Our favourite London long reads of 2022

Food, sex, money, property and gentrification

At the end of last year we compiled some of our favourite writing about London. It seemed to go down well, so this year we’re doing it again.

Below you’ll find links to articles, opinion pieces, personal essays and plain old rants that span subjects as varied as communal eating, the Olympics, oligarchs, the magical properties of shawarma and gay saunas (there should probably be another comma in there somewhere).

Some of these articles have featured in the newsletter before, most of them haven’t. If the article is paywalled then we’ve put a padlock emoji next to it to let you know before you click through (and if you have to ‘sign up for free’ to read it then we’ve added a padlock with a pen).

Comments are open, so if you have a favourite long read from this year that you think we’ve missed, then let us know.

Food writing as fuel

Last year we started off this issue with a section on food writing and called Jonathan Nunn our ‘London writer of the year’ thanks to his wonderful

Vittles

newsletter. This year he cemented that title with the publication of London Feeds Itself (not to mention the recent, exhaustive London Pub Guide series).

The book, which Nunn edited, contains 25 essays about “25 different buildings, structures and public amenities in which London’s vernacular food culture can be found” and it will undoubtedly appear in our non-fiction London book guide when that appears next month sometime.

In July, Nunn published the introduction to the book over on Vittles. Here’s a short extract:

There are no purely historical pieces in this book and, apart from in the very first essay on The Port, there is no talk of ghosts (unless it is to exorcise them) or psychogeography (the word ‘liminal’ has been banned). I am, as are all of the writers in this book, interested in London as it is now, how we eat and live today; when history is invoked it is done so to find out where the city is going and how quickly, to track London’s velocity as it spreads outwards in radial pulses, seeing where kinetic energy has been transformed and stored as potential energy, and vice versa. Institutional food – hospitals, schools, prisons – has for the most part been avoided; these essays are about places where good food exists because of, not in spite of, the urban conditions that surround it.

(Nunn also wrote this article for Dezeen back in September, about how the “proliferation of strangely similar restaurants in our cities is at risk of making them boring places to live”.)

One of the writers featured in London Feeds Itself is Rebecca May Johnson, the co-editor of Vittles and author of the fantastic book Small Fires, which came out in August.

Over at

dinner document by Rebecca May Johnson

, you can find a reprint of her essay on canteens that was first published in 2019, but which has only become more relevant in recent years, as this extract shows:

Hiding one’s body and one’s lack of money has become part of survival in London. I have hidden sandwiches or hidden myself where I should buy before sitting in places all over town: haven’t you? Last summer a woman nervously approached me while I ate a cheeseburger in McDonalds near The British Library to ask for the tokens attached to my coffee cup so that she could get a free coffee and then I watched her fill it with as many free sachets of sugar as was required to achieve an intake of calories that might sustain her life for one more day – a sugar-sachet black market that casts a long shadow on London’s status as a gastronomic destination.

Nunn of course made his name over at Eater London. In June of this year Eater published Zahra Al Asaadi’s article on how new developments “are threatening the soul” of the “remarkable culinary enclave” that is Park Royal.

Even if you’ve never visited Park Royal, this is a great look at how the delicate social infrastructure of a neighbourhood can be wiped out by commercial forces in a very short space of time.

Many of the restaurants open to the public are in the middle of Acton Business Centre, an industrial estate in the heart of Park Royal itself. The area is replete with warehouses, gated compounds, and a marked lack of housing. The streets are lined with wooden pallets and damaged cars awaiting repair. The number of restaurants located down alleyways reminds visitors of the area’s industrial wholesale history. And in order to appreciate Park Royal, city planning and the high street model should be forgotten; for those who regularly visit, the singular, industrial aesthetic is now part of the experience.

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Following the money

For obvious reason, there has been a lot of writing this year about the presence of ‘dirty money’ in London, as well as the various oligarchs that help put it there. Strangely, a lot of that writing came from the other side of the Atlantic.

One of the best pieces appeared in The New Yorker, where Patrick Radden Keefe dissected how Putin bought up London’s ‘establishment’ (🔏) via its banks, schools and football clubs, through a network of puppet oligarchs:

Belton even makes the case that Abramovich’s purchase of the Chelsea Football Club was carried out on Putin’s orders. “Putin’s Kremlin had accurately calculated that the way to gain acceptance in British society was through the country’s greatest love, its national sport,” she writes. Pugachev informs her that the objective was to build “a beachhead for Russian influence in the UK.’”He adds, “Putin personally told me of his plan to acquire the Chelsea Football Club in order to increase his influence and raise Russia’s profile, not only with the elite but with ordinary British people.”

More recently the New York Times had a look (🔒) at how the Pandora Paper show just how instrumental London is “in the worldwide concealment of cash and assets”.

In May of this year we interviewed Caroline Knowles about her new book Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London. Four days later, Andrew Anthony went for a walk with Caroline for The Guardian to view first hand how ‘extreme wealth’ has reshaped the streets of the capital:

When one Notting Hill resident tells her she likes the “social mix” of the neighbourhood, Knowles asks what that means, and hears a roll-call of professions: judges, economists, filmmakers and so on, leading her to observe acidly that the role of the poor is “lending authenticity to what would otherwise be a sterile plutocratic bubble’”