For nearly 20 years I went out with a Londoner. Born and bred in Streatham, he lived in Pullman Court, Fred Gibberd’s 1936 Modernist masterpiece at the top of Brixton Hill. Described as an early essay in the International Style (Gibberd was a precocious 23 when he designed it), Pullman Court was all svelte lines and Corbusian ambition. It also had shops and a swimming pool for its residents who were the epitome of the aspirational English middle-classes. Yet though my paramour appeared English through and through, he was actually second generation Irish. And within Pullman Court there were others who could claim more exotic origins, flung together though migration, displacement and diaspora. Fellow residents included a young Lew Grade (née Winogradksy), Aden-born Eddy Izzard and Elsa Taterka, who originally taught design at Berlin’s Reimann-Schule in Weimar Germany, and encouraged my Streatham boy to go to art college. He ended up working for Hans Schleger, a key figure in the history of European graphic design and another Jewish refugee who fled to London to escape the Nazis.
London is a perpetually shifting osmotic mass of peoples and cultures, each leaving their own distinct imprint on the city. Scrape away the outer layers of ‘Londoners’ and you’ll almost always find something else, shaped by complex narratives and fluid identities. Who, then, do we really think we are? And who really cares?
Intensified by the current carnage in Syria, the issue of migration continues to exercise politicians and fuel hysterical headlines. Refugee or ‘economic migrant’, there is a world of difference between the institutional elite on the move, cushioned by well-endowed relocation packages (the Bank of England springs to mind, now run by a Canadian), and the hellish odysseys of people fleeing the implosion of their native country. For them it’s not when, but if they manage to reach land and carve a foothold in a new city as they exchange one chaos for another. Yet this is how it has always been for those running for their lives.