Grieving London

A City Remembered, A City Changed

I was born and raised in London, leaving at sixteen when my parents emigrated to Australia. At twenty-one, I returned, with the dream of going to drama school and pursuing acting. When that dream crumbled - and after several more years of trying to make a life for myself in the UK - I left again. I settled in Australia in 2001 and have lived there ever since.

London, for me, was never an easy place to live. It felt expensive, crowded, dirty, and cold. My parents had migrated there from New Zealand in the late 1960s, so we had very little extended family; no grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins nearby. It was just the five of us. Growing up, I was acutely aware of this absence, especially when I saw my friends surrounded by extended family networks. That sense of difference fed into a deeper feeling of rootlessness.

When I returned as a young adult in my early twenties, that feeling intensified. It was just me and my sister, trying to build lives in a city that often felt indifferent to our efforts; navigating unstable housing, low wages, inconsistent work, and the slow unravelling of my hopes of becoming an actor. My relationship with London became deeply ambivalent. I loved its nightlife, its parks, its theatres and pubs, and its proximity to Europe. But beneath all of that was a persistent sense of disconnection.

Since 2001, my husband and I have returned ‘home’ many times, both with and without our - now grown - children. With each visit, my relationship to the city has shifted. Strangely, the ambivalence has softened into something more like affection. Distance has allowed me to see London more clearly - to appreciate its beauty, its history, and its scale. I have never felt the pull to return permanently, but I have come to value it in ways I never could when I lived here.

Last year, my niece gave birth to twin boys. I have visited three times since then, now here for their first birthday. These visits have been joyful, almost magical, shaped by the wonder of new life, and by the recent loss of my parents, both of whom died within the last four and a half years. In their absence, these new connections feel especially significant.

Over the course of these visits, something unexpected has happened. London has begun to feel more like home than it ever did when I lived here. I move through it now with a sense of ease and familiarity. I know the neighbourhoods where my family live; I return to old haunts that feel quietly unchanged. I inhabit these spaces as though they fit me, as though they are a second skin.

And yet, at the same time, I feel like a stranger.

I feel like a stranger because, while so much appears unchanged, London has altered in ways that feel irreversible. This has revealed itself slowly, most clearly on these recent solo visits, when I have had the quietude to really look.

There is a visible fraying. A carelessness. I remember walking through Mayfair last year and stopping short at the sight of rubbish piled along the pavements, an image that jarred with everything that place once stood for. When I was young, London carried itself differently. It felt like a great capital city, held together by a shared, if unspoken, sense of pride. Now that sense of dignity feels diminished, as though the fabric has loosened and no one is quite holding it in place.

And the deeper dislocation is palpable. It sits in the changing character of neighbourhoods - in the sometimes sudden transformation of who lives there and how life is lived. Places that once felt familiar now feel entirely reconfigured. The sounds, the languages, the rhythms of daily life have shifted.

Standing in a park in North London with my niece’s twins, I found myself searching, not just for recognisable people, but for a thread of shared connection. Looking for something that echoed memory, and not finding it. It is not simply that the city has changed. It is the pace of it, the completeness. The sense that the city’s human fabric has been rewoven at such speed – threads pulled out, others stitched in – before there was time to catch my breath.

And alongside this is a growing unease - about how these different communities live alongside one another, about the inevitable tensions that sit just beneath the surface, about the fragility of social cohesion in a city that feels increasingly fragmented and imperilled. There are brief moments that feel celebratory and open, but so many more that feel charged, difficult to interpret, or quietly divisive. It leaves me profoundly disturbed by what I am seeing.

So I move through London with this strange doubleness. I know it intimately - the streets, the corners, the way the light falls in certain places. I slip back into it with ease. And yet I do not recognise it fully. It resists me.

It feels like grieving something that has not quite gone, but is no longer what it was. Like watching a slow departure, uncertain whether to stay and bear witness or to turn away before it hurts too much.

Because so much of me is tied to this place; my past, yes, but now also my present. New life has taken root here. My great-nephews will grow up in this version of London, not the one I remember.

So, I find myself wondering: what will this city be to them? How will they belong to it?

And how do I hold both things at once - the memory of what was, and the reality of what is – with the feeling that the centre cannot hold?