UnlearningSilence.blog

I did not fall in love with London when I first arrived.

People often speak about cities as though they are love at first sight. Paris dazzles them. Rome seduces them. New York overwhelms them. London did none of those things to me. When I first arrived, I was simply trying to survive.

Everything felt unfamiliar. The streets, the language, the weather, the people. I was with my mother, but she relied on me more than I relied on her. The future was uncertain. I was young, homesick and trying to build a life in a city that seemed too large to notice whether I existed or not.

For years, London was simply the place where I lived. Then, slowly and almost without me noticing, it became my city. Not because of its landmarks or its history, and certainly not because life suddenly became easier. It became mine because my life became intertwined with it.

Both of my sons were born here. My eldest at Whittington Hospital and my youngest at Homerton Hospital. There is something profound about raising children in a city that was once entirely foreign to you. The hospitals where they took their first breaths, the parks where they learned to run, the schools they attended and the streets they walked all became part of my own story. Over time, the place that welcomed my children into the world stopped feeling foreign and started feeling like home.

For several years I lived in Stoke Newington, a place with a long history of independent thinkers, reformers and campaigners. It is also home to a monument to Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the earliest and most influential advocates for women’s rights. Long before women could vote, own property independently or pursue many of the opportunities we take for granted today, she argued that women deserved education, independence and the freedom to shape their own lives.

Every time I walk past that monument, I find myself thinking about how few public monuments are dedicated to women compared with men. Our cities are filled with statues of kings, generals and politicians. Women who changed the course of history are often much harder to find.

Yet what I remember most about Stoke Newington is not a monument.

It is the women.

When my second son was born, mothers from the neighbourhood would knock on my door in the morning and ask whether I wanted them to take my eldest son to school. They told me I needed to rest. There was no fuss, no expectation of anything in return and no grand declaration of solidarity. They simply showed up.

Years later, when I was trying to leave a difficult relationship, many of those same women were there again. Looking back, it felt as though an entire community quietly formed a protective circle around me. They listened, encouraged, checked in and reminded me that I was not alone.

I learnt something important from them. Women do not always need to rescue one another. Sometimes they simply need to stand beside one another. To this day, I try to do the same whenever I can.

I also learnt London through small rituals. Through coffee shops where the staff began to recognise me and where I always chose the same seat by the window. Sometimes I would work there with my laptop. Other times I would sit for hours with a book and a cup of coffee that had long gone cold. There was comfort in the familiarity of those places. They became small anchors in a city that never stops moving.

I learnt London through bicycle rides. There is something oddly liberating about riding a Lime bike through the city. For half an hour you belong nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Some of my favourite journeys have taken place on two wheels. Cycling through Holborn on a rainy evening. Riding through Covent Garden after work. Taking a longer route home simply because the city looked beautiful that day. Watching the lights reflect on wet pavement after rain. Sometimes I think London makes most sense from a bicycle.

I learnt London through its green spaces. Through long walks on Hampstead Heath where the city suddenly disappears behind trees and open sky. There are moments there when it is difficult to believe that one of the largest cities in Europe is only minutes away. The Heath has a way of slowing everything down. It reminds me that solitude and loneliness are not the same thing.

I learnt London through grief too. Every so often I visit Highgate Cemetery to leave fresh flowers on the grave of a friend. It is one of the most beautiful and peaceful places in the city. Strange perhaps, to find comfort among graves, yet there is something deeply reassuring about it. It reminds me that lives matter, that people leave traces behind them and that remembering someone is its own quiet act of love.

I learnt London through poetry and music. Some evenings took me to Pushkin House, where Russian poetry filled rooms with familiar sounds from another part of my life. Other evenings took me to Brixton, where Black poets stood on stage telling stories about identity, family, migration, love and belonging. Different histories. Different voices. Different journeys. Yet so many of the emotions felt familiar.

Over the years people introduced me to hidden jazz clubs tucked away beneath busy streets, tiny live music venues, spoken-word nights and places I would never have found on my own. Some introduced me to soul music. Others introduced me to Afrobeat, electronic music and dance floors that carried on until sunrise. One introduced me to the simple pleasure of sitting in a park with good music and good company and allowing the moment to be enough.

The city slowly expanded my world.

That is one of the things I love most about London. A Russian poetry evening, a spoken-word event in Brixton, a hidden jazz club, a tiny independent café, a second-hand bookshop, a crowded market, a quiet cemetery and a woman cycling through the rain in a black cashmere coat can all exist within a few miles of one another.

London never asked me to become somebody else.

It never demanded that I choose between where I came from and where I was going.

Instead, it gave me room to become more fully myself.

That is not to say London has always been kind to me.

That would be too simple a story.

During the Brexit years, I was once shouted at in the street and told to “go back to Eastern Europe”. The irony, of course, was that I am not from Eastern Europe.

During the pandemic, an angry man nearly became physically aggressive towards me because he believed I was Chinese.

Experiences like these remind you that some people see difference before they see humanity.

Yet those moments are not what define the city for me.

What defines London are the mothers who knocked on my door when I had a newborn baby. The friends who stood beside me when life became difficult. The strangers who became familiar faces. The conversations, the books, the music and the poems.

People often struggle to place me.

Depending on who is looking, I have been mistaken for almost everything. Over the years I have heard some wonderfully creative theories. East Asian, Eastern European, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, Latin American.

One of the most common guesses, however, is South African.

I suspect it is the accent.

More than once, somebody has listened to me speak for a few minutes before confidently asking which part of South Africa I come from.

I have always found it rather entertaining.

Perhaps it is because I have spent so much of my life moving between different places, cultures and languages that I have never felt a strong need to fit neatly into a single category. Cities like London are full of people whose stories are not straightforward. People who have lived in different countries, speak different languages, carry different influences and call more than one place home.

In a city like that, being slightly difficult to place feels entirely appropriate.

The guesses often say as much about the person making them as they do about me, and I have come to enjoy hearing them.

Perhaps that is why I have grown to love London.

Not because it is easy.

It isn’t.

It can be expensive, exhausting and indifferent. It can make you feel anonymous. It can make you feel lonely. It can leave you standing on a crowded Tube platform feeling as though nobody in the world knows your name.

But it can also teach you something important.

It can teach you how to enjoy your own company. How to spend a Saturday alone without feeling lonely. How to sit in a café with a book and feel perfectly content. How to wander through a park without a destination. How to attend a poetry reading where you know nobody. How to build a life that feels full even when it is quiet.

When I first arrived in London, being alone felt frightening. I thought happiness was something that would arrive through certainty, through belonging, through finding the right people and building the right life.

Instead, London taught me something I did not expect.

A good life cannot depend entirely on another person.

It has to belong to you first.

The city taught me that joy can be found in small things. In a favourite coffee shop. In a bicycle ride through the rain. In a book. In music. In conversation. In flowers left on a grave. In discovering a new corner of a city you thought you already knew.

Perhaps that is why I feel differently about being alone today than I did all those years ago. Not because I no longer want companionship. I do. Not because I no longer believe in love. I do. But because I no longer feel as though my life is waiting to begin.

For years I thought I was building a life in London. Looking back, I realise something else was happening too. While I was learning the city, the city was shaping me.

Somewhere between the poetry readings, the bicycle rides, the friendships, the heartbreaks, the births of my children and the countless cups of coffee, London stopped being the city where I lived.

It became mine.