In its earlier phase of expansion, Britain took what could be called a “small plates” approach to empire – non-contiguous bits of land spread across the tabletop of the world, rather than one meat-and-two-veg continental slab. This is not a completely insane metaphor. East London, where the rent is high and the bill for a fashionable, crockery-intensive dinner for four isn’t far behind, pips any eroding statue in Whitehall for post-colonial resonance.
Let me explain. I recently moved near London Fields, a small park with Hackney to its east and Dalston to its west. Below it is Broadway Market, a stretch of shops that accommodates a line of hectic food stalls on the weekend. That market has existed in some form since the 19th century but, as with the street itself, has been thoroughly gentrified. After 120 years of service, the F Cooke pie and mash shop closed in 2020 and was replaced by a branch of the expensive glasses brand Cubitts. Like the Ottomans taking over the Hagia Sophia, it left much of the original shopfront unchanged.
When I walk along Broadway Market, and through London Fields and the surrounding streets, my ears twitch. It sounds like I’ve gone east of central London and continued east for several thousand miles. Everyone is Australian – and “everyone” is only a small exaggeration. Aussies are buying £5 coffees. Aussies are serving £5 coffees. Aussies are walking through the park in yoga pants and Aussies are on the grass basking in what little sun kisses the land of the Poms.
Between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, the Australian population in London declined from 53,959 to 43,418, likely due to Brexit, Covid and its homeland’s higher wages. But look at the ward-by-ward change and it’s a massacre in the west. Queensway had a 2.6 percentage point drop in the proportion of its population that was Aussie; Fulham Broadway, 2.2; Shepherd’s Bush West, 2.5; Clapham North, 1.7. By 2021, the most concentrated group of west London Australians – they make up 2.1 per cent of people in Clapham Common West – is in the shadow of north-east London clusters in Highbury Fields (now 2.3 per cent Australian), Angel (2.4 per cent) and Dalston Kingsland (2.5 per cent). A whole 1.3 per cent of Dalston Kingsland hails from New Zealand, for God’s sake.
The east London Australian used to be an oxymoron: until quite recently it was those western and south-western neighbourhoods, particularly Clapham, Fulham and Wandsworth, that they were firmly wedded to. Aussie actress Margot Robbie has talked about how she and her mates were kicked out of “most of the clubs in Clapham”, including the notorious Inferno’s, during her time living in the area. The Walkabout chain of Aussie sports pubs, which first opened in 1994, were national strongholds; reminiscing in the Guardian in 2013, the Australian political speechwriter Brigid Delany described the Covent Garden branch during the Melbourne Cup horse race as “some sort of Bacchanal or Daily Mail spread come to life. Girls in arse-skimming skirts and eye-gouging fascinators drunk and falling down; the boys, bleary-eyed and leering, in huddles playing drinking games.”
This does not smell like cultural clout, exactly. These Aussies were rough-and-ready journeymen and women who loved pints and rugby. But everyone who lives in east London either hasn’t heard of rugby, or is trying to outrun an expensive education in which they were forced to play it. Here there are no explicitly Aussie pubs, only Aussie-ish cafes, where orders for matchas? And cortados? Are delivered with that Antipodean “upspeak” which makes every sentence ring out like a question?
Interrogating an east London Aussie at an east London literary reading recently, I learned that Melbourne is more-or-less “Dalston on sea”; that Australia is full of tatted-up creatives who can pretend to work in a cafe just as well as any Central Saint Martins graduate. The 2021 UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement expanded working holiday visa requirements; now citizens of each country can now work in the other one for three years rather than two, and up to the age of 35 rather than 30.
This widens the possibility of Aussies building careers here rather than simply having an extended gap year of bouncing around Europe on easyJet flights. Creatives love the networking possibilities of east London, and there are loads of Australian corporate lawyers in the City, where they can still earn more than back home despite the overall wage gap. There are fewer people flying over with no existing job and no plan other than to mooch about Walkabout and Inferno’s. (The last London branch of Walkabout, alas, closed in 2017.) The city’s cost-of-living squeeze is squeezing non-professional Westerners out of its immigrant mix.
For professionals, though, it still has enough clout, via specialised job opportunities and safely gentrified cool, to be an enticing honeypot – though one extremely similar to the place they left behind. They can turn up and order the same flat white they get in Melbourne. They can date women in the same outfits and men with the same shaggy mullets as back home. Of course they don’t need their own pubs, like the west London Australians did – the only thing distinctive about them is their accent. The algo-powered homogenisation of cool urban culture means that every cool neighbourhood in every major city is instantly graspable and livable for someone who’s lived in its equivalent half a world away.
Up to a point. It’s not just Aussie accents I hear in London Fields, but Kiwi, Canadian, American and Irish ones too. In chorus, they sound distinctly “Anglo” in a way their peers in Berlin or Paris do not. They make London sound like a city that still has an empire attached to it. They haven’t ended up here just because of their Instagram feed, but because of centuries of British settler-colonialism and the resulting cultural links between Anglophone countries. “CANZUK”, the alliance-slash-confederation of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK, was dreamed up by right-wing think tanks but is deeply progressive in its actually existing form: the mother city’s far-flung children returning for a glug of natty wine.
[Further reading: Rupert Lowe, podcast bro?]
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Subscribe here to commentAh, the Walkabout on York Road ona Sunday, which I often drove past on the way to work, where one would see scores of almost-pantomime mullets standing outside slugging from a can, which, when finished, was crushed, recycling-ready, on the ground.
Great, funny article; more plese, Mr Gogarty.
(BTW, subs: where they can still [EARN] more than…
No, please, not more tedious London-centric analysis of micro-locality social trends of no interest to anyone except the journalist and his oh-so-cool media friends. I couldn’t give a tuppeny damn about which bits of London or which London eateries are currently trendy. The New Statesman is getting increasingly tedious on this subject, whilst simultaneously patronising and sniggering at the rest of the country with the “This England” column. Very disappointed at the direction the magazine is taking under the new editor.
The article refers to a tiny part of East London as “East London”.