Starbucks office to set up for the day. J spots a comment on Twitter from Ben Judah. He's going to be interviewed at the Waterstones bookshop on Hampstead High Street tonight. Attempt to buy tickets online. Bizarre site involves filling out forms printed in black on charcoal. Eventually give up and phone bookshop. They have plenty of tickets so we arrive early enough and then poke around the antique shops. Lovely, and expensive, area. Young couple are operating a coffee shop out of a disused red phone booth and kindly let me photograph their operation. Reluctant to ask them to stand back while I set the shot up properly so it's a bit substandard.
About 25 or 30 people there for the interview. They've clearly done the routine before, but it's good. X asks the questions to get Ben started and then the performance is on - explanations, background, readings "in character", accents and all. Energetic and engaging. Like Judah's. book, This is London, the various migrants he met telling their own stories. Perhaps too much reading from the book. He does it well and it is compelling - but presumably everyone in the room has recently read, or is about to read, the book, and his method and insights are interesting. Over a third of Londoners were born abroad, half of them having arrived since 2000. This has nothing to do with the current issue of war refugees, who would in any case be a drop in the bucket, and is also different from past waves of immigration here - the Huguenots, of whom there were 50,000 over 20 years, the Irish following the famine, the Jews (including Judah's grandparents) with 200,000 immigrants over 30 years. These people, large numbers of East Europeans, Africans, and Middle Easterners, are changing the character of the city. They are also living very difficult lives, often without the communal supports of the past and without much realistic expectation that life will be better for their children. Personally Judah sees London in a historical tradition of cosmopolitan trading cities of past and present - Venice, Hong Kong, Krakow, Calcutta, Alexandria. Cities with a varied cultural and ethnic presence and power. The hour passes quickly. A glass of wine, the signing, and we're on the tube with our new book. Have wanted it ever since first seeing excerpts. It's only disappointment being that the many photographs that were in colour on the internet are, in the hardcover book non-gloss black and white. The real loss not the black and white but the lack of sharpness.
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