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No-Go London

Over the last few months I’ve been having a conversation with someone about why, exactly, “London is over/a bleak woke dystopia” has become the big talking point on the right. For many, London in their imaginary is some kind of end-times mash-up of: Blade Runner, stabbings, TikTok teens in ramen restaurants and roads blocked permanently by Just Stop Oil.

A view that when interrogated I think, tells us far more about life outside the capital than about the city itself.

First, The biggest burst of dislocation I have felt about the decline of this country wast not on a night bus through central, but back home in Thanet. 

With it’s seaside towns full of boarded shops, chain coffee shops and disappearing bus routes.

Over Easter a family friend, retired,  muttered over a mug tea that the town had tipped into violence; no police, no manners.

Later, walking in the Old Town, two cars locked bumpers. Drivers were out, shouting, slapping bonnets; passers by spilling out and joining in. The next day through a restaurant window, I watched a BMW cut off a young couple crossing the road. One pedestrian shouted, and the driver hit the brakes and got out, forehead to forehead with a guy shouting “you want some?” 

A lorry-driver, stuck, ended up getting out and playing referee until the driver moved on. 

My parents say these flare-ups are now routine. Maybe the pandemic fried everyone’s fuse. There’s anomie in the air. 

Right now, at home, there’s a dispersal order in place after a brawl in the same street. Thrown bottles, and smashed windows. Yet flip on the news and this sort of mayhem is always somewhere else; a stabbing in Hackney followed by a clip of Sadiq Khan looking concerned. An age based dispersal curfew aimed at young people is almost unimaginable in London, but they have been normal outside the M25 for decades.

If life already feels precarious on your own high street, then London must seem ten times worse. 

“London is Over” is a narrative fault-line.  

English culture has never quite trusted the capital. Blame Hogarth; blame the Victorian penny dreadfuls; blame Dickens if you like. The metropolis plays the villain because stories need a face; and London, unlike a declining business park in Essex, is a ready-made psychic landmark. Add in its diverse population and the scene is set. A convenient Other to shoulder the nations anxieties.

Yes, London has some grim statistics; but so do Glasgow, Manchester, Nottingham. Yet overall, crime is down. 

Meanwhile, rural crime costs farmers millions, emergency response times in the sticks are way up, and deaths of despair peak in coastal towns. Plus you don’t get regular mass brawls on the beach in London.

The countryside and suburbs in my opinion just fails to film well. Distance matters, but cameras matter more. I made an episode 5 years ago about how the media and outside of London. It’s more urgent than ever. Camera crews can reach Soho in twenty minutes; but they need hours and a packed lunch to get to Eastbourne. So the capital always wins for airtime.

Older boomers, more rural with patchier broadband absorb a loop of London violence on TV. Whilst younger users in the city watch something else online.

Auntie May in the village watches the BBC at 6pm and scrolls Facebook between her soaps: and the algorithm serves her the same knife-attack clip twice.

Back in the 70s, Gerbner called this mean-world syndrome: the more TV you swallow, the nastier the world looks. In Britain 2025, the mean world is in our pockets with us all the time. The villains are migrants, eco-warriors, gender-neutral baristas. But strip those urban images away and the anxiety out in the shires, beyond the screen has nowhere obvious to land.

Projection does useful work. If your GP’s down to one doctor, the last bank replaced by a Costa, and there’s an hour’s wait for an ambulance, it’s neater to insist that things must be worse in London. 

So a loop forms: rural unease fuels anti-city talk; national media pumps London footage; Facebook pages ad YouTubers monetise the churn. The capital’s imperfections—and its migrants—become catch-all explanations.

Strangers sell stories. And London has a big cast. Racial characters are handed an old script: once it was the gin-soaked mother; today it’s second-gen teens with Caribbean or Somali roots. Same scaffold; same role.

London isn’t paradise; it’s expensive, noisy, and very unequal. But the portrayal of the capital collapsing under the weight of rainbow flags, vegan burgers is theatre. 

Meanwhile the real rot nibbles away in places where buses stop at 8pm and the mobile signal dies on the high street.

Politicians also know this. And “Take back our streets” polls well with the over-55s, but the problem is, they only ever visit the shopping centre out of town. 

If we insist on villains, let us at least try to choose systemic ones; under-funded services, hollowed out local economies, first past the post in local government. Blaming London (or the people who give it its colour) is as empty as shouting at the sea. 

It fills airtime, gets clicks, but changes nothing on the ground.

I’m not sure what to do about it, I have no advice. But I do know that if you start looking around at your own high street, instead of across at the city’s dark and ominous skyline, the fear will fade. Because the real work, as ever, lies at home.