London is no longer an English city

[Leafyhouse]

Said by John Cleese (he of Monty Python fame), recently. Link to story is here:

www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48451384

What do other people think? I do see London's diversity as being its great strength, but maybe it's just because I live in the London bubble - and maybe the view from the rest of the country is utter horror that the capital seems to be becoming increasingly disconnected from the country. Both economically and culturally. Hence the Brexit vote - Remain in a sea of Leave.

What's the view from others?

I only mentioned the Brontes, because it seemed someone was holding them up as an example of "Englishness" that would reject a multicultural London, clearly ignorant (fancy that) or forgetting that they were the product of Irish immigration to England previously.

A little like the scene in "Yes Minister" when Hacker praises the "Great English Writers" like Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw ....

Grinchley cross posted, and clearly even more of a Bronte bore!!!

DGR Exactly, but I also think that the chippiness that was in my experience a factor in the northern Brexit vote is something that is a post Thatcher phenomenon. Even in the 60s the prevailing feeling about London was that it was entertaining and alright for a visit but also regarded as "the smoke", full of soft southerners and life there was inferior. The deep seated resentment stems from Thatcher reengineering the economy away from the north and subsequent governments failure to do anything about the growing imbalance, and a stereotyping of Londoners as all affluent and out of touch with the suffering in the rest of the country (as if most Londoners do not actually come from elsewhere, including from the rest of the country... )

I am English and I spend a lot of time in London as I have family there.
It certainly no longer feels like an English city to me and I am sad about that and I resent it.

This has nothing to do with Brexit. It no longer felt like an English city long before the referendum.

Keen to hear what people mean by an English city? White English people speaking English? What about a city of British born brown and black people speaking English? Would that make you equally sad?

It never was an English City. It was a Roman city. Before there was such a thing as English or England.

I don’t understand your post Mockers are you saying the capital of England has always been Italian?

London has always been cosmopolitan, that's part of its charm.

{I don’t understand your post Mockers are you saying the capital of England has always been Italian?}

Romans, when they appeared in England were already a mixed culture and races.
The soldiers that built Hadrian's wall were a mix from a wide area of Europe and as far as Syria.

I love London. I don’t have much else to add...

So Mockers is saying that London has never been English and LeClerk is saying that Rome has never been Italian?

{LeClerk is saying that Rome has never been Italian? }

I said nothing of the sort.
I said that those that we now consider to have been 'Romans' came from the Roman Empire 2000 years ago and inhabited land that is now considered to be London.
The racial make up of those 'Romans' was very diverse.

Mockers is saying that London pre-dates the English, who were scared to go inside its abandoned walls for three hundred years, they thought it was haunted.

More pertinently, the plague pits show the population was ever so multi-ethnic in the 15th century. It as a port, after all.

I think people can grasp that cities change over the centuries as different peoples choose to live there. I thought it was just quite funny how it was phrased.

That is a disgusting expression, worthy of Goebbels.

Why? 1tisILeClerc

I'm as Remain as they come. The Irish, Celtic, population was over run by Normans (from which I am descended on my father's side), Spanish, Norwegian. All of those were not 'true' in any sense, nor were the Celts.

I'm European, to my very bones, with all the hotchpotch that Europeans come from. It's a dynamic structure.

Nationalism is the death of humanity as far as I'm concerned.

Hope I've made myself clear.

The expression 'over run' is getting too close to this, particularly given some of the views being expressed in the UK.
historynewsnetwork.org/article/169351

You know exactly what I mean. Stop with the semantics and start with the engagement.

There is no such thing as 'English'. Being in a geographical position as it is, Britain was always going to have a flux of people. Less so Ireland unless accessed via Britain.

"Every person who served us in a shop, restaurant or the hotel where we were staying did not have English as their first language"

Maybe they were speaking in the original native languages of what is now the UK. Welsh, Gaidhlig or Gaeilge. Before the arrival of the Germanic antecedent of English with (shock) mainland European migrants.

I am not sure I agree with that placemats. if you look at the US that is built on immigration and yet their citizens have a proud and distinct sense of being American.

But I think in the US being American supersedes any other identity. So you're an American or Irish/Cuban/Korean etc heritage but you're an American first and foremost. Here, the equivalent of that is to say you're British of xyz heritage, but British first. Yet what we are talking about on this thread is the reverse: it's the xyz bit that is debated as more important.

Not sure. I think there is an English identity and I see nothing wrong with people want to acknowledge that. George Orwell said the English loath themselves and I think he was spot on. I can’t think of another nationality who would tie themselves up in knots just to argue that there is no such thing as their national identity.

Great innit. I love it here.

TatianaLarina
Well at least 2 of us are happy, you like it there and I like it here, which is nowhere near London.

I agree about the thinly veiled racism on here. Utterly depressing in this day and age and what a horribly narrow outlook. When I visit London, I couldn't give a rat's arse if anyone is English or not.

London existed well before the Romans, they simply Latinised the name.