25 February 2026

London hates tourists – just look at the West End

Pity the foreigners looking for a good meal on Shaftesbury Avenue

Photo by Getty

“Become a tourist in your own city” is a snotty, insipid, unimaginative and malign piece of advice. If you ever hear it, you must assume that the person offering it to you has bad intentions. London treats its tourists with a snivelling contempt somehow worse than Paris and New York combined. Meanwhile, the greatest insult London spits at its visitors is to pretend they are wanted. But I know that open-hearted bonhomie is impossible to fake.

Here is a trick. To learn how a person really feels, what they really think about someone – a man of his wife, a host of her guests, an owner of her cocker spaniel, me of my colleagues, a city of its visitors – pay attention to what the former feeds the latter. As a rule it might be mawkish and sentimental, but it is no less true for that. No one serves rubbish to the people they love. The family labradoodle, for example, gets a little cube of the good pecorino every time someone passes the fridge. I know a beloved golden retriever who thrives on a diet of bresaola. The overseers of Victorian workhouses fed their child slaves gruel.

With this principle in mind, I bravely left the office to head to the West End. I felt it important to see London through the eyes of an imagined Italian teenager called Giacomo, being dragged down Shaftesbury Avenue by his officious Roman mother and absent-minded father. Such is the fate of too many European children at half-term. Tourists who land at Heathrow are assaulted by a giant purple sign that says “WELCOME TO THE UNITED KINGDOM”. But a single lunch break spent on the Charing Cross Road – tourist-goggles on – exposes the profound epistemological dishonesty in the heart of the British Airports Authority.

At its peak, somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, Charing Cross Road played host to dozens of specialist second-hand book stores. Now, just two remain – Any Amount of Books and Henry Pordes Books. Hordes of Japanese supermarkets, mobile phone shops, vaguely “Asian” fast-food vendors, and disposable vape-peddlers have taken their place, transforming what was once the souk of literary London into an open-air department store for imported carcinogens. On my right is Bunsik – “No 1 Korean street food in the UK” – heaving with foreigners eating “potato mozzarella corn dogs”. That’s a deep-fried sausage on a stick, if you were wondering. Which I hope you weren’t.

Around the corner on Shaftesbury Avenue there was a long queue of cold Europeans waiting for “Kung Fu Burger” – sandwiches “inspired by the ESEA region”. More than 2.3 billion people live in the ESEA region, so I hope the good people at Kung Fu Burger might want to be a little more specific about their inputs. Alas, this is the kind of culinary nonsense – equivalent to a shrug, a sigh, a “fuck it, whatever” – we offer to our tourists. I had lunch at a faceless Hong Kong-style restaurant – the wanton soup wasn’t bad at all but it was so unmemorable that, writing to you just an hour later, I cannot offer any specific tasting notes. Unusually gingery, I think?

I returned to the office with two boxes of pastries picked up from Buns from Home for my colleagues. I was – for the first time in my career, and just a glancing moment – the most popular person in the room. This inhumanly self-effacing act of generosity was not just a good intention – though I am full of those too, of course. It was a rhetorical device, a means to prove my point. You see, if I liked them less, I might have returned from my jaunt with a box full of potato mozzarella corndogs picked up on the now-rather-frowsy Charing Cross Road. Or perhaps just a big bag of disposable vapes.

But I refused to believe that any of this is real food and therefore I refused to serve it to my colleagues, no matter how irritating they can be. That London cannot treat its visitors with a similar depth of magnanimity tells us all we need to know. “Become a tourist in your own city” is not just bad advice. It’s practically damnation.