London

In which I discover that yet another well-known programmer is a loathsome human being.

So I found this, via this. David Heinemeier Hansson, a Danish programmer, thinks¹ that

London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it’s no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.

You can guess what he means by ‘native Brits’, can’t you? Hint: it’s nothing to do with whether you were born in Britain. He’s given us some bigger hints:

That frustration was on wide display in Tommy Robinson’s march yesterday. British and English flags flying high and proud, like they would in Copenhagen on the day of a national soccer match. Which was both odd to see but also heartwarming. You can sometimes be forgiven for thinking that all of Britain is lost in self-loathing, shame, and suicidal empathy. But of course it’s not.

Empathy is ‘suicidal’ in his view. Because of course it is.

Well, I was born in London. And I’m old: I can remember, as a child and young adult, all the bomb sites full of rosebay willowherb and poppies. I can’t remember the cranes bowing for Churchill, but I think I may have seen them. I do remember in the 1980s when the Isle of Dogs was a strange, desolate place of falling-down warehouses where they said you probably should not go after dark.

I’m white, male, privately-educated and probably have what counts as a mildly posh accent if you’re not British. David Heinemeier Hansson would consider me a ‘native Brit’.

I don’t, now, live in London, but I spend about a week a month there. And I walk and have always walked: I have spent thousands of hours walking around London. I’ve walked from Tottenham Hale to the river, from Waterloo to Greenwich, from Stratford to Bishopsgate. I’ve done a fair amount of walking well after midnight²: when the imaginary feral knife-gangs are meant to be everywhere. I do, in fact, know London in a way that David Heinemeier Hansson, a tourist, never will. And I knew London in about 2000 when he first visited: I lived & worked there between 2003 and 2006 for one thing.

London is not the same as it was: in almost all ways it is better. And yes, it is less white than it was when I was young. And you know what, those brown people are British, and they also are Londoners in a way that I am not any more. Go watch Rye Lane (or actually go to Rye Lane & Peckham Rye where it’s set): that’s what London is like. The people in that film are Londoners.

It’s true, there are parts of London you don’t want to walk through. I mean, I walked through Mayfair twice last week, and I really had to work hard not to just start keying the cars of the awful self-satisfied moneyed fucks who are turning great areas of the town into sterile wastelands full of shops selling bad, expensive, art and bad, expensive, clothes to the very rich. I try not to go to those places any more.

And what London isn’t and has never been is whatever David Heinemeier Hansson thinks it was. Apparently

Compared to Copenhagen at the time, there was something so majestic about Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, and even the Tube around the turn of the millenium.

That tells you exactly what he is: a tourist who doesn’t understand what he’s looking at. And, it turns out, something much, much nastier as well. I don’t need people like him. London doesn’t need people like him. Nobody needs people like him.