It's 20 years ago since I became a Londoner, whatever that means, if indeed that is the date.
I'd agreed to take the flat in Bow a fortnight earlier, and this was the day I came down to pick up the keys. I turned up at the letting agents to sign the paperwork and to pay the deposit, which I did by cheque because 2001 was a very different era. I was surprised to be given a bottle of champagne for my trouble... which I still have because opportunities for sharing a bottle have been thin on the ground, so I should probably open it today to celebrate the 20th anniversary, although I suspect it went flat years ago.
I caught the bus to my new front door, which just shows what a newbie I was because I could easily have walked it instead. First I emptied the letterbox, which was rammed with flyers, free papers and all sorts of mail the previous tenant hadn't redirected. And then I unlocked my new front door with my new keys, and maybe that's when I became a Londoner.
It might not be because I didn't stay long. I opened the cupboards to see what I'd been left, threw some limescale tablets in the toilet bowl because it was a disgrace and nipped out to Tesco to buy some grocery staples. I wrote myself an inventory because the letting agent hadn't... which one day they're going to be very embarrassed about not doing. But I didn't stay overnight because I hadn't moved my stuff down yet, so I wasn't a proper Londoner at that point.
The next day I moved half my stuff down in a white van. Two sweaty men helped me lug it all inside, and also helped swap over the double bed to the other bedroom where I'd decided I wanted it. Once they'd gone I did a lot of unpacking, reshelving and cleaning of sticky surfaces. I discovered that TV reception was appalling and that BT hadn't connected my phone yet, which was more of a communications disaster then than it would be today. I also went out for a bus ride and more importantly I stayed in my new flat overnight, so maybe that's when I became a Londoner.
It might not be because I still had four weeks of my old job left, so after the bank holiday weekend I went back and started using my new London pad for weekends only. I see my first council tax bill was dated 5th September 2001 so maybe that's when I became a Londoner, but more likely it was mid-September when I finally vanned the other half of my belongings down to Bow and abandoned my former life altogether. Whatever the precise date, it's 20 years since I first got a foothold in the capital and I've been a Londoner ever since.
I was born within 400 yards of a tube station, which could be the modern version of being born within the sound of Bow Bells, but doesn't count because it was 10 miles outside London at the time. When I was three weeks old Greater London was invented, but I still grew up two miles beyond its boundary so am very much a product of Hertfordshire rather than the capital. I can therefore only claim to have been a Londoner for 20 years, which is great, but nowhere near as good as it could have been.
I know lots of you can beat 20 years, indeed 20 years is easy. But if you can beat 40 years as a Londoner I'm interested - that's uninterrupted from at least 1981 until today - and if it's 50 or 60 years all the better. When we did a survey back in 2017 only 6% of you said you'd lived in London all your lives, but I wonder who can claim the longest continuous residence.comments
And how long does it take to be accepted as a Londoner anyway?
When my parents moved from Hertfordshire to a small Norfolk village in 1991, we joked about the fact they wouldn't be accepted as 'proper' villagers for years. But they threw themselves into the community, rather than just being 'those outsiders from Watford', and managed to get accepted much earlier than we initially expected. 30 years later my Dad is very much one of the village mainstays, indeed he can hardly walk up to the shop without being stopped for a chat on multiple occasions, and the latest arrivals would only ever see him as one of the old guard. It can be done, it just takes a while.
But London is a very different kind of community. With 8 million neighbours it's all too easy to blend in with the rest, and to walk down even a local street without being addressed by anyone you know. We don't have the same level of social organisation as a village, nor a network of societies everyone belongs to, nor a single shop you can't avoid using. I couldn't even tell you how many people live nextdoor to me, let alone what their names are, because in London it's so much easier to be anonymous.
London also has a lot of subdivisions so you might better identify with one of those, like being from Harrow or Waltham Forest or Erith or Kew. In some parts of town you can get noticed by going to the best coffee shops, attending the local parkruns or sending your offspring to the right school, and that's when people start nodding as you go by. Alternatively you can simply get on with living here and enjoying everything the capital has to offer, or your preferred selection from it, without ever feeling an overarching need to belong.
One of the best things about being a Londoner is that it's your choice, nobody else judges you for it. Anyone can be a Londoner, you just have to live here, which diverse people at all levels of society manage to do. It makes you one among many, with all the collective strength that brings, perhaps in frustration but more likely with pride. There are no acceptance criteria, unspoken or otherwise, so if I choose I can indeed claim to have become a Londoner the day I picked up my keys.
