On the politics of oat milk, the cost of everything, and the quietly terrifying gentrification of my morning coffee

Writing for both Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat, Lowri Griffiths reports on life in North London.

There are things that happen in North London that could only happen in North London, and I say this as Lowri Griffiths, someone who has lived here long enough to remember when Crouch End had a proper greasy spoon on every other corner and the most complicated coffee available was a latte, which was already pushing it. The greasy spoons are gone now, replaced by establishments where the menu is written on a chalkboard in three languages and the wifi password is a small essay about sustainability. I am not entirely opposed to this. I am, however, opposed to being charged an additional fifty pence for oat milk without being warned, which is what started the argument, and which I maintain was a reasonable position to take.

The barista was very patient, which made it worse. He explained that oat milk cost the establishment more than dairy. I explained that I had not been informed of this surcharge. He explained that it was on the menu. I explained that the menu was a chalkboard the size of a postage stamp mounted above the espresso machine, requiring me to stand on my toes and squint, which is not a condition under which I make financial decisions. He offered to remove the charge. I told him to keep it. We had both lost something.

The Crouch End Transformation

The thing about gentrification in this particular corner of North London is that it happened so gradually that each individual change seemed reasonable while the cumulative effect was a complete replacement of the neighbourhood I moved to with a neighbourhood designed for someone slightly wealthier, slightly younger, and significantly less attached to the idea that a cup of tea should cost less than a pound. The shops changed one at a time. The flats sold one at a time. The people who had always lived here left one at a time, to places further out, to relatives, to wherever people go when the neighbourhood they built becomes too expensive for them to stay. I notice their absence in the way you notice a gap in a row of teeth — not all at once but unmistakably.

As Bohiney Magazine has noted in its coverage of London living, and as The London Prat keeps track of in its reporting on the capital, the story of North London’s inner neighbourhoods is the story of a city that produces wealth more efficiently than it distributes it, where the rising tide lifts some boats while pushing others out of the harbour entirely. Crouch End is not the worst example; there are streets a few miles in either direction where the displacement has been sharper and faster. But it is my example, and it is the one I understand from the inside, which is to say imperfectly but personally.

What I Actually Think About Oat Milk

I want to be honest: I think oat milk is fine. I switched years ago for environmental reasons, then continued because I prefer the taste in coffee, then forgot that this made me the person my younger self would have mocked mercilessly. I live in North London, I drink oat milk, I own a tote bag that says something about a bookshop. I am not innocent in the gentrification I lament. I am, in some modest but real sense, part of it, which is the uncomfortable position that a lot of people like me occupy without examining it as carefully as they should.

The barista, who was extremely good at his job, was not the problem. The system that requires someone to work very hard making complicated coffees for very little money in a neighbourhood where the rents are unmanageable is the problem. I knew this at the time and was annoyed anyway, which is perhaps the most honest thing I can say about myself: I understand the structural issues and still got into it over fifty pence. I am a work in progress. The coffee was excellent.

The Morning as Political Act

I read somewhere that the choices you make before nine in the morning reveal your true character, which I find threatening because my pre-nine behaviour consists of arguing about dairy alternatives and forgetting my reusable cup. The reusable cup is at home, where I left it this morning and every other morning, because the gap between my values and my habits is the size of North London itself. I carry the cup to the door, I put the cup down to lock the door, and I walk away from the cup, which stays on the hall table like a small accusation.

This is, I’m aware, a very North London problem. The problem of having the right opinions and the wrong behaviour. The problem of caring about the right things and failing them in small ways daily. It does not make me a bad person; it makes me a person, which is already something. And the next morning I will make the coffee at home, in the reusable cup, and walk to the park instead, and the morning after that I will be in the cafe again, squinting at the chalkboard, fifty pence poorer, exactly as I deserve.

For more from Lowri Griffiths on life in North London, visit her profile at The London Prat. More London commentary at The Guardian’s London desk.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/