The rise of the West

New Statesman​

3 days ago

Illustration by Charlotte Trounce
Wednesday evening, I am sitting on the Golborne Road with a Marlboro Light and a glass of wine. I wait for some tardy friends. Neither the cigarette nor the Riesling are a new affectation; the late arrivals hardly unusual either. The location, however…
Until now, heading west was not to be undertaken lightly. West London was the land of peppercorn sauce and claret, last exotic in the 1980s, maybe? It was where George Osborne and Nick Clegg dinner-partied; it was plummy, ruddy, taxidermy incarnate. As London recovered from the downbeat Seventies, its winners drifted to W postcodes, transforming the urban nastiness observed by Martin Amis into something banal, staid, French.
By 2016 London Fields (the neighbourhood, not the novel) had condemned west London to social irrelevance. Dalston's identikit wine bars were the chosen destination for the 2018 bourgeois bohemian. Broadway Market was a Potemkin answer to New York's East Village – with 70 per cent more foliage. E8 asked the urgent question: what if we sat on the pavement instead?
Well, it's time to smack the big red VIBE SHIFT button. Hackney, I love you. But it's over.
Just look to the restaurant scene, the best weathervane for London's ecosystem. Restaurants – the mayfly businesses they are – open and close faster than long-term trends can often identify, outpacing slower tells of change like architectural evolution and even the think-piece economy.
And here on the Golborne Road is proof of concept. It has wrested itself out of the culinary doldrums, where it had been languishing since the 1990s. The social gravity soon will follow. Our reservation is at a new opening, the Fat Badger. I'll forgive a great restaurant its terrible name. Also in my eyeline from outside the Golborne Deli is 2024's Canteen (a kind of River Café-lite, but don't tell them I said that) and Straker's (deservedly celebrated since 2022).
What precipitated west resurrection? Well, it all starts with the Protestant Reformation and then the emergence of a globalised capitalist… no, hold on. I suspect the explanation is uncomplicated: Hackney was desirable for the aspiring restaurateur in the 2000s because rent was cheap. It was disconnected, the graphic designers had not yet moved in. But as the middle classes looked east, the prices rose with them. Hackney became desirable because Hackney was desirable and so Hackney became too desirable. In this cosmic battle between competing poles, east was felled by its success.
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The vibes-based explanation is slippier: contrary people set the weather, and what's more contrary than the belief that London's most hated postcodes might actually be its best? So, sitting in Ladbroke Grove over the weekend I wonder… is this cool? Geoff Dyer only lives down the road!
Not quite. Go a little south and you'll find Fulham, the Privet Drive of the banker class. There is nothing recherché happening around Golborne Road either: our main course at the Fat Badger was still just roast beef. It is all a bit Blairite: two gastropubs – a ghoulish new Labour invention – have cropped up in the area, the Pelican and the Hero (both owned by the same imperial group as Canteen and the Badger).
I pretend to know more about Amis than I do (a survival mechanism among colleagues as well read as mine). But I can tell you this: Amis's west London – the darts, the Black Cross Pub – has not returned with tremendous force. But nor has Keith Talent been entirely lost to the Bobo ascendancy. Both can be found in the Cow: at once a working-class pub and an expensive restaurant.
And so, here I am on the Golborne Road, where the optimistic hedonism of New Labour meets the mannered sensibilities of Cameron's Conservatives. My friends still have not arrived.
[See also: Los Angeles, Donald Trump and the moronic inferno]
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