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"The city weighs on me like a wet sweater"

Niall Griffiths writes a Letter to London

Niall Griffiths writes a Letter to London

Dear London,
and I mean 'dear' as a synonym for 'expensive', so let's start again:

Astronomically dear, cripplingly dear, exclusively dear, accessible-to-only-the-rich dear, berserkly dear, obscenely dear, London

my reaction, these days, to the words Paddington or Euston - the entry points into London from Wales - is Pavlovian; my heart sinks in my chest. My skin starts to prickle; after a few hours of being in it, I start to wear London, the city weighs on me, like a wet sweater, and I crave to shrug it off. It hasn't always been this way; there was a time when London would make my heart race and blood boom with promise and potential. Often thwarted, true, and on many occasions I would leave feeling disappointed and, somehow, let down, but I'd be drawn back, enticed by the thrill of opportunity. Now, though, even the initial electric jolt of arrival has gone, and any visit demands the transformative magic of alcohol; half-drunk, I can make believe I'm in a better, more vibrantly concocted, more immediate and available city like Berlin or Chicago or Zagreb or Copenhagen. Edinburgh. Cardiff. The list could go on and on.

Gone, and never to return, is the London of Bohemian pursuit and energy, the like-minded community of artistic endeavour united in penury, and all the enervation and innovation of hope that went with that. Gone are the days of leaving a Smithfield pub at dawn to scavenge spilled vegetables for breakfast; such memories have been interred in the footings of those flats in Covent Garden where you can drive your car into a lift that will take both you and your vehicle up into the front room of your hermetically sealed flat in which no noise or smell can enter. London is not, any more, the lovely zoo that Soho once was or the perilous quick of Brixton. The city is not a place in which to feel vulnerably and excitedly alive, now. It is a nation to itself in which everything has been monetised, in which the accumulation of wealth is extolled as the very pinnacle of human achievement. Forget any enrichment other than the material. Money is everything. Money is all. To be un-rich in London is to be wretched.

This has reached an irreparable, irreversible point. My wish is that the creative industries and everyone associated with them will re-locate. To Birmingham, say; it's central, it's cheap, it has an international airport, it's a place that, so far, has resisted the deification of Mammon. And, when central London is populated only by bankers and their political lapdogs and oligarchs and Russian gangsters, we can build a great big wall around it, let such people do what they want to do to each other without harming anyone else. And then maybe the country can start to re-build itself.

I'll see you soon, London.

Sincerely, but never faithfully, yours,

Niall

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3 minutes

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