Uh-oh. The waitress looked unhappy as she faced the queue outside Bara, a small Welsh-owned café in, of all places, Peckham. “It’s all sold,” she grimaced just after 2pm. “It’s all gone.” There would be no more “Swansea Breakfasts” served on this St David’s Day. There were no other Welsh-owned cafés in south London either. The queue melted away, retreating, perhaps, all the way back along the M4 to Cymru. The daffodils outside the café drooped a tad lower, like drunks. “Well, I guess I’ll just eat those then,” said one woman in a slate-breakingly Welsh accent, pointing at the sagging flowers.
I walked with my friend Celyn, a zoomer goth girl from Swansea, back along the road into Peckham, past a black beauty salon, a West African grocery store, a Nigerian “spice” joint and a slightly singed-looking shop that claimed to stock “Bibles, bells, incense, CD-roms, DVDs”. Shoppers eyeing up pigs’ trotters and salted cod seemed unaware that on this day 1,437 years ago, St David died. Traditionally, he was said to have passed away from natural causes aged 100, which is about how old the cod looked. I thought of the lost breakfast – “Smoked bacon, Blas Y Tir leeks, Câr-y-Môr cockles & laverbread, on toasted focaccia £12” – as we filed sadly into a kebab shop and asked for lamb shawarma. Lamb not chicken. We had traditional standards to uphold.
Celyn is actually Welsh. “Ultra-orthodox” Welsh, in her own description. Like most ambitious young people from Wales, she speaks the language fluently, but finds herself marooned in London because the only jobs where she’s from involve call centres, packing meat or, at best, working in a hospital. When she talks about greyscale Swansea it sounds strange and beautiful, like a town in Guatemala or Game of Thrones. I’m half-Welsh, which means something but also means absolutely nothing other than a vague preference for solidly working-class Welsh rugby over the pig-faced, quasi-fascist game they play at Twickenham. Celyn has promised me a tour through the London Welsh diaspora on this feast day. “It’ll be like your Aliyah,” she said, referring to the return of diaspora Jews to the lands of Israel and Palestine.
London is the second largest Welsh city after Cardiff, although you would never guess it. This weird fact is known in Wales, though. A few months ago, I watched Eluned Morgan, the First Minister, give a sad speech on the site of a proposed modular nuclear reactor in Anglesea for an audience of several hundred dazed-looking teenagers. My memory of her exact words is hazy, but her address to the Welsh youth was as clear and clean as Welsh tap water: please don’t leave. Stay here. Work here, have families here. Don’t move to London. Wales needs you…
Yet here we all are in London. Celyn insists that we ignore the St David’s Day rugby match at Old Deer Park and the St David’s Day food festival inside Spitalfields Market to attend the St David’s Day “daytime rave” in the London Welsh Community Centre on Gray’s Inn Road.
I ask Celyn what the most unacknowledged facts about Wales are. The list is long. Nobody understands that Jesus College, Oxford, is a nerve centre of Welsh supremacy, she says. Saunders Lewis, the founding figure of Welsh nationalism was actually born in Liverpool. North Wales is itself a zone of Scouse imperial overreach. Most Welsh speakers today are third-generation Welsh speakers taught by second-generation Welsh speakers, so they’re probably doing it wrong, but that is still better than the language dying out entirely, which could have happened in the 20th century. Swansea was bigger than Cardiff until the 1960s. The Welsh outside Cardiff talk about the city in the same cutting tone that the English outside London talk about the capital. St David’s monks once tried to poison him. When Plaid triumph in the Senedd elections in May, it will have nothing to do with romantic Welsh nationalism, and everything to do with the rubbish condition of Welsh schools, hospitals and roads. The Irish and Scottish nationalists couldn’t sort their language out. “We could, though.”
Celyn gave me an old history of Wales by Gwyn A Williams to read on the bus that we took to north London. I opened it on a random page, looking for some answers about Welshness, now that I wouldn’t find them inside Bara. Williams’s history was extremely well written, in the way that books by Raymond Williams or Jan Morris always are. But it’s not very helpful on the whole being Welsh thing: “Wales is impossible. A country called Wales exists only because the Welsh invented it,” Gwyn writes. “The Welsh only exist because they invented themselves.”
It’s nearly 4pm inside the London Welsh Community Centre, and they’ve sold out of Wrexham Lager. Above the bar the historic county shields of Wales are hung, and a small and possibly libellous sign that claims King Charles “shags dogs”.
The day rave reminded me of cousin David’s wedding in Essex a few years ago. A Welsh occasion that happened mysteriously in an English setting. Celyn claimed that the scene inside the club is “very South Walean”. Men in rugby tops staggered towards a cheese board. (All Welsh artisanal products are made out of cheese.) Paper plates stacked with Welsh cakes tottered dangerously on the edge of tables. A woman pretended to eat an inflatable daffodil the size of a guitar. The heavy curtains were drawn, the disco lights were on and the DJ promised “Welsh music” before blasting Earth, Wind & Fire out of the speakers. I drank heavily. (Brains Limited Edition “Tight Head” Ale.) “You do realise you have to dance at some point,” Celyn said. “There is no way I’m going to be the first man in this room to dance,” I said at the exact moment a tall, thin, bald, long-nosed and candidly South Welsh bloke staggered on to the floor, forcing me to join him. Everyone looked like my Auntie Carol.
I once asked a Cambodian fisherman standing by the shore of the Tonle Sap what made Cambodians Cambodian. I have never forgotten his thoughtful, considered answer: “Drinking and eating.” This makes the Welsh Cambodian and the Cambodians Welsh. I found a Welshman, born in Anglesea and now teaching at a famous school in London. He said he always knew he would leave the island, first to Cardiff, then to London. We didn’t have a huge amount to talk about and I was already falling-over drunk, so I asked him what it meant to be Welsh. “Oh, you know,” he said. “Rugby. Mountains. Singing.”
“You feel like you’re living in an internationally recognised sovereign state but you’re surrounded by people who aren’t your people. Welsh is an acute regional identity, but we also have a language, we have our own genetic markers. I’m not trying to measure skulls or anything, but it’s true.” David stopped for a moment. We have moved to the smoking area of the Old Red Lion pub in Islington. The climax of our St David’s Day: Welsh spoken-word poetry.
Everyone here was young, Welsh-speaking, political. The men wore heavy knitwear and the women had brilliant, curling Celtic tattoos running down their arms. They read each other’s poems and Dylan Thomas’s poems inside the dark, warmly lit pub. We sang all the songs you’d expect apart from “Men of Harlech”. They sound like underground songs here, like Gypsy songs from Romania or Ukraine, songs written in the heyday of romantic nationalism, which in Wales means sometime between the 1960s and the early 1980s. Ry’n ni yma o hyd! The Welsh voices fill the room. Ry’n ni yma o hyd! Allow me some small, undeserved ethnic pride. Nobody else can sing like this. Ry’n ni yma o hyd! Celyn told me what it meant later. We are still here.
[Further reading: Rachel Reeves is pretending everything is absolutely fine]
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This article appears in the 04 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Trump's global terror
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Subscribe here to commentThat’s my friend’s daughter who opened ‘Bara’ and I was friendly with Gwyn Alf (I lived in his house in Cardiff for about a year while he moved in with my sister’s mother in law) and I am Cardiff born and bred, although my mother’s family is from mid Wales and my dad’s from the Welsh valleys, namely Abergwynfi. So them’s my seventh decade and counting Cymraes credentials.
Well, in search of “Welsh Nationalism”?! Are you mad?! Do you know nothing?! Even the Welsh flag is younger than my husband… We KNOW flags are only useful at sea (Union JACK, anyone?). We don’t view the world through that Anglo Saxon colonial lens here yng nghymru. For a start, ‘Wales’ is saesneg for ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’ (yeah, we were just very early practice for those flag waving, colonialist types…) so “Welsh Nationalism” is actually an oxymoron, because we also have something else, something different that doesn’t even TRANSLATE into saesneg, we have ‘hiraeth’… I guess that’s why colonial invader types found us so “foreign”and “strange”… Duw duw cariad, “Welsh Nationalism “?! Mynd i chwarae gyda dy fam gu 🤣 ✌🏾❣️