London Feeds Itself E-Book
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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
London is often called the best place in the world to eat – a city where a new landmark restaurant opens each day, where vertiginous towers, sprawling food halls and central neighbourhoods contain the cuisines of every country in the world. Yet, this London is not where Londoners usually eat. There is another version of London that exists in its marginal spaces, where food culture flourishes in parks and allotments, in warehouses and industrial estates, along rivers and A-roads, in baths and in libraries. A city where Londoners eat, sell, produce and distribute food every day without fanfare, where its food culture weaves in and out of daily urban existence. In a city of rising rents, of gentrification, and displacement, this new and updated edition of London Feeds Itself, edited by the food writer and editor of Vittles, Jonathan Nunn, shows that the true centres of London food culture can be found in ever more creative uses of space, eked out by the people who make up the city. Its chapters explore the charged intersections between food and modern London's varied urban conditions, from markets and railway arches to places of worship to community centres. 26 essays about 26 different buildings, structures and public amenities in which London's vernacular food culture can be found, seen through the eyes of writers, architects, journalists and politicians – all accompanied by over 125 guides to some of the city's best vernacular restaurants across all 33 London boroughs. Contributors: Carla Montemayor, Jenny Lau, Mike Wilson, Claudia Roden, Stephen Buranyi, Rebecca May Johnson, Owen Hatherley, Aditya Chakrabortty, Yvonne Maxwell, Melek Erdal, Sameh Asami, Barclay Bram, Ciaran Thapar, Santiago Peluffo Soneyra, Virginia Hartley, Jess Fagin, Leah Cowan, Ruby Tandoh, Jeremy Corbyn, Dee Woods, Shahed Saleem, Amardeep Singh Dhillon, Zarina Muhammad, Yemisi Aribisala, Nabil Al-Kinani, Sana Badri, Nikesh Shukla.
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1
London Feeds Itself
Edited By Jonathan Nunn
Open City
Foreword
Nikesh Shukla
A few months ago, I arrived at a vegetarian Gujarati restaurant a fortnight early for a lunch date with a friend. I had written the date down wrong, scheduling our catch up optimistically. I am fond of this friend and love their company. We meet regularly to discuss everything except the thing we both do, which is write. Instead, we talk about things that interest us, from food to music to skateboarding to the expanse of the sea, leading out to the point where the line between the water and the sky becomes undefined. When we were discussing when to meet, they had given me dates so far in the future, I felt a bit of despondency at having to wait so long to see them.
Which is how I ended up at this restaurant two weeks early. It was empty, both inside and out, so I sat outside, reading a comic, checking my phone as the hour approached. Eventually, I moved inside, as the shade of the courtyard I was in had created a cold through-draft. I’m not so acclimatised to the ways of the English that I sat outside at every opportunity: when it wasn’t raining; sometimes when it actually was raining. 5
When I moved inside, I gave my friend’s name – he had made the reservation. It was needless. There was no one else here. I couldn’t tell if the confusion was because of my insistence on the reservation, given that it was a Tuesday, or because they couldn’t find it. I remembered that my friend had sent me a screengrab of the reservation and when I brought it up on my phone, to see if there was a reference number, I noticed the date.
I smiled at the confused manager and said, Oh, I’m early. She asked how early. Two weeks, I said, and she laughed efficiently. A joke had been made but she had a restaurant to run. Expecting me to leave out of embarrassment, she started looking down at her tablet, scrolling through various screens.
Can I have a table, please? I asked.
Eating by yourself gives an opportunity to take in where you are. The places we eat at represent more than a meal. Whether it’s a kitchen table, a community space or a restaurant that has been well reviewed in your favourite food column, a food space can tell you so much about a city. And London revels in having many of these spaces.
I slowly made my way through a series of small dishes and ended by ordering gobi 65 (I’m not a dessert guy – I like to finish savoury). I watched the rhythms of the staff, the various photos that threw back to the owner’s heritage, the strange mix of sporting equipment and medals that took up corner shelves. In the forty or so minutes I was in that restaurant, a fortnight early for a friend date I was excited about, I realised that each meal gives a sense of home, that each restaurant or food space has some semblance of how the owners grew up, however small it was. As a still moment, where I existed only for my own company, thoughts and expectations, I realised I rarely do this. As writers, so much of our job is to notice, to curate, to omit and to spotlight and slow down time. That is what the writers of the essays in this collection do, and by doing so, they give you glimpses into the worlds, lives, heritages and, most importantly, people who make up this fine city and eat in it.
After the meal, I thanked my hosts, paid, and said I would see them in a few weeks. The manager asked whether I’d be ordering anything again. I said I would see, and apologised again, even though I had nothing to worry about. I noticed, above the bar, a small mandap, a homespun one, and I knew, in that moment, who these people were and how this place was, for them, a home of sorts.
Essays
Restaurants
Introduction
Jonathan Nunn
London eats itself
The architecture writer Ian Nairn once remarked of Sacred Heart secondary school, just round the corner from where I live in Camberwell, that ‘you can get along from day to day without masterpieces, but you can’t get along without this kind of quiet humanity’. The charity Open City, who published the first edition of this book, has dedicated itself to celebrating the type of buildings that contain within them some kernel of ‘quiet humanity’, the structures that we may not notice because they’re too busy being used and enjoyed by people every day.
When Open City challenged me to edit a book on ‘food and architecture’ I was initially stumped. Is it possible to write a food book about architecture? Or rather, an architecture book about food. The two are not natural bedfellows at first glance, I admit. My initial thoughts on what a ‘food and architecture’ book might look like, in order of when they came to me, were: 1) a kind of urban food systems book, already done so well by writer-architects like Carolyn Steel; 2) something about grand dining rooms, art deco cafes and listed pie and mash shops – the masterpieces – that would please precisely no one; and 3) whatever Jonathan Meades does. Yet ten Owen Hatherley books and a quick glance at the Wikipedia entry on architecture later, I realised that everything about London and food that interests me fits into this seemingly niche intersection: the way that Burgess Park transforms into a Latin fiesta every summer, the specialist food businesses incubated by the nowhere-ness of the North Circular Road, the ability of London’s industrial estates to become nature’s food halls. It turned out that ‘food and architecture’ was, to borrow a phrase from Leytonstone boy Alfred Hitchcock, a MacGuffin. Instead, this is a book about London and its quiet humanity, told through the people and places that feed us.
The framing of London Feeds Itself is 26 chapters about 26 different buildings, structures and public amenities in which various aspects of London’s everyday food culture can be found. There are many versions of London, and no one person has access to all of them, which is why this book had to be a group effort where London’s story is told by food writers, architecture writers, journalists, activists, and even one MP. Books about London have a tendency to dwell on the Londons that have been and gone, but I am, as are all 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 11London’s velocity as it spreads outwards in radial pulses, seeing where kinetic energy has been transformed and stored as potential energy in a city where energy never truly dies, just changes form. 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. 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).
The chapters of this book are about the spaces and food that get us through the day-to-day, but unfortunately London is a city seemingly obsessed with masterpieces. It is intent on getting more grand, more beautiful, more expensive, more Michelin stars, more, more, more. London consumes the rest of the country, but it is also an autophagic city – self consuming. London: the city that ate itself was the headline to a perceptive 2015 Observer article by the paper’s architecture critic Rowan Moore – a city where ‘anything distinctive is converted into property value’, where working-class markets are shut, replaced with cookie-cutter street food placed on pseudo-public property; where food production is being shunted to its peripheries or out of the city altogether; where community centres are shutting and food banks are rising; where new restaurants open just to be a notch on a property developer’s bedpost. If Orwell’s vision of the future was a boot stamping on a human face forever, then I have an even more chilling one: a Five Guys opening in your neighbourhood, soon.
The title of this book, London Feeds Itself, is not intended to suggest that London is self-sufficient, or that it is a Singaporean city state (in fact, the idea that London is somehow innately different and disconnected from the country that surrounds it is the source of so much that is wrong with the city), but to celebrate an opposing vision of the capital to the vertigos of finance, property portfolios and masterpieces that are symptoms of its autophagy. It is also a simple statement of fact. London feeds itself, and it does so in its own unusual ways – in its warehouses, parks, church halls, mosques, community centres, and even its baths: spaces where monetary transaction is peripheral or even completely absent. In the media, London is praised, it is reviled, it is resented, and it is grudgingly admired, but it is very rarely talked about with love. I would like to change that – this is the version of London that I love, and it is the London that I, and all the writers of the book, would like to share with you too. 12
London plays itself
In Thom Andersen’s 2003 essay documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, the director interrogates the use of Los Angeles as a backdrop to films. Los Angeles, Andersen argues, is cinema’s hidden protagonist, its buildings, streets and monuments reconfigured, spat out and often disrespected into forms that resemble a version of the city unrecognisable to those who live there. Andersen reserves much of his ire for Hollywood location scouts, who lazily use the wealth of Modernist architecture scattered across the surrounding hills and valleys as the lairs of villains and gangsters, subverting the buildings’ utopian intentions and usage. Yes, Los Angeles might be a character in a film, but it is just that – a character. It is unwittingly playing a version of itself that does not exist.
I think of Andersen’s film when I read restaurant criticism in British broadsheet papers because London is usually the hidden protagonist of the review. Outside of the few hundred men (me included) who keep buying Iain Sinclair books and who walk round the North Circular for fun, restaurant criticism is the most-read urbanist writing in Britain today. Unlike almost every other branch of criticism – except, notably, architecture – restaurant writing is impossible to extract from place: whether it’s El Bulli or a caff on an industrial estate, the review starts with the journey there: where it is, who lives there, and how its location might be surprising (a small plates restaurant run by a white chef opening in Peckham in 2011) or typical (a small plates restaurant run by a white chef opening in Peckham in 2024). This makes restaurant criticism far more important than a list of things that went into someone’s mouth: it is writing that, by its very nature – in the decisions its authors make on where to write about, and how to write about it – is political.
In the months prior to the pandemic, when restaurants temporarily shut, I looked at the last hundred reviews from eight national broadsheets: 68% were for London restaurants, with 20% of those restaurants in Mayfair and Chelsea and another 20% in Soho and Fitzrovia. That’s 40% of the entire country’s restaurant reviews taken up by a few square miles of the most expensive real estate in central London, controlled by a handful of mega-landlords. Given that the readership of these papers lives largely outside of London, the reviews function much like Hollywood’s depictions of Los Angeles: a kind of light entertainment; a satire for those who have no intention of going. The object of the satire may vary: oligarchs, idiotic tourists, 13rich Arabs, east London hipsters, whatever nonsensical idea some chef has concocted to appeal to London foodies. But the upshot of this is that the London depicted in reviews – neophilic, absurd, infinitely affluent – bears little resemblance to the city as a whole.
When restaurant critics do eventually venture outside of the city centre, the effect is even more ruinous. The satire, having no obvious target to latch on to, moves to focus on the neighbourhoods themselves: south London is described as ‘stabby’, Elephant and Castle where you might ‘pick up a nasty skin condition’ – whole areas written off as shitholes while Britain’s food critics pretend they deserve the George Cross for getting on the Thameslink. These reviews have a genuinely pernicious effect: they become handmaidens of developer-led gentrification and displacement. Brixton and Peckham – two significantly Black neighbourhoods – have taken the brunt of this; here, restaurants and street food ventures are written up as new, exciting phenomena that did not exist there beforehand, with what was already flourishing there completely ignored. House prices go up and these restaurants – mainly white-owned, mainly with PR, mainly on property in the process of being developed – proliferate. The review can be as powerful an advertisement that an area has changed as anything in an estate agent’s window.
Restaurants, for good or for ill, are integral to London’s food ecosystem, as well as its sense of civic pride, but I am interested in what restaurant writing might look like if it was not allied with PR, profit and property speculation, or anchored to hierarchies of taste forged by colonialism. So for each essay included here, I have written an accompanying guide on restaurants which shares the theme of the central essay. Some of these categorisations are obvious and geographical (restaurants in Chinatowns, restaurants on the Old Kent Road) although others (restaurants pretending to be restaurants from somewhere else) are less intuitive. Together they amount to a patchwork of London’s increasingly vital peripheries, of neighbourhoods where restaurants serve diaspora communities whose existence is bound up with the city’s role as a former imperial capital, where restaurants fulfil a function of remembrance and transform the city into other cities, or even meld with the city to create something that is uniquely its own. Or they’re just a record of everything that has given me indigestion between Uxbridge and Dagenham. My hope is that London appears once again as a character – although this time, one with an agency of its own. 14
London feeds itself
In the 1966 Time article Great Britain: You Can Walk Across It On the Grass, writer Piri Halasz introduced the theory that every city has its ten-year epoch, and that the 1960s were being defined by London’s resurgence as a countercultural capital. ‘More important than all the other changes is the fact that the center, the heart of London, has gravitated slowly westward to the haunts of the city’s new elite, just as it did in centuries gone by’, she says. Tracking the shift from the City to Westminster, she placed London’s new centre ‘somewhere in Mayfair, between the green fields and orators of Hyde Park and the impish statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus.’
Where is London’s centre today? Firstly, it is now located in food, not music, theatre nor any of the things Halasz was excited by in 1966. Some might place it geographically back east, in a small plates restaurant in Shoreditch, but it’s truer to say that London is now a city without a cultural centre; it is polyvalent, with multiple centres located in ever-expanding concentric circles emanating out from its geographic centre point. What was once the centre is being pushed out to the peripheries. In an inversion of Paris (where Paris is always the arrondissements, and everything outside of the arrondissements is not-Paris), what is in the London suburbs increasingly feels more like London than what is in the centre.
It is no coincidence, then, that many of the places in this book are located outside the city centre, nor that the buildings and structures discussed have been traditionally viewed as marginal. Yes, there are more exciting and genuinely radical culinary things going on in Ilford, Wembley and Hounslow than Soho and Mayfair, but there are also libraries and baths serving exceptional food on industrial estates, fiestas in suburban parks and in church halls, meals cooked in community centres and gurdwaras, some of the best produce in London being made in railway arches and viaducts. In a city where every inch of land is monetisable, squeezed like a near-empty toothpaste tube, these are creative, inspired uses of space, with each community or business becoming their own Thomas Müller: a raumdeuter, a ‘space interpreter’.
If this is a book about space, it is also about time. There are multiple villains in this book – the City of London Corporation (sometimes), landlords (frequently), the British Library café, the 15pandemic and, in the case of Jeremy Corbyn’s allotment, Barnet council – but the final boss is time. It is time that turns the city we recognise into one we don’t: the Peckham of lost time remembered in The Arcades (p118), or the tabula rasa vandalism wrought at Elephant and Castle in The Housing Estate (p100). These spaces sometimes force time to continually repeat itself: the second lives of Kurdish warehouses (p128), the cycle of immigration that takes place in a Hampstead Garden Suburb synagogue (p58), or the disappearance and resurgence of salt beef in Soho (p66). Often these spaces reverse time, taking those who have lost spaces back to their past: a lost Damascus (p136), a lost Hong Kong (p16), a lost moment in time in pre-partition India (p152).
To write about the city with love is to be in a constant state of grief for the spaces we lose to time: Elephant and Castle’s bingo hall, Edmonton Green, the arepa stand that became a Sports Direct, the Kurdish community centre that became a Beyond Retro, The Granville, which we lost between the first and second editions of this book. But the best spaces seem to exist outside time itself, defying the financialisation of time that measures out leisure in thimble-sized portions: the atemporality of the New Docklands sauna (p78), a plot of land for growing food, a community centre cafe, the way both a park and a viaduct can shield a space from the usual sense of London-time encroaching on it, spaces that constantly regenerate to house new flow, new communities – sticking points, as writer Rebecca May Johnson calls them – in the endless river of capital that courses through the city. It is not a surprise that all these spaces are, in their own ways, precarious, besieged by time and in constant need of protection.
Velocity is, if you recall from school, space over time plus direction, and all these essays are really about London’s velocity. Everything in London is expanding outwards and upwards at a pace that seems almost unstoppable. London is eating itself, but this is neither irreversible or inevitable. Italo Calvino warned us about cities being ‘the inferno of the living’ in his 1972 book Invisible Cities. London is a city as infernal as any other, but Calvino also gave us the cheat codes: to ‘seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space’. London is feeding itself too. This book hopes to recognise the places that feed us and, with your help, to make them endure: to give them space.
THE PORT
Jonathan Nunn
My son asked, ‘Grandfather, where is Hong Kong’s Chinatown?’ My father replied, ‘The entire city is its Chinatown, and no other Chinatown in the world is comparable.’
William Poon, owner of Poon’s Restaurant, formerly of Chinatown
It starts, as things often do, with a cup of tea.
During the first half of the 19th century the British Empire crept further east under the cloak of an unregulated corporation called the East India Company which controlled an entire subcontinent from a single anonymous office on Leadenhall Street. As tea became the stimulant of empire, the ignominy of having a trade deficit with China provoked the company to resort to drug-pushing, initiating the first of two Opium Wars. The result was the beginning of China’s century of humiliation, the cession of the Island of Hong Kong to the UK, and the establishment of five treaty ports – Xiamen, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Ningbo and, most importantly, Shanghai – where foreign trade could be enforced at gunpoint on terms amenable to the British. To facilitate trade, particularly of opium – which vacillated between the British Raj and China, funnelled through the ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai – the British set up a bank: The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation.
While the defeated Qing Dynasty attempted to crack down on widespread emigration, it was through these ports, now swelling with wealth, that its ban could be flouted. Chinese seamen escaped, borne through the sea on ships, and made new lives at new ports.
In this moment the germs of two powerful ideas were born: the modern conception of Hong Kong, and the existence of Chinatowns. 17
For the last 150 years, the cities of London, Hong Kong and Shanghai have formed three corners of an unbreakable triangle, where the fates and fortunes at one point necessarily affect the fates and fortunes of the others, forming unequal shapes – isosceles, scalene – but always connected. These cities are linked by their relationship to water – their very names refer to their status as ports: ‘fragrant harbour’ and ‘on the sea’ respectively. London was built on still and flowing water: if the Thames kept the city fed, the port made it fat, spreading the rump of its wealth horizontally over Rotherhithe, Limehouse and Millwall, shifting the entire gravity of the city eastwards. Docks were cut across the river where it spiralled in great loop-de-loops, acting as the biggest ingredient-storage cupboards the world had ever seen – East India Docks for tea, West India for sugar, Tobacco for tobacco. It was here in the Port of London, enriched and swollen through Chinese tea, that many of the first Chinese sailors decided to jump ship.
Chinatown turns the triangle into a tetrahedron, forming a central fourth point that can only be understood in relation to the other three – for all Chinatowns that exist in this world are reflections of reflections of Hong Kong and the treaty ports. They are reconstructions of a city’s memory, made visible through signs and architecture: mazes of traditional and simplified characters, statues, 18street names and interventions in the landscape. If the original Chinatown was Hong Kong itself, one of its first mirror images was at Limehouse, near the West India Docks.
In the title cards to D. W. Griffith’s 1919 film Broken Blossoms, Limehouse is introduced as ‘where the Orient squats at the portals of the West’, while an eerie stone pyramid by the Church of St Anne’s was fictionalised by the novelist Sax Rohmer as the secret portal to his character Fu Manchu’s hideout, with Rohmer tapping into feverish conspiracy theories of a Chinese Moriarty who controlled crime in the docks (the extremely unsalacious truth was that the pyramid was designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor). Meanwhile, in a foreshadowing of what restaurant critics would do to Peckham in 100 years’ time, journalists visited Limehouse and printed ever more outlandish stories about Chinese sailors pushing opium on Londoners: a sure sign of a guilty conscience.
In reality, the Limehouse Chinatown, even at its zenith, was only two disjointed streets of houses and small businesses, a tiny conurbation divided by language, port and, ultimately, West India Dock Road: the sailors from Shanghai located on Pennyfields, and those from Hong Kong and Guangzhou on Limehouse Causeway. In 1932, there were around 20–30 Chinese-owned businesses, with very few of them based around food: tobacconists, launderettes, bookmakers, a workers’ club, a three-tiered restaurant called Dai Ting Lao, two grocers. The grocers sold imported goods and homemade lap cheong – Hong Kong-style cured sausage that could be made on-site – and doubled up as herbalists, selling medicine and remedies to those who distrusted Western doctors. The only visual cues that indicated you might be in a Chinatown were names on doors; characters on archways that ran counter-clockwise; inscriptions on walls; and a handful of street names: Canton (Guangzhou) Street, Nankin Street and Amoy (Xiamen) Place.
By the time King Street was renamed Ming Street in 1938, Limehouse was already in decline – and soon, the damage wrought during the Blitz, slum clearances, and the movement of the major docks to Tilbury would all suffocate it. Chinatown was dead, and had to be reborn elsewhere. 19
East & West Chinese restaurant, Limehouse, 1955 © Henry Grant Collection / Museum of London 20
In 1951, the decline of Chinese restaurants in London was unexpectedly arrested by Herbert Morrison’s Festival of Britain, a celebration of British art, science and technology which was meant to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of the Great Exhibition, but which also happened to mark both the start of Britain’s geopolitical twilight and the end of China’s century of humiliation. The cookery writer Deh-Ta Hsiung remembers how the festival brought a huge wave of visitors into central London, and that the handful of centrally-located Chinese restaurants were revitalised by a new crowd who, in the festival’s spirit, embraced the modernity of Chinese food.
The Soho ‘Chinatown’ we see in central London today almost never was one; in another universe it could have been an Indiatown. Like Limehouse, it centred around two distinct streets – Wardour and Lisle – with Indian restaurants and grocers on the former, and Chinese on the latter. The names of the treaty ports were not found on street names, but on restaurants and grocers: the Canton in Newport Place, the Hong Kong Emporium on Rupert Street, the Nanking on Charlotte Street. The Bombay Emporium in Leicester Place started the Rajah brand, but also popularised the Amoy brand, catering for the new market. This Chinatown, unlike Limehouse, was centred around food, which had the effect of bringing outsiders and tourists in. By 1970, Gerrard Street was being talked up in the New York Times as a new Chinatown, with another article counting seven restaurants (and two hairdressers, a beauty salon, a travel agency, a supermarket and two car-hire firms) on the street alone.
When a city names something and makes it official, its purpose is always to monetise it, to make coherent something which was never meant to be resolved. In this sense, the media and government approved creation of Chinatown was somewhat cynical; only two years before, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act had put restrictions on the right of Hongkongers to reside in the UK, while those who were already here and worked in Chinatown were met with racism from diners who often refused to pay, and from police who denied them protection. Despite the tourists, the main purpose of Chinatown was a defensive: to bring in all the amenities a community needed in a city where Cantonese culture was seen as marginal.
By the time the city discovered what it had, the internet had replaced the need for most of Chinatown’s book and film shops, while once-vital grocery stores could be found in the suburbs, such 21as Barnet, where many of the old wave of Cantonese immigrants now lived. Once the streets were renamed, this time in Chinese characters, and a stone lion put on Gerrard Street to canonise it, the reason for Chinatown’s existence no longer made sense. What was once alive became heritage, a retail opportunity zone; a portfolio to be traded by Shaftesbury, the landlord which now owns most of Chinatown.
Yet Chinatown is the city’s most effective meme because it never quite replicates itself when it moves across ports; there is always a mutation, giving it an unstable definition. The movement of Chinatown from Limehouse to the centre of London didn’t just change Chinatown, it also marked a shift in what Chinatown could mean. If Limehouse was a Chinatown of the imaginary, spoken in a language meant to be understood by few, the Soho Chinatown was a Chinatown of commerce, speaking to insiders and outsiders alike. Limehouse was a place where Chinese people lived; Soho was where they worked. Both were predicated on a relationship between London, Hong Kong and Shanghai which has fundamentally changed. The Chinatowns of the future will be based on a reformulation of the triangle, but they won’t look like the Chinatowns of the past.
As the 20th century unscrolled, the Port of Hong Kong overtook the Port of London to become the biggest port in the world, which was then swiftly overtaken by the Port of Shanghai. At the end of this century, the city of Hong Kong switched from British rule to Chinese. In his book Why the West Rules – For Now, historian Ian Morris argues that it was the moment when Britain assumed the sovereignty of Hong Kong Island which decisively swung the finely tuned balance of global power between the East and the West to the East End of London. It has now started to swing back: future historians with a sense of humour might look at the development of Haidilao, China’s biggest hotpot chain, which started in Jianyang in Sichuan in 1994, opened in Shanghai in 2008, Hong Kong in 2017, and in 2019 created its first European outlet, in London’s Chinatown.
Haidilao reveals the shape of Chinatowns to come. China is no longer exporting labour or people; it is exporting its own chains. Therefore, Chinatowns are no longer reflections of a past Hong Kong or Canton but of the freshly created state-level new areas, and the 22most advanced cities in the world: Shanghai and the city-state of Chongqing. Walk through Soho and you will find more bubble tea shops and dessert parlours than dim sum restaurants, while Bloomsbury and Spitalfields have been reshaped to accommodate the on-trend tastes of mainland Chinese students. Walk through Limehouse today and you will find little sign of Chinatown, although you can still walk down Canton Street, Nankin Street and Amoy Place – now filled with council housing built for the Festival of Britain, courtyards, and walkways that feel like a municipal take on an Oxbridge quad. You may search for the only two names missing – Hong Kong and Shanghai – until you look up, towards the metallic skyline of Canary Wharf, and there they are, adorning the Norman Foster-designed HSBC building.
The wealth of the Docklands now imposes itself vertically, in glass towers and spires grown from the scorched earth of London’s former port at the Isle of Dogs. It is here, according to the 2021 census, that the largest proportion of people in London who identify as Chinese now reside – around 15 times the city average. It has become a kind of proto-Chinatown, not an enclave or ghetto, but diffused throughout the entire docks in an area where Chinese people now live and work: Dongbei hotpots in Canary Wharf, Sichuan barbecue at All Saints, a Chinese grocers that delivers meals via Deliveroo in Millwall, a warehouse that sells fresh tofu in Greenwich, a Sichuan restaurant in a North Greenwich retail park. You might have bet good money on this being the Chinatown of the future: in 2013, then-mayor Boris Johnson announced that the Royal Albert Dock development would once again become ‘arteries of trade and commerce’, funded by the Chinese-owned ABP to the tune of £1.7 billion in order to turn it into a commercial and financial hub to rival Canary Wharf, an investment deal presided over by Xi Jinping on his visit to London in 2015. In return, the Canary Wharf Group has invested in Xiong’An, one of the latest state-level new areas in Hebei province.
Yet history is never thrown away; it is always recycled. Not all of the old Cantonese population of the Docklands left: in the middle of this proto-Chinatown of capital, there is an older, vestigial Chinatown, of takeaways that still serve jar jow, a uniquely Limehouse take on sweet-and-sour pork; dim sum restaurants in Holiday Inns, on floating docks, in storage warehouses in the shadow of the ExCeL Centre, overlooking London City Airport, in dining rooms the size 23of aircraft hangers. Their numbers are being swelled by the biggest planned migration Britain has seen since Windrush, caused by China trying to turn Hong Kong into another Shanghai – Hongkongers on British National Overseas passports, affluent and middle-aged, who crave the security of suburbia and watch YouTube videos by British-Cantonese influencers titled ‘top place to live in the uk – healthiest town, Wokingham’.
It may well be that the Chinatowns of the future will look like Britain’s own state-led new areas, like Milton Keynes, or Sutton – one of London’s blandest suburbs, where many Hongkongers are currently choosing to settle, opening nostalgic Western-influenced bakeries and cha chaan tengs unique to Hong Kong in memory of a city that has been lost to them. Meanwhile, the Royal Albert Dock development is a ghost town, dormant if not dead, with ABP recently removed from the project by the Greater London Authority. Instead of a boom in ‘trade and commerce’, the mainland Chinese restaurants of the Docklands may well see a decline from a sudden vacuum of Chinese students and professions.
The triangle is now finely poised, a perfect equilateral for the first time since 1839. Whatever route history takes, there will once again be a Chinatown formed by London, Hong Kong and Shanghai, built over the roads and waterways that still bear the names of the cities’ ghosts.
De-Ta Hsiung interviewed by Anna Chen and Mukti Jain Campion, Chinese in Britain Interviews
Seed, John, ‘Limehouse Blues: Looking for Chinatown in the London Docks, 1900-1940’, History Workshop Journal, Issue 62, 2006
Interview with William Poon, China Exchange, The Making of Chinatown, 2019
ARTIFICIAL CHINATOWNS
Until the late 20th century, the precondition of a Chinatown was artifice; a Chineseness signified through ornamental architectural interventions like pagodas, stone lions, curled eaves, patterned tiles and pi-shaped gateways. This did not start in Hong Kong or any Chinese city, but in San Francisco, when the earthquake of 1906 decimated the 24 blocks that made up its nascent Chinatown. To stop the whole district from being relocated by the municipal government (who resented its central position but also relied on the Chinese traders), the community hired a group of white American architects. They rebuilt Chinatown as a theme park, not to be unseen as another working-class, immigrant enclave but to be claimed as part of the city’s visible warp and weft: somewhere to be visited. The new Chinatown was such a success that not only was its own location secured, but its signs and aesthetic also proliferated into Vancouver, New York, Melbourne, Toronto, Washington and London.
This was a Chinatown as we now commonly understand it – an area of Chinese commerce that is at once separate from and part of the city, which is made official and then finally accepted onto the map as ‘Chinatown’. Our own Soho Chinatown was canonised as late as the 1980s, when the pavilion and bilingual street names were added to Newport Court – a sure sign of a community whose diversity is about to be co-opted (see Brick Lane). Since the neighbourhood’s takeover by Shaftesbury PLC – one of the most powerful landlords in central London – the pavilion has gone, and in its place is a proliferation of eating options: no longer just Cantonese food but bubble tea shops, dessert parlours, Korean hot dogs, Filipino ice cream. These cater to two key new demographics: teenagers from the Home Counties who crawl from place to place following viral TikTok videos, and Chinese students from the mainland who emerge from hotpot restaurants dressed immaculately head to toe in Comme.
This shift has undoubtedly made Chinatown a more diverse and better place to eat, as well as mainstreaming the cuisines of Sichuan, Hunan, Dongbei and Shaanxi across the city, creating new conglomerations of restaurants that may or may not be new Chinatowns. There is a Chinatown of students in Bloomsbury, where UCL, LSE, King’s and SOAS all have campuses, as well as emerging Chinatowns close to student housing in Spitalfields and King’s Cross. However, fuelled by new arrivals from Hong Kong, the long arc of history is bending back towards Cantonese food. This is a welcome development: not only is it one of the great Chinese cuisines, but the shift to Cantonese food also highlights a set of (unjustly) forgotten restaurants old and new, which claim fidelity to something more than a region. Like the very idea of Chinatown, the best Cantonese restaurants are authentic only to their patch of London, and to themselves.
CAFE TPT
The Talmud states that there are no more or fewer than 36 righteous people in the world who justify humanity’s existence to God. I feel the same about the three restaurants on the western side of Wardour Street, which are currently holding up the last vestige of old Chinatown. WONG KEI is the most convenient and has the most lore, OLD TOWN 97 is open the latest and has the drunkard’s dream of LSE fried rice (containing four textures of egg) but Cafe TPT is the best. It does what every dai pai dong-style cafe should, which is to execute everything competently, then excel at a few dishes that you can measure your life by. For me, those dishes are the soft-shell crab showered in cornflakes, the creamy beef flank that comes in a seething cauldron, the morning glory with fermented beancurd, and the Macau-style pork chop with onions, cheesy béchamel and spoonfuls of chilli oil – a chaise longue of a comfort dish that is best eaten in the early hours of the morning to soak up a Soho night. You will find yours too. 21 Wardour St, Westminster, W1D 6PN
MANDARIN KITCHEN
The lobster noodles at Mandarin Kitchen is a uniquely London story. Started in 1978 by Stephen Cheung and Helen Li, Mandarin Kitchen was transformed from a Queensway disco into a Cantonese seafood restaurant specialising in lobster noodles. According to writer Ysabelle Cheung, the serving of lobster and noodles together (rather than separately, as is traditional) was a Mandarin Kitchen invention, with ‘the lobster smashed into pieces, its tail, eyes, and antennae floating in a glistening river of brine and egg noodles.’ The dish was a success, and has since been replicated everywhere from Soho to 25Kowloon. Now owned by Stephen and Helen’s son Alex, the decor of Mandarin Kitchen has changed (it now has the look of a luxe aquarium), but the noodles haven’t: they still emerge from the kitchen to coos, and are portioned out with the same theatricality as a canard à la presse at an old-school French bistro. 14-16 Queensway, Bayswater, Westminster, W2 3RX
REINDEER CAFE
In his 2008 book Chinatown in Britain, academic Wai-ki E. Luk describes the phenomenon of satellite Chinatowns ‘driven by forces of enclave decentralisation’. As workers get pushed out of the centre, they move into affluent neighbourhoods, transforming the demography of the area and opening new businesses. The areas of London where this has happened, Luk argues, are Barnet and Colindale – where the first wave of Cantonese immigrants moved – with the shopping hubs Oriental City and Wing Yip marking its south-western borders. Reindeer Cafe, in the supermarket Wing Yip, is the best of these institutions, simultaneously left alone by time and well used by those who know it. Everything here is just that bit better than in Chinatown: the springiness of the imported noodles in the wonton soup, the wok char on the beef brisket noodles, and the cha chaan teng staples – like pork chop in tomato sauce, or curry soup filled with fish balls, pork rind and turnips – that show confidence in the taste of its customers, who prioritise comfort over novelty. Unit 3 Wing Yip Business Centre, 395 Edgware Road, Brent, NW2 6LN
SAIKEI
Dim sum is an occasion, and demands a go-big-or-go-home room to prove it. Most of these rooms are located in the East End, particularly around the Docklands – where the first Chinatown was, and where locations as large as station termini are still possible to come by on the cheap. Two of these rooms are dramatic enough to give dim sum the stage it deserves: YI-BAN, next to London City Airport, where you can watch the suited City boys fly off to make deals on their lunch break, and Saikei, inexplicably located on the ground floor of a Holiday Inn. On Sundays, Saikei writhes with activity: Cockney-Cantonese families of 12 eating lobster, old men drinking pu erh and playing cards, whole suckling pigs, and a kinesis of waiters ferrying dumplings. Adding to the surreality of it all: this is the only restaurant I know of in London that validates parking. 85 Bugsby’s Way, Greenwich, SE10 0GD
UNCLE WRINKLE
There’s a kind of ordinary extraordinariness about Uncle Wrinkle, a small New Cross takeaway (with a few tables for eating in) which is run by couple Siu Kwan Wang and Yin Fai Ng. Ordinary because it could be mistaken for a generic British-Chinese takeaway (always a great thing) until you clock how weird it is: the open kitchen and counter built to their heights so you can witness the ergonomic dance of prepping, cooking and serving; the beef curry in the samosas; the sweet, Cinnamon Graham note in the salt and pepper aubergine; even the ceramics in the back which are made by Kwan herself. It’s a completely sui generis mixture: assimilation food which is cooked with precise, considered technique, plus nostalgic dishes like fish in sweetcorn sauce that you might not find outside of a Cantonese home (as well as the best fritter shop in the city, hiding in plain sight). Batavia Mews, 299 New Cross Rd, Lewisham, SE14 6AS
THE COMMUNITY CENTRE
Jenny Lau
Photos by Sirui Ma
At 12.29pm on a Wednesday, Jabez Lam shouts ‘Last game!’ with more than a touch of exasperation. He is inside a shabby bungalow on a residential road by the railway arches at London Fields, where the average house is currently estimated to be worth upwards of £1 million. Blink and you could miss it, but the rumbling, clacking sound of melamine tiles and aroma of freshly steamed rice will stop you in your tracks. A hand-painted sign on the door indicates its occupants: 克尼華人中心 – Hackney Chinese Community Services (HCCS).
One minute later, inside a clinically-lit dining room, food is served: plates of white rice heaped with a variety of stir-fried vegetables, fried fish and stuffed tofu, along with bowls of porkbone broth, start to appear. The elderly Chinese members of HCCS reluctantly leave their square mahjong tables and shuffle a few steps over to the round dining tables.
Lunch club commences. 27
I have come on this particular day to quench a nostalgic thirst for some homey comfort food, and to catch up with Lam, the centre manager. He quips of the mahjong players, ‘They would have the perfect work ethic: they can’t wait for lunch to be over with so they can get back to their game.’
Like the building itself, you’ll only know about lunch club if you seek it out. It’s a long-running institution that provides affordable hot meals for the elderly and isolated; at HCCS, lunch club operates three times a week. A hot meal costs £4, though it’s not exclusively for centre members – anyone can drop in, and on this visit I find myself sitting on a table with a British-Indonesian poet, an Extinction Rebellion activist and a farmer. To keep prices low, menus are planned around weekly donations of fresh vegetables from a local wholesaler. That the food is actually very tasty is no surprise when you learn that the cooks are retired Chinese takeaway chefs who have spent half a century behind a wok station. ‘Back in the day, if you asked an old Chinese lady what was inside her wallet, she would show you her membership cards to all the different centres. She would know which one had the best menu,’ jokes Lam. I make a mental note to attempt a lunch-club tour.
Scan a list of community centre lunch clubs in your neighbourhood and the menus will tell a story of London’s migrants. In Tower Hamlets they serve Bangladeshi, Somali and Chinese communities; further into Hackney it’s Chinese, Vietnamese, Turkish and Kurdish, Cypriot and Afro-Caribbean. Most importantly, the meals on offer are culturally appropriate, taking into account halal or kosher requirements and cultural definitions of comfort; at HCCS, for instance, the sharing dishes are eaten family-style, and the non-negotiable traditional Chinese labour of love – clear pork broth, cooked for hours – is something the members especially crave.
Chinese community centres in East London form a rough trail around the historic settlement of ethnic Chinese migrants, most notably flanking the ‘Pho Mile’ stretch of Kingsland Road 28in Hoxton, and around Limehouse and Poplar – echoes of the original Chinatown, and where the first Chinese seamen disembarked from East India Company ships in the 1800s. To outsiders, these centres appear to serve one and the same community, but listen to the polyphony of Sinitic dialects at any one of the lunch clubs, and you will hear an aural map of the diasporic elders’ individual migration journeys. In the Soho Chinatown LCCC (the UK’s oldest Chinese community centre, wedged implausibly above the Hippodrome Casino), you are likely to hear Hokkien and Hakka mixing with Cantonese and Mandarin, where a diverse mix of Malaysian Chinese mingle with Hongkongers, Taiwanese and mainlanders. These elders used to work, even live in Chinatown – hard to believe, but the formerly seedy, no-go zone of Soho was once the only place working-class immigrants could afford and were welcome in. Now almost all of them have moved outwards, clustering in suburbs like Barnet, but still commute in for daily activities.
30Further east, at HCCS, as well as at the Community of Refugees from Vietnam (CRV) East London and the Chinese Association of Tower Hamlets, you might pick up on the Cantonese-speaking overlap between the Hong Kong Chinese and Vietnamese Hoa. South of the river, these dialectic breadcrumbs continue, with Lambeth Chinese Community Association and the Vietnamese Family Partnership in Lewisham, as well as with the two stalwarts of the ‘N’ postcodes: Camden Chinese Community Centre and Islington Chinese Association. At Centre 151’s Phở Club in Haggerston you may even hear Cambodian and Laotian.
Community centres are not a recent invention. Toynbee Hall, just a stone’s throw from Brick Lane, was one of the first proto-community centres, a university settlement founded in 1884. In the post-World War public housing boom, as Britain tried to reconstruct its damaged housing stock, new council estates and housing associations came attached with their own communal halls and facilities – like the Skinner Bailey and Lubetkin-designed Cranbrook Estate, a highrise model village plastered over former Victorian slums and concrete panacea for the 3,000 Bethnal Green homes destroyed during the Blitz.
But it was in the aftermath of the 1981 Brixton riot – itself a result of years of increasing tension between the institutionally racist Metropolitan Police and the young Black community – and on the recommendation of the subsequent Scarman Report, that centres sprang 31up in London’s most socially-deprived neighbourhoods. Often, these centres were dedicated to a particular ethnic group. Social reforms were to pay particular attention to improving leisure and social activities for Black and South Asian communities, whose lack of integration Leslie Scarman deemed a failure of state and police.
33Much like their South Asian counterparts, Chinese community leaders recognised a need to support the successive waves of immigrants who had been arriving since the 1950s. There are parallels between the groups: both were typically made up of male labourers, either displaced from post-Partition India, or from Hong Kong’s New Territories. By the 1980s, this now-ageing diasporic group lacked the intergenerational family care they would have received in their home countries. Many still spoke minimal English.
Another pressing issue was added to the mix. Between the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, the UK resettled roughly 19,000 Vietnamese refugees, mostly ethnic Chinese Hoa from the north. Many settled in Hackney, Lewisham and Southwark and faced the same social exclusions as the earlier waves of Chinese migrants. This was the catalyst for the founding of the now-defunct An Viet Foundation, which ran a legendary restaurant throughout the 1990s – technically the first Vietnamese restaurant in Hackney.
The case for the community centre was clear. It would help immigrants with cultural integration by providing language lessons and training. It could step in to help with daily mundanities, like booking doctor’s appointments. A programme of activities would combat social isolation and cultural disconnect. Most importantly, it was a physical home from home, allowing ethnic minorities to feel safe in a city of increasing racial tension.
HCCS was founded in 1985, the year I was born, yet a whole generation of British-born Chinese like myself have grown up unaware of the existence of Chinese community centres. And why should we be? Redundancy is sometimes the best outcome of immigrant aspirations. The second and third generations have fulfilled the hopes and dreams of their ancestors, achieving remarkable upwards social mobility and integration. Yet new challenges arise: racism, identity struggles, cultural dissonance. 34
A generation’s worth of introspection and retrospection has resulted in various movements within identity politics, all jostling for inclusive forms of self-labelling. Until recently, ‘British Chinese’ encompassed everyone else who doesn’t have a box to tick (literally, because the alternative to ‘Chinese’ on the UK census is ‘other Asian’). Into the ‘other Asian’ net fall the forgotten British ethnicities: the Japanese, Filipino, South Korean, Timorese and mixed-race kids, and anyone else who has endured homogeneity. While ‘other Asian’ is a self-deprecating in-joke reclaimed by some, it has also spurred a grass roots pivot towards adopting a more inclusive term: ESEA, or ‘East and South East Asian’.
It was a few years back, when I went to my first lunch club, that I became aware of the minutiae of ESEA language and cultural differences among the seniors. Of course there is always rice – the lingua franca – but just because you and I eat rice does not mean we automatically get along. Lam tells me of how, when he started working at HCCS, there were incidents when the Cantonese elders would not share a table with the mainland Chinese guests. The indelible phrase ‘You can’t sit with us!’ from Mean Girls springs to mind, for we never grow out of petty high school tribalism, regardless of age. Determined not to perpetuate the same patterns, I set about building a programme of food events at HCCS, which brings a younger generation of people together to celebrate diverse ESEA heritages. Since then, the centre has welcomed food lovers from across the generations – all from different backgrounds – to join in with pot lucks, fundraising supper clubs and tea parties. Even more recently, HCCS has become a safe haven for Hongkongers resettling in the UK amidst political uncertainty back home. The new members have wasted no time in creating their own network of support groups and cultural activities – including a weekly pop-up serving a taste of Hong Kong’s cha chaan tengs – heralding fresh iterations of Cantonese influence in the multilayered make-up of the British Chinese diaspora.
Meanwhile, the lunch clubs have suffered the repercussions of both the pandemic and public spending cuts. Some have been suspended; others, like the LCCC, used to feed up to 40 members a day, but now welcome a quarter of that. The lunch club network in Hackney, which has historically received healthy financial backing, is currently down to its last year of council funding, with uncertainty 35as to whether the contract will be renewed. Local councils are missing the point if they deem lunch clubs to be non-essential services – addressing food poverty is the work of community kitchens and food banks, but the commensality of community centres provides vital socialisation and cultural connection that can’t be found elsewhere.
In 2024, I and a motley crew of volunteers will help HCCS in transforming the defunct An Viet Foundation into the UK’s first centre for East and South East Asian communities. In dropping the word ‘Chinese’ during its rebrand – a gesture of solidarity – HCCS deliberately seeks to start anew. At the heart of this centre will be a self-sustaining community kitchen that is not so much concerned with feeding its own as by giving back to society. The principle of lunch club will remain: to create a physical home from home that facilitates social harmony – one where we all still eat rice, and we do sit with each other.
OTHER ASIAN
The vagaries of urban immigration patterns can sometimes be explained by a simple grand narrative. Why was the first Chinatown in Limehouse? Of course it made sense for it to be near the docks, where so many Chinese sailors disembarked. Why are Southall and Hounslow predominantly Indian and Pakistani areas? Because so many jobs were available in the environs of Heathrow Airport in the aftermath of Partition. Why are there so many Australians in Clapham? So they can be near their chaotic spiritual home, Infernos. But for other (smaller and less visible) groups, there is often no single convincing explanation. One day New Malden was a bland, office-worker suburb on the outskirts of Surrey; the next, it was a bland, office-worker suburb on the outskirts of Surrey with the biggest Korean population in Europe.
For anyone who has to tick the ‘other Asian’ box – Koreans, Vietnamese, Filipinos – this lack of documentation often contributes to a flattening of complex narrative, or sometimes a loss of narrative altogether. There will always be a half explanation somewhere in the family history: a roulette of housing allocation, a family member to whom it was more convenient to move nearby, a church, an embassy, a rumour. In the case of New Malden, was it because of the ambassador’s nearby residence, or because of a South Korean conglomerate’s deal with a British electronics agency, or because of Samsung? Very soon all this speculation becomes immaterial, because suddenly there is everything a neighbourhood needs: a community centre, a market, hairdressers, restaurants. An area becomes ‘known for’ being the place to go; it thrives, becomes found, and then, in an eternal parabolic curve, declines, then springs up somewhere else for equally unknown reasons. The city continues.
PHỞ THÚY TÂY
The Vietnamese community in London is formed of a patchwork of identities: north and south, student and settled, ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese. In the US – where the wave of Vietnamese immigration predominantly originated in the capitalist south – stronger networks lent the community increased visibility, yet in London many of the old rivalries die hard. Deptford was the epicentre of the community a few years ago, but rents, immigration raids and displacement have pushed restaurants further afield – to Greenwich one way and Peckham another. At Phở Thúy Tây, owner Thuy Nguyen has steered the same path through the rapids to calmer waters: she started on Deptford High Street, then moved to Old Kent Road, and now, finally, has a large restaurant right by Surrey Quays station, where her cooking finally has the breathing space it deserves. Thuy mainly caters for the new student population, recreating popular street food dishes from the country’s north – particularly the capital, Hanoi. The pho here is crystalline, and the deep-frying is faultless, but my favourite dish from the main menu is the dry pho, with noodles fried into round rosti-like pucks and accompanied by egg and beef. The weekend blackboard is like nothing else in the city. It attracts a young, rowdy crowd anticipating deep cuts of offal, all served with mam tom – a bureaucratic grey shrimp paste hiding a corrupt flavour which is like the funk of a thousand prawn heads reduced down and down, atomised to the density of a neutron star. 1B Rotherhithe Old Rd, Southwark, SE16 2PP
IMONE
The way many Londoners speak of New Malden is similar to the patronising way the British talk about Ireland: they know it’s close, and they constantly chide themselves for not visiting, but they never actually go. New Malden is twenty minutes from Waterloo; those who can’t be bothered to visit are missing London’s own K-Town that’s home to 20,000 Koreans, a community of a few hundred North Korean defectors, and fried chicken that shares more DNA with the hypergloss of a Jeff Koons sculpture than it does with KFC. I have a soft spot for the old-school jjajangmyeon at YOU ME
