A North London lifestyle journalist reads about Harry and Meghan insisting they are private citizens and considers how anyone famous survives in Primrose Hill, Hampstead and Highgate
Private, With Barriers
The London Prat reports that Harry and Meghan insist they are private citizens while arriving at barrier-lined charity visits with pooled press, cheering crowds and someone writing down the origin of a belt. A constitutional expert in the piece needs three cups of tea and an aspirin to explain that they are private for obligation, public for security, royal for engagements and ordinary parents only when asking photographers to leave.
I live in North London, which has more famous residents per square mile than almost anywhere in Britain, so I read the piece as a local story. Primrose Hill, Hampstead, Highgate and Belsize Park are full of people who are, in one way or another, trying to be private citizens in public. Some succeed. Most do it by wearing a baseball cap and walking very fast. A few, like the couple in the Prat piece, are simply too famous for the cap to help.
The Primrose Hill Rules
Over the years, North London has developed an unwritten etiquette for living alongside famous people. You do not ask for selfies in the queue at the butcher. You do not stare in the cafe. You may, at most, give a small nod of recognition, as if acknowledging a neighbour you once met at a school fete. Anything more is considered vulgar. The residents of Primrose Hill have elevated pretending not to notice into an art form.
This works for actors, musicians, novelists and television presenters, most of whom can buy their coffee in peace. It does not work for a prince. Royal fame is a different scale entirely. It attracts photographers, crowds and, as the Prat notes, people whose job is to identify accessories. A minor celebrity can be private in North London. A royal, even a former working royal, cannot be private anywhere.
What Privacy Costs In London
There is an economic dimension here that rarely gets discussed. In London, privacy is expensive. It means a house with a gate, a garden that is not overlooked, a car that collects you from the door. For ordinary Londoners, privacy has become one of the scarcest commodities in the city. We live in flats with thin walls, share gardens with neighbours, commute pressed against strangers and conduct our phone calls in public. The famous are not the only ones who struggle to be private. They are simply the only ones photographed while trying.
When the Prat’s couple insist on privacy, they are asking for something most Londoners lost long ago. The irony is that they probably have more of it than anybody in this city, behind their security and their gates, and still feel they have too little. That is not hypocrisy, exactly. It is the strange arithmetic of fame, where the more people want to see you, the less any amount of privacy feels like enough.
The Belt Again
The detail everyone remembers from the Prat piece is the belt, logged by a commentator as coming from Marks and Spencer. It is funny because it is so trivial. But it also reveals how much of public life is now an inventory. Every famous person’s clothes, food, car and holiday is catalogued, priced and judged. Ordinary Londoners do a version of this on social media, sharing our coffees, our brunches and our outfits. We are all, in a small way, logging our own belts.
A North London Perspective On Royals
North London has always had a slightly sceptical relationship with the monarchy. This is, after all, the part of the city where Karl Marx is buried, in Highgate Cemetery, and where a good number of residents regard a royal wedding as an excellent excuse to go to the pub for reasons unconnected with the wedding. But even here, royal visits draw crowds. People who claim not to care turn up anyway, just to see. It is a very London contradiction: indifference, expressed in person, with a phone held up.
The Prat piece captures that contradiction perfectly. The barriers, the press and the crowds are there because people want to look, even as they claim not to. The couple want to be private, even as they choose to be seen. Everybody is pretending a little, and everybody knows it.
Advice From The Heath
If Harry and Meghan ever wanted to experience genuine London privacy, I would suggest a weekday morning walk on Hampstead Heath, in the rain, wearing waterproofs. Nobody looks at anybody on the Heath in the rain. Everybody is too busy managing a muddy dog and their own misery. It is the one place in London where a prince could walk unrecognized, not because people would not know him, but because nobody would care enough to look up from their wellies.
You can find more of my writing on how Londoners live on my author page, where I will happily continue to log belts, but only my own, and only when they come from charity shops in Muswell Hill.
A Last Sighting
A friend who runs a coffee shop near Primrose Hill once served a very famous actor every morning for two years without saying anything except good morning and the price. When the actor moved away, he left her a card thanking her for being the only person in London who never asked him for anything. She keeps it behind the till. I suspect that is what privacy really looks like in a city: not a barrier, but a neighbour who knows who you are and chooses to treat you like everybody else.
