Ben Judah, This is London: Life and Death in the World City: 'Stirring the melting pot, but with sympathy', book review

Ben Judah is an excellent foreign correspondent, rightly celebrated for the work he has done on Putinism

In the wrong hands, this book could have read like a Ukip recruitment drive. More than 600,000 illegal immigrants are in London, it announces, more than the entire population of Glasgow.

From 1971 to 2011 the white British population fell from 86 per cent to 45 per cent. Almost one in five left during the Noughties alone.

“The English are dying,” one interviewee, a Nigerian-born policeman, repeatedly warns the author, and, intentionally or not, that becomes the message of this timely if myopic book. The British are apparently being forced out of their capital to be replaced by a kaleidoscope of immigrant populations that they neither understand, nor speak to, and which they should, it implies, sometimes fear.

Ben Judah is an excellent foreign correspondent, rightly celebrated for the work he has done on Putinism. Here, he turns the skills he learnt abroad to his home city. He goes on the “front-line”, spending time with the drug dealers fighting turfs wars. He “embeds” with London’s latest arrivals, sleeping with Romanian beggars at Hyde Park Corner and living in a slum bedsit with itinerant workers looking for cash-in-hand from the building trade.

Above all, though, he listens to the stories of those normally forgotten: the Romanian prostitute whose friend was murdered; the Afghan youth smuggled into the UK fuelled by the dream of a new life in Neasden; the Arab “princess” kept in her Mayfair mansion dulling her loneliness with copious amounts of marijuana.

It is these stories that make the book so timely. London is an atomised city where people can spend decades not knowing their neighbours, let alone understanding what the lives of those they see on public transport or cleaning their offices are like, or what brought them here.

One of the most affecting passages is Judah on the Tube, heading west, and using his new-found knowledge to guess at those among whom he sits; imagining the journeys they undertook to be in this carriage, and the homes they now go to.

In a period when those making their way into Europe are too easily being categorised solely by a number – the size of their migration – such a visceral reminder of the personal triumphs and tragedies each embodies is needed, and carries with it a call for empathy.

Where this book falters, however, is in its unrelenting focus on the miserable. For almost everyone it features, life is reduced to mutual hatreds and unremitting regret, a catalogue of experiences that is mixed with implicit warnings of what crime-ridden fate now awaits stretches of the city.

This not only becomes gruelling for the reader but ultimately risks reducing the immigrants’ experience to just that of victim, which is disingenuous at best and stigmatising at worst.

Judah has succeeded in opening reader’s eyes to the hardships experienced by many and ignored by most. But, this alone is not London. There is a more textured range of immigrant experiences he has chosen to ignore, and this would have been a more rounded book if those too had been explained and explored.

This is London: Life and Death in the World City, by Ben Judah. Picador £18.99