Camberwell Authentocrats
What a storm to prominence this imperious tribe has had! These men—yes, it’s always men—are sticking two fingers up to the corporate crap in pursuit of revelation at the bottom of a bowl of genuinely gristly Vietnamese pho. The authentocrats are on the march from their southeast habitat, through the world-food aisles at the supermarket and the Hinge dating profiles of every woman under 30.
Where they go, others follow. The tribe swells and the mass transforms: Haircuts grow slack and mulleted. Mustaches creep across and below the lip. Regular outerwear is replaced by esoteric restaurant merchandise. They converge on dubious sandwich shops with pen-scrawled menus stuck to the window. Their fridges overflow with obscure oils and pastes they’ve picked up along their quest for authentic consumption, jars of jerk marinade growing white and furry with neglect.
They know their olives: gordal, nocellara, Castelveltrano. They go to the farmers’ market without a plan of what to buy; they insist they will “see which vegetables jump out.” You must never ask them for dining recommendations, for this is their heart’s one true desire and you will never, ever escape.
180 Strand Girlies
Poppy’s Margiela Tabis pumps aren’t real. This rumor begins as a WhatsApp message and spreads through the fashion girlies of 180 Strand faster than chlamydia at their alma mater, Central Saint Martins art school. Soon enough, every girl with bleached eyebrows is talking about Poppy’s fake Tabis. They are the gossip du jour of Soho House, from Shoreditch to White City.
Then again, nobody’s Margiela Tabis are real, so it doesn’t really matter. All the fashion girlies of London have their hidden secrets, their knockoff Alaïa ballet flats. Everyone knows that Tilly bought her Wales Bonner x Adidas Sambas from online Chinese knockoff merchant DHGate, par exemple, and, to add insult to injury, she insists on wearing them to dinners at Perilla even though literally nobody wears Sambas anymore.
Barbican Bores
It’s hard to know who is responsible for the rise of the Barbican Bore. The critic Jonathan Meades—whose arch documentaries on architecture often serve as a gateway to building bothering—deserves his fair share of the blame.
But whoever’s to blame, the Barbican Bores are now knitted into London’s social fabric. They’re a scattered bunch, strangely au fait with the complexities of social-housing provisions and able to bore you senseless with the dictates of urban planning. You might see them shuffling around a tube station nodding approvingly at the undulating curves of the new Elizabeth Line platforms.
You can trust, however, that on a weekend you will find them paying tribute at the cathedral from which their tribe is named, the concrete menace that is the Barbican Centre, a massive brutalist megalith of a cultural center. A few of the very lucky ones (or the secretly wealthy ones) even ascend to the highest evolution of their race, paying an eye-watering sum for an apartment inside the Barbican itself. An appreciable asset, for sure, as new Barbican Bores emerge each and every day.
The Droids of Nine Elms
These poor sods are the saddest, yet the most essential tribe to the state of London today. If you’ve spent any meaningful time in the city over the last decade, you may have noticed the cacophony of wretched property developments jutting upward into the city skyline—all crap glass and cheap cladding and limp little trees sprouting from the concrete outside. “Who would live in a place like this?” you might ask. Well, here’s your answer: the Droids of Nine Elms, or Limehouse, or Canary Wharf.
They are the figures who populate the fitful erotic dreams of city developers. They’re salaried, upwardly mobile urban professionals, whose needs are simple: a shop to buy food from, a gym to lift weights in, and a tube station seconds from their door so they can get in before the boss does. Maybe, just maybe, they seek a hype-resistant chain restaurant around the corner for something they don’t have to prepare themselves. But, for the most part, they’re content to move robotically from office to train to apartment to train to office unto death.
Islington Guinness Cops
Thick, black Guinness is served in practically every bar, pub, and club in the capital, but if you believe the word of a Guinness Cop, only a scant few know how to pour this rare, mysterious elixir in the form it was intended.
Never mind that it’s the only draft beer that comes offered in two temperatures, normal and “Extra Cold”(?). Never mind that the legendary two-stage pour—in which you are supposed to let the Guinness settle halfway through—is, to all intents and purposes, a cargo-cult pantomime; modern barreling processes have long since eliminated the actual need for it. Never mind that Guinness has somehow acquired a form of outré, left-field status as a drink order despite it being the product of blue-blooded aristocrats—the Guinness Cop is never satisfied unless they are drinking in a place that is known to do “good Guinness.”
Mortlake Mandem
Would you believe it? Freddy and Amelia are earning $360,000 a year but are stuck out in the wilds of Zone 3 of the Underground? The old private-school, Oxbridge, management-consultancy conveyor belt means little in the new oligarchical capital. Once princely Londoners, who thought the city was theirs for the taking, now shuffle around in Mortlake, Walthamstow, and Nunhead, spending their middle age trying to save enough capital to pay the city’s exorbitant school fees.
They’ve sacked the nanny. They’re threatening their parents with the care home if they don’t transfer the rest of their inheritance now. They’re probably the last well-educated people left in Britain who are going to vote for Rishi Sunak. Drinking screw-top Romanian Pinot Noir on a Friday night as you frantically check your bank balance is no way to live—on that, all their old friends agree.
Westminster Wonks
Take a look across the human thicket congealed around the edges of Whitehall and you will find them in their scores: the wonks of Westminster, the grist to our threshing mills of government. You will most likely never encounter one outside of their habitat (wonks are practically indigenous to the SW1 postcode), but should you venture into their enclosure, here’s what to look for, and where to look.
You’re going to want to find a really bad pub somewhere near a large, internationally well-known tourist attraction in the very center of London—the kind of place that even the most credulous summer visitor would have second thoughts about entering. Set yourself up at a sticky back table and, from lunchtime onward, observe. After a while, you’ll notice a cluster of wonks forming around the pub’s dismal smoking area, chattering amid a fug of tobacco and glycerin vapor. Wonk pencil pushers confiding in wonk journalists, wonk advisers slobbering onto wonk researchers.
Eventually, as the bell for last orders rings, you can watch them disperse to their Bermondsey basement burrows for six allotted hours of rest. By sunrise, they will reconvene on Whitehall, cheap coffee in hand, sluiced straight back into the corridors of power.
Charlie Baker is the editor of The Fence magazine
