In early 2016, a book came out that cast London as a city seething with racial tension. It included strange and disturbing accounts of migrant Londoners, including describing a black man as looking “pure African” and having a “melon head”, and suggested the capital was filling up with violent and racist eastern Europeans.
But despite being published just months before the EU referendum, This is London: Life and Death in the World City was not the work of a far-right activist or a politician arguing against immigration. In fact, the book received glowing reviews in newspapers like the Guardian, The Times and the Financial Times, which called it “eye-opening”, “revelatory” and “an epic work of reportage”. It was written by a young journalist called Ben Judah — who now works in the Labour government as a special advisor to foreign secretary David Lammy.
Experts and academics who have examined the book for us in recent weeks dispute its accuracy, question Judah’s reporting methods and condemn his portrayal of some of the capital’s most marginalised groups. They point out that it is littered with implausible dialogues and false claims. (We have contacted Judah three times in the past week to give him a chance to respond to the details in this story and provide evidence to support his interviews in the book, but he has not responded).
The promise of This Is London was a thrilling one: Judah had gained extraordinary access to every level of London society — from sleeping rough with Roma beggars to pulling back the curtain on the lives of Gulf princesses — and could give us an utterly unvarnished journalistic portrait. The book’s title suggested Judah wanted to inject a dose of reality into the perception of a city that was still on a high from hosting the Olympics and show us its darker side. It was long-listed for the Baillie Gifford, a prestigious prize for non-fiction writing.
Following the path of his renowned journalist father, Tim Judah, Ben Judah started as a foreign correspondent in Russia in his early twenties before turning his gaze to his home city. This Is London, he made clear early on, would focus heavily on immigration. “I was born in London, but I no longer recognize this city,” Judah writes. “I don’t know if I love the new London or if it frightens me. A city where at least 55 percent of people are not ethnically white British.” (the book had to be amended after it was first published as the original failed to include the ‘ethnically white’ detail — instead suggesting 55 percent of the city wasn't British).
Much of the book relies on Judah’s amazing ability to tell someone’s nationality without speaking to them — one that must come in handy when he accompanies the foreign secretary David Lammy to global summits. While many of us can only guess whether the man sitting opposite us on the Tube is Spanish, Italian or Portuguese, Judah’s mental computer unerringly spits out the answer, which gives him a distinct advantage as a chronicler of modern, diverse London.
In This Is London, this skill was on full display. Then a young journalist who had yet to scale the heights of the Labour Party as a special advisor, Judah roams around the capital identifying migrant Londoners in his path.
On the first page, Judah watches as “Polish meatheads grip onto huge toolboxes as they make for the street”. This casual stereotyping around race or nationality quickly becomes a motif. Among the cast of Londoners we are introduced to are “clear-eyed Roma beggar girls” that were “moving furtively”, a “frumpy Colombian woman”, several “surly Afghans” and a group of “frazzled Jamaican bums”. In total, we counted over 100 places in the book where Judah assumes the race or nationality of someone after merely spotting them on the street or on public transport.
One of the most egregious examples of this is Judah’s stereotyping of the black people he spots cleaning bus stations or leaving police stations, who are frequently labelled as “African” when he has no way to determine their nationality. Of one “gang leader” he meets, Judah writes: “He is Caribbean but looks pure African, flabby more than muscled, with a fold of skin at the back of his melon head.” A week ago, we asked Judah how someone can look “pure African” or what he means by his reference to a “melon head”, but he hasn’t yet responded.
Observations on skull shape continue throughout the book. In addition to his use of “melon head”, Judah introduces a different man as “skinny, a little brittle, with an oblong Somali head that slopes down into thick lips, charred from weed and khat”. When he meets a Registrar, he notes “how perfectly round her skull seems to be, with a fleshy button nose, and pink miniature ears,” he writes. “This is a face I have seen all over London. I think anyone could guess the Registrar is Polish.” Without posting long passages of the book, it’s difficult to convey just how frequently this ethnic stereotyping appears in This Is London. Kids exiting a bus in South London are “angry-looking school children in sky-blue uniforms, almost all of them black.” In another scene, Judah looks at “this fresh-faced little boy in the hood, whose eyes shoot straight to the floor. He looks like yet another black Oliver Twist.”
‘To me it sounds like fiction’
This Is London paints a dystopian picture of London, one where migrants are invariably angry, drunk or criminal. Almost all the people he interviews are obsessed with talking about ethnic differences and resentments, often in ways that sound very similar. On Friday nights on Neasden Lane, “Romanians start beating Poles who start beating Irish… and they don’t stop until Sunday,” a person in a Romanian kiosk tells him. “Blacks beat me three times,” says a Pakistani fruit seller in Peckham. “Police, they do nothing to control these blacks”. Did Judah interview thousands of migrant Londoners and then choose to quote the most extreme and unflattering examples? Or are some of these people ventriloquising for the author?
In particular, Judah seems to have a fascination with the Romanian community in London, who he portrays as racist and belonging to a semi-criminal underclass. “Such a depiction is biased. It’s sensationalist,” says the Romanian academic Dr Sergiu Gherghina, a reader in Comparative Politics at the University of Glasgow. Last year, he conducted a major study of the Romanian immigrant experience in the UK. Why is there such a gap between the people who appear in Judah’s book and the people Gherghina spoke to for his report? “I think the book was written to tick the major stereotypes about migrants from eastern Europe,” he says. “The book confirms many biases that some people have about specific groups of migrants.” When we asked him about Judah’s depiction of Romanians, Gherghina cited his work demonstrating the wide range of jobs that his countrymen do in the UK — besides academia and white-collar professions, “many work in industry, agriculture, warehouses, grocery stores, hotels or as drivers or care assistants,” says Gherghina. “That is much more common than beggars, sex workers and the doss house guys.”
By “doss house guys”, Gherghina is referring to a chapter where Judah gains access to a doss house for Romanian migrants in east London. This is a scene that Judah would later recreate in a documentary film for VICE, in which he and his interpreter Matei use a secret camera to film themselves spending a night at a hostel set up to offer cheap beds to migrant workers. But the doss house described in the book must be a different establishment from the one captured in the film, and it’s much worse. In the VICE film, the men sleep three or four to a room in bunk beds — basic accommodation, but more like grown men living in a youth hostel than a living hell.
In the book, the bathroom is “covered in black cratered Martian moulds”, and cockroaches scurry behind the kitchen table as Judah eats and up the walls as he sleeps. And in this doss house, beds are shared. In one bedroom, four men share two single beds; in Judah’s room, “we share beds, and only one is remotely double”, and in the living room, seven men share one room. The lodgers grunt “in foul-breathed peasant Romanian, mumbling their morning curses”. It is run by The Matron, a grotesque figure whose arms ripple with wobbling fat, and who Judah says cannot be “pure Romanian” — her hair and eyes tell him she must have “the blood of a Roma, or a Jew.” Another Romanian man peers at Judah with “tiny black peasant eyes”.
But Judah’s bizarre xenophobia can’t compete with the racism he hears from his fellow doss house dwellers. “This is London… There are n****rs everywhere, the Indians and the Muslims control all the shops, and the English hate us,” says one Romanian plasterer he meets in the kitchen. Another lodger — a Roma man who dreams of becoming president of Romania “just to sell it to Putin” — tells him that ideally you want to get day-labour jobs from an English boss because they are lazy and gentle. “You don’t want to get an Indian or a n****r or one of those crafty P***s,” he adds.
This, like many of the migrant quotes in This Is London, feels implausible. Judah mentions using his Romanian interpreter friend to gain access to the doss house, while he pretends to be Russian. If these men are speaking to him in Romanian, a language which has no specific word to demean Pakistani people, then how has he rendered these quotes? If they are speaking English, it’s surprising to hear them using terms like “crafty P***s”, a distinctively British slur.
When we called the interpreter Judah used to ask him how long he spent in the doss house with Judah and whether he could vouch for the book’s accuracy, he said he didn’t want to talk about it and quickly ended the call. We asked Judah if he could send some of his notes and recordings that support these interviews, but he did not reply.
“The quotes feel very far-fetched to me,” says Olimpia Erdogan from the Romanian Culture and Charity Together (RCCT) support group in London. “He is hitting low – he is hitting people who can’t come after him and say ‘I didn’t give you permission to put my photo in that book and make me look like a racist’”. A Romanian support worker, who has worked with several local authorities in London and who didn’t want to be named, agrees. “To me it sounds like fiction,” she says. When we sent her a sample of chapters from This Is London that focus on Romanians and Roma, she described Judah’s writing as “a mix of stereotypes and jargon that is simply hard to believe”. Of the doss house chapter, she says the account is “not credible at all”.
In the second chapter of the book, Judah conducts an interview with a Roma beggar he calls the “Fiddler” who is sleeping rough in the underpass at Hyde Park Corner and who speaks “less than five words of English”. When Judah beds down for the night after speaking to the Fiddler, he implies to the reader he is alone, meaning he can’t have an interpreter with him and Judah has admitted in the doss house chapter that his Romanian isn’t good enough to be convincing. How, then, does he manage to speak to the Fiddler and his fellow Roma, and get such perfect quotes? Standing outside a gleaming supercar showroom, the Fiddler tells Judah poetically: “What struck me first when I came to London, two weeks ago now, were the lights. There are no lights in my village. There are no buildings wrapped in lights.” Another man asks: “Why do the English hate the Romanians so much. Is it because the Romanians were allied to Hitler in the Second World War? Will they never forgive us for being an Axis power?”
Judah includes identifying photographs of some of the Roma beggars he spoke to. When we sent these chapters to Aluna Lepadatu, a Roma activist and director of the Roma Voice Centre, she emailed us to say: “I am highly disturbed by the material I have just read.” In her view, Judah’s book exploits its subjects by showing multiple photographs of them and using them to portray Roma people in a negative light. “These are vulnerable people,” she wrote, “rough sleeping, illiterate, immigrants, with little or no English at all. They already have a hard life at home and here. There is no need to showcase them in a negative light, making their lives harder, especially showing their photographs to the world.”
It’s hard to know if the Roma people depicted agreed to having their photos published, or knew what they were agreeing to. “I had a feeling the author is making fun of those poor people,” Lepadatu told The Londoner. "By speaking to this small group of the most vulnerable people within the Roma community, he has distorted how the public sees us. I would recommend taking this book off the shelves."
‘A case of blaming the Muslims’
Lepadatu isn’t the only person to feel as though her community has been misrepresented by This Is London. Later in the book, Judah spends time in Barking and writes about the sex workers who operate there. “Nobody hates this more than the red-brick mosque at the bottom of Ilford Lane,” he says. “They were ecstatic when the youth, in puffa jackets, trainers and jubbah robes, organized a Sharia Patrol to march up and down Ilford Lane shouting, ‘This is a Muslim area,’ at the soliciting whores, at the heroin dealers.”
This scene appears to have been taken from a VICE documentary about a handful of notorious Sharia patrols that took place in East London in 2013. But the idea that the local mosque was ecstatic about them comes as a shock to the mosque’s secretary for the last 28 years, Ash Siddique. A former police officer, Siddique’s mosque was profiled in the New York Times a year after Judah’s book came out, thanks to his efforts to bridge divides and combat Islamophobia in the area. “It’s nonsense, total nonsense,” Siddique says when we read out the passage from the book. “It just seems to be born of ignorance, to be honest with you… No mainstream mosque should ever be supporting anything like that at all. It’s a vigilante thing.” Saima Ashraf, the deputy leader of the local council, chuckles when the mosque quote is mentioned. “That’s bollocks. That’s complete nonsense.”
Siddique thinks Judah’s passage is “a case of blaming the Muslims, because that's the answer to everything. And unfortunately, we've become a little bit anesthetised to it.” He’s lived in Barking and Dagenham his whole life, and says that, for the most part, it’s a good place to live. “But you'll always get people who want to create division,” he tells us. “You’ll always get people who want to spread misinformation or are here to sell a book. But it is worrying that someone like that [Judah] could be advising the Foreign Office.”
Judah’s role at the top of government — advising the foreign secretary on a range of far-reaching policy decisions — was a serious cause for concern among many of the people we spoke to. “The Foreign Office should be looking at itself and saying, ‘what are we doing here?’ This is something that’s palpably false,” says Siddique. Olimpia Erdogan from the RCCT asks the same question. “What type of background check did David Lammy do?” she told The Londoner. “It is disheartening. I think the British government should explain why it gave a job to someone who has written something so one-sided against Romanians and Poles. Someone who has such a low opinion of immigrants.” (We gave the Foreign Office and the Labour Party a chance to review the details in this story and asked them if they read the book before appointing Judah, but they did not respond.)
You can carry on fact-checking the specific claims and anecdotes in This Is London, but after a certain point, it feels futile. Judah barely ever calls anyone by their real name and only occasionally leaves enough detail about a place that you can check it. There are stories about Filipina maids illicitly borrowing “white woman’s clothes” from their employers and having secret balls in West London mansions in the dead of winter. There’s the chapter about a Gulf princess kept tightly controlled by her sheikh father who gets stoned in her room all day but who Judah only hears about second hand from her friend.
The notes section at the back of the book contains citations for some claims in This Is London, but many of the sources he cites contradict him. He says a gun is fired in London every six hours, but the source he cites in fact says a bullet is fired on average around once a day — a quarter of what he claims. He says there are “at least” 7,000 sex workers in London, “mostly” from Eastern Europe, but the real minimum estimate from the more-than-decade-old report he cites seems to be under 5,000, and only a minority are Eastern European. He claims there are “thousands” of Roma living on the streets, but a report from the year his book was released found there were less than 1,400 Romanian street homeless in London, only a third of whom were Roma.
Some of these slips could be attributed to shoddy reporting, the kind of mistake Judah made when he wrote a piece for the New York Times in 2014 claiming that oligarchs were having sex with escorts in the top floors of the Shard, only for various journalists to point out that the flats at the top of the building had yet to be let. But the combined weight of the implausible quotes, invented details and ugly stereotyping in This Is London points to something far more disturbing: that a young journalist set out to write a racialised, stereotyped fantasy of a dystopian London — one of seething ethno-national conflict and rampant immigrant crime, with a bit of wealthy glamour thrown in as a satisfying contrast.
In an interview he gave years after the book came out, Judah declared himself “extremely bored” of the intellectual discourse in the US and UK. Why? “I found there was a very exciting moment in the debate after the referendum and after Trump’s election, when there was a hint that we were going to have a very serious debate about ethnic change and social class, and that’s sort of gone.”
With Judah and his publisher Picador (who also published his bestselling sequel This Is Europe) choosing not to speak to us, it’s hard to know exactly how this book came about. Judah later told an interviewer that for the first six to eight months, reporting the book was “a disaster” as he struggled to get interesting quotes from his sources. Then, after he worked out what the theme of the book should be, it “became easy”. It’s unclear why.
But perhaps more important is a different question, not about the book but about all of us: why were so many readers willing to believe it?
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