grenadian gangster, the Polish marriage regis- trar and the Romanian prostitute. The experiences documented are bleak, at times darkly humorous, sometimes brutal and occasionally tragic. Each chapter is a different area of the capital — from Berkeley Square to Plaistow Road, from white stucco mansions owned by ex-KGB Russian oligarchs to abandoned garages, now only useful for