London’s changed – including the climate

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When I lived in London in 1992, I never left my Kentish Town flat in the northwest of the city without an umbrella. I would never have walked out the door without taking a shawl or a light jacket, even in high summer.

Things are dramatically different 30 years later. As I write this it’s a blistering 34 degrees outside with weather forecasts predicting the mercury will reach 37 degrees in two days. A punishing sun beats down on this parched metropolis as the newspapers announce that drought is to be declared in southwest England.

Hyde Park, a short walk away from my front door — like every park I love in this crazy, busy city — is tinder dry, with lawns that look more Johannesburg in July than the usual London green. Some parts of England have had the driest July since records began. Climate change? Certainly, change. 

It is my first visit back to this city since 1999 and it is unrecognisable. Big cities change all the time, evolve and decay and renew … constantly. The (new to me) changing London skyline now includes the London Eye, a giant Ferris Wheel that sits on the banks of the Thames; the curiously bullet-shaped Gherkin and the correctly named Shard. These join the ranks of landmarks in the city such as Big Ben, St Paul’s Cathedral and Buckingham Palace.

The Millennium Bridge, a steel suspension pedestrian footbridge, is impossibly elegant. But what I have found most noticeable is the shifting nature of the once characterful neighbourhoods that used to be filled with original shops, intriguing owners and an unusual and exciting mishmash of customers and clients.

The gentrification of London’s suburbs has brought a sad uniformity to high street shopping. The family stores; the independent cafes, the stand-alone record shops, the greengrocers where tiered rows of fruit and vegetables were neatly stacked in rows under striped awnings have mostly given way to large chains.

Gone is my favourite working-man’s tea room that offered a nice cup of builder’s tea, a full English breakfast complete with black pudding or soft white bread cheddar and Branston pickle sandwiches — served by a cheerful middle-aged Cockney waitress in a pink and white gingham apron. 

Now I can get designer coffee with soy, coconut, oat or almond milk served by a chirpy hipster whose “Awright?” means what will you have rather than how are you.

These all-purpose shops are where you can get artisanal sourdough bread, a sugar-crusted raisin bun or a poke bowl with fresh salmon and Edamame beans.

And, the ethnic make-up of areas has changed. There are foreign accents everywhere — East European, Asian, Indian, Middle Eastern and African … London has become, more than ever, a delicious global melting pot of cultures; a convergence of people from everywhere in the world.

Within walking distance, I have access to a well-stocked Lebanese and Middle Eastern grocery store, a gloriously pungent Indian spice shop and a Korean speciality foods market.

Still, the change that has astonished me most is the new method of communication. I am not a digital virgin and have spent holidays every year in the digital capital of the world, New York.

But the digital revolution has dramatically altered London more than anywhere else — at least for me. I suppose it’s because of the vast area that has to be covered to get anywhere, and London’s higgledy-piggledy layout.

I’m in awe of the live app that includes how to get anywhere (walking, underground, bus, car) and how long it will take. For the Luddite that I am, my smartphone is a gift from the gods — the repository of my London life that holds the key to entrance tickets, transport and where to find things.

I am entranced and bewildered by the speed at which this city runs. As my niece remarks, frequently, I’ve slowed down, not the city. She’s probably right. While the transition from a fold-out underground map to a phone app has been relatively smooth, I mourn the tactile-ness of the first even while I am grateful for the ease of the second.

Everywhere are people with AirPods, those little white sticks that emerge from the sides of faces, broadcasting into eardrums from hidden phones.This means that communication with other human beings requires getting their attention which, once had, needs them to remove or turn off their listening device. It’s a process that discourages conversation. Gauging what a nation coming out of a pandemic thinks is not going to be done by in-person anecdotal conversation.

There is an unprecedented rise in the cost of living across Britain, so bad that Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss — both in the race to be the next British prime minister — are constantly being asked how they will help struggling families.

There are energy crisis talks with Britain’s big energy firms on how to contain winter price hikes — inconceivable as temperatures rise.

There’s the never-before-experienced heat wave accompanied by wildfires and the hosepipe ban. In the pre-digital age, I’d have done small anecdotal surveys on what people think, about the weather, the cost of living, the drought and the influx of tourists to what has, since early 2020, been quietly manageable London.

I’d have chatted to people on the bus or in the supermarket queue — impossible now that people scan their own groceries at their own little tills and pay electronically.

If this sounds like a long whinge, it is and it isn’t. It’s true that I yearn for another time, a time not so long ago when I was young, in my prime; hopeful, looking forward and forward-looking. 

I suppose that longing is for a time of connection, where we talked to each other without disappearing into our heads via headphones.

That said, I am infinitely in awe of my clever phone, my lifeline. 

Everything is back to pre-Covid-19 normal with not a mask in sight. Tourists have reclaimed London and getting into anything that is free (the British Museum, the National Art Gallery, the Tate Modern, the British Library) needs patience and a tolerance for standing in the sun in unbearable heat.

The trains continue to baffle me, as they did 30 years ago. It took twice as long, for example, to get back to the city from a (usually) two-hour trip to the Chichester Theatre Festival. Why? It was Pride Day in nearby Brighton, which meant cancelling trains. How large numbers of LGBTQI revellers could affect the train schedules is beyond me. Ridiculous images of rainbow-clad train drivers abandoning their posts to join the merriment on the streets of Brighton clouded my head.

London. English essayist poet Samuel Johnson said: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford.”

I’m not sure all Londoners will agree. To be literal, there is much in London that life can no longer afford. Still, despite the eye-watering expense of a cup of coffee — regular dairy please — it’s a treat to sit by the river and contemplate another life, another time.

Charmain Naidoo is a journalist and regular Thought Leader contributor

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.