This is London: Life and Death in the World City

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If you are interested in this review, you may also like to listen to a podcast of Ben Judah’s lecture at LSE, held on 26 January 2016.

Ben Judah (born 1988) is a Franco-British [1] journalist and the author of This Is London and Fragile Empire. Not every migrant arrives like this. Most EU migrants – the vast majority – arrive with jobs, plans and professions. Yet at the same time, every year, tens of thousands of eastern European migrants arrive without jobs. Thousands of them arrive with next to nothing. These lives matter, even if they only tell a small part of a huge story.The man fleeing his country, losing his wife and daughter on the way, ending up in France with his son. This is the new London: an immigrant city. Over one-third of Londoners were born abroad, with half arriving since the millennium. This has utterly transformed the capital, for better and for worse. Welcome to Europe, the Europe of cam girls, covid-survivors, political refugees from Belarus, Ukrainian soldiers, French winemakers and many more. This book is not a politcal or demographical description of Judah. Just like as in >>This is London, Judah describes of people like you and me, people you could have been in another life or dimension, people you can identify with. We shot the film consecutively: day-by-day, as if I really had just arrived. I started at the beginning, at Victoria Coach Station with nothing. Romanian is the rough sleeper’s language here. This is where I met Ionut and Lucian, two Roma beggars from Romania. They had just arrived. They could hardly comprehend the wealth now surrounding them: super-cars and icing sugar mansions.

he stares every day into this landscape, through five tube stops, over which the life expectancy of an average Londoner falls by eleven years. People say Ben Judah is Orwellian. They're Right. . . . He's a superb reporter. -- William Leith * Evening Standard * Is this Europe? Yes, to an extent, it’s the Europe that we usually prefer not to dwell on and never to experience. Judah is to be commended for his deep journalistic curiosity and unflinching gaze, yet there is an unexpected irony here. For all the energy and dynamism that his subjects demonstrate, their often sad and soulless lives in a sense dovetail with more pessimistic and conservative visions of this old continent, such as Douglas Murray’s The Strange Death of Europe.All of which he achieves, after a fashion, by becoming a porn star in his low-budget, self-directed videos that have apparently taken the Arab world by storm. His is an extraordinary story, recounted with such urgency and immediacy that the reader is projected headlong into a world about which most of us know next to nothing. A Latvian teenager is drawn into online sex work, an Ivorian migrant goes through hell to get to France Ben Judah: ‘deep journalistic curiosity and unflinching gaze’. Photograph: Alexandra Chan for the Jewish Chronicle As Ben flits round the vast metropolis, his flowing tide of (in general) pretty unhappy interviewees can begin to sound like William Blake An eye-opening investigation into the hidden immigrant life of the city . . . You won't read a more succinct analysis * Sunday Times * This Is London is an exhilarating account of the British capital . . . His writing is visceral, and at its best echoes the immersive style of the great Polish reporter and author Ryszard Kapuscinski . . . He treats his subjects with great sensitivity . . . an important, unflinching piece of reportage. Judah digs deep into parts of London that a less adventurous journalist would avoid, unearthing some of the many tragic narratives shaping a city at the turbulent forefront of globalisation * The National (Scotland) *

There was one final thing, which is that everybody in the book is a storyteller. They all want to tell their stories and they all think that their stories say something profound and important about Europe today. And all of the stories add up to a question. All of the great political philosophies—liberalism, socialism, conservatism—they’re all about how we should live. What is a good life? And all of the people in the book are asking themselves, and they’re also asking you, is this the way we want to live now? You spoke earlier about how those within and beyond the continent perceive Europe. How do you think This Is Europe will challenge, or enhance, those perceptions? There is no way anyone living off the touting spots can afford their own room. This is why the next step up from the street is a doss house. These are pretty easy to find. These are where crooked landlords are cramming as many as they can into overcrowded, illegal, cheap rooms. Undercover, the worst doss house I ever lived in was 15 shoved into three rooms. They shared beds, and one night worker time-shared a bunk in the day. Update: Ben Judah has made a film about the lives of migrants for Vice; the link can be found here: Vice: Life as a Migrant in Post-Brexit Britain Judah, Ben (October 2008). "Caucasus: Diary, August–September, 2008". Standpoint Magazine. Archived from the original on 9 March 2016 . Retrieved 19 February 2016. Others have pointed out the issues with his prose style and they are correct. His constant attempts at metaphor and simile are both unnecessary and unsuccessful.In a few cases Judah gets so close to his protagonists that he writes as if from inside their heads, in the manner of WG Sebald. There’s the Polish registrar in Catford, for example, who describes her own love life as well as her job marrying couples and deciding which ones are genuine and which doing it for a passport. When she recalls being invited to a Nigerian-Polish wedding party, on “one of those lingering and beautiful fallings of light there is only in England in the summer”, she loses herself in rapture and he lets her run on as if he’s not there. We found the numbers of half a dozen doss houses in Ilford, deep in east London, and settled into the first one we found. Nobody was working in the house. They were heading out for work at the touting spot everyday and mostly returning emptyhanded. It didn’t take long for one labourer in the house to tell us this place “is like Rahova” – the name of Romania’s most infamous prison. A name that, in Romanian, rings of hopelessness.