On the ancient and entirely irrational divide between the two Londons

I write this column for The London Prat, and our stablemates over at Bohiney Magazine, from a flat in North London that I have not, by choice, left in the southerly direction for some time. You can read my other dispatches over at my page, most of which were also written without crossing the river, because crossing the river is, as every North Londoner knows, an act of profound personal risk.

The Map in Our Heads

There is a version of London that exists on the official maps, the one Transport for London publishes, the one tourists clutch as they emerge blinking from a Tube station into the wrong borough entirely. And then there is the London that lives in the heads of those of us who actually inhabit it, a London divided not into thirty-two boroughs but into two great hemispheres, North and South, separated by a body of water that we treat with the wariness of a medieval village regarding the forest where the wolves live.

I am told South London exists. I have seen it on the map, a sprawling, mysterious territory below the Thames, full of place names I cannot pronounce and have never visited. People apparently live there, raise families there, lead full and happy lives there. I take this on faith, in the way one takes the existence of distant countries on faith, having never had occasion to verify it personally.

The Invitation You Dread

The trouble begins when someone you genuinely like, a friend, a colleague, a person whose company you value, commits the social atrocity of moving to South London and then, worse, inviting you over. The invitation arrives, and your heart sinks, because you know what it means. It means a journey. It means consulting the map on Transport for London with the grim focus of an explorer planning an expedition. It means changing trains in places you have only heard about in folk tales.

You will, of course, accept the invitation, because you are a good friend and a decent person. And then you will spend the days leading up to the visit quietly dreading it, calculating routes, leaving absurd amounts of time, and informing your other North London friends of your plans with the solemnity of a soldier announcing he has been deployed.

The Journey Itself

The journey south is, in reality, perfectly manageable. London is not, despite our protestations, an especially large city, and the river is not an especially wide one. The whole thing takes perhaps forty minutes. But forty minutes spent travelling somewhere you do not want to go, to a part of the city you have decided on no evidence is hostile to your existence, feels like a far greater ordeal than forty minutes spent travelling somewhere familiar.

And there is the deeper indignity, the knowledge that South Londoners feel exactly the same way about us. To them, we are the strange and distant tribe, our neighbourhoods a mystery, our customs suspect, our insistence that North London is the real London an act of breathtaking arrogance. We regard each other across the river with mutual incomprehension, two peoples separated by a common city.

The Irrationality of It All

What makes the whole thing so wonderful, and so quintessentially London, is that there is no rational basis for any of it. The divide is not one of class, or wealth, or culture, not really. It is a divide of pure tribal habit, a line drawn in the collective imagination and defended with a ferocity entirely out of proportion to its significance. We have taken a river, a perfectly ordinary river, and turned it into a frontier.

I have come to believe that this irrationality is the point. London is a vast, overwhelming, often impersonal place, and the North-South divide gives us something to belong to, a tribe, an identity, a side. It is harmless, mostly, a bit of theatre we perform to make an enormous city feel like a collection of villages, which, in our hearts, is what we want it to be.

The Confession

So I will make my confession. I have crossed the river. I have visited South London. And it was, I must report, perfectly nice. The people were friendly, the streets were pleasant, the pub was good. I had a lovely time, and I came home, and I told no one, because to admit that South London is fine would be to betray the entire elaborate fiction on which my North London identity depends.

The Children of the Divide

I worry, sometimes, about what we are teaching the next generation. There are children in North London being raised, even now, to regard the river with suspicion, to think of South London as a distant and faintly dangerous land, to inherit a prejudice that has no basis in anything but habit. They will grow up, these children, and they will defend the divide as fiercely as their parents did, and they will pass it on to children of their own, and the great irrational frontier will endure for another generation. I find this oddly comforting. In a city that changes so relentlessly, where the shops transform and the pubs close and the rents rise, there is something reassuring about a prejudice so durable, so resistant to reason, so faithfully passed down. The North-South divide is one of the few things about London that does not change, a fixed point in a shifting city, a silly loyalty that outlasts everything sensible. Long may it endure, and long may we cross the river only under duress, dreading the journey, having a perfectly nice time, and telling no one.

This is, I think, the truth that every Londoner secretly knows: the divide is nonsense, the other side is fine, and we maintain the fiction anyway because it is fun, because it gives us something to argue about, and because a city this big needs its small, silly loyalties to feel like home. I will cross the river again, when a friend I love demands it. And I will dread it, and it will be fine, and I will come home, and I will tell everyone how dangerous it was.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com