Americans in London tell me, with increasing bafflement, how different the city is to New York. Pubs regularly shut at 10pm, and god forbid you feel like dinner out post-theatre. After 11pm midweek the public transport system runs on a wing and a prayer. Europe’s answer to the city that never sleeps? Be serious. For a bustling, cosmopolitan metropole London has an early bedtime. And a habit of calling in sick. In the view of those hyper-urban American implants, London could be mistaken for a quaint, sleepy village. Even our answer to Times Square – Piccadilly Circus – is a mere roundabout.
Some of the criticism is unfair: you try navigating Covent Garden on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas and argue with me about this being a place in spiralling, terminal decline. But for the most part that grand old cliche about London having a late-night-problem is true. And what about on a public holiday?
It is a cold and sunny morning on 25 December and I am approaching Soho, solo, to road-test the thesis. Swirling through Camden and then Euston and through Fitzrovia, on my descent, I find a place pretty much boarded up. With one noble exception on the corner of Oxford Street. BASICMART – which serves hot food, soft drinks, tobacco, plastic vapes, phone chargers, keychains, souls, hopes, dreams, fake Burberry, and bananas – will always be there and open for Londoners in need of emergency miscellany.
I get out of the car (no tubes, no buses, self-imposed ban on Lime biking, you see) and venture south-west. Earlier that morning I contacted the five-year-old within and insisted on wearing a new pair of boots for my jaunt – flippantly dismissing advice from my wise mother that new boots need “breaking in” before a several-mile expedition like mine. And so, the exercise was blood soaked and, at points, conspicuously lame. But I marched on through Soho determined to bring back some festive cheer, dead or alive.
And it didn’t take me long to find it. With BASICMART in the rearview mirror I head down Frith Street, that critical artery of London’s art, food, and nice-place-to-be scene. Everything was closed – even the otherwise 24-hour institution Bar Italia (an excusable fact, owing to the Italian work/life balance sensibility). This deserted street, by way of response to one lamenting Financial Times columnist, might be a means to land that otherwise-impossible-to-come-by 9pm reservation at Humble Chicken, if you are okay with some yuletide breaking and entering.
But then, signs of life, two streets over: The French House. Not only open, but full, and before lunchtime, mind you. I speak to a dazed American vaudeville-y graphic designer; she’s a regular and lives round the corner. Then two Australian women who seem dressed and ready for Bloomsday. Behind me, a grunting man I nearly mistook for Michel Houellebecq. Bottles of white wine are flung around between groups above my head, everyone basking in their shared sense of cool: no paper hats and bothersome crackers, Brussels sprouts or tinsel here. It is not very British, nor even particularly French. This is supranational Christmas.
I carry on. Without any buses and very few cars the rough edges of the city – visible signs of wear and tear – become more apparent. This is significant, like discovering an old jumper is moth-eaten in all sorts of previously undetected ways. The troubling and saddening extent of the homelessness problem is laid bare when there aren’t crowds; and the sheer amount of straight-to-landfill tourist tat shops lining Shaftsbury Avenue depresses (in lesser, but still not insignificant, measure). In Chinatown, as is to be expected of Chinatown, it could be any other day of the week – were it not hemmed in by eerie quiet everywhere else.
Last Christmas in a faceless Soho pub with my father we encountered a group of mismatched young people with accents so non-specific I would believe it if they told me they were from the moon. Air hostesses, as it turns out. This is a typical Christmas for their trade, they explained: on a day off in a foreign city with colleagues, drinking wherever is open and less depressing than airport hotels.
And so I begin to bristle once again at that oh-so-American accusation – when they insist with the air of a pretend insider that London “is really just a collection of villages”; as though it is not a monstrous, sprawling, turbo-international city. At the end of the daunting year that faces us, maybe “town” (that charming semi-parochial designation for “the centre of one of Europe’s biggest cities”) will look altogether different. But for Christmas in 2025 – quiet? Yes. Quaint? That couldn’t be less accurate. This is as cosmopolitan as it gets, just with a curfew.
[Further reading: Laboozer: the definitive Labour pub crawl]
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