Down and out in Park Lane and Plaistow

‘I was born in London,’ Ben Judah tells us early in this vivid portrait of Britain’s capital, ‘but I no longer recognise the city.’ London has become a building site where dirty money is converted into gleaming blocks of bullion. The smartest parts of town are lined with empty houses owned by foreign plutocrats, and London’s spirit is embodied not so much by the bearded hipster brewing your £3 cup of coffee as by the Shard, a soaring monument to wealth and inequality.

Judah isn’t all that interested in the well-shod hirelings who lubricate this shiny capitalism. We’re halfway into the book before we encounter anyone who could be described as privileged (other than the widely-travelled, Oxford-educated Judah). Then it’s Nahla, a bored Egyptian who introduces him to a world of expensive nightclubs where rich young men from the Middle East sit surrounded by glinting champagne bottles. Later, he traipses along the King’s Road and observes the red-trousered swells lolloping towards Fulham — ‘a ghetto of signet rings’.

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But mostly he focuses on the ‘immigrant city’ — the third of London’s population that was born abroad — and especially its paupers, earnest strivers and petty crims.