Zadie Smith once wrote that “the square mile around Arsenal’s stadium could be a suitable surrogate for the whole wide world”. Perhaps you only really glimpse this on a match day, when the jerk chicken grills and paella pans fire up and belch delicious smoke across the rows of terraced houses, when the locals in weathered replica shirts brush shoulders with tourists bearing selfie sticks, when a small group of dedicated volunteers at a kiosk by the Ken Friar Bridge accepts non-perishable donations for the Islington food bank.
And you shall scoff, and you shall sneer, because there is a north London of the popular imagination, and Islington in particular, which has become a surrogate for something else entirely. A slur, an insult, a byword for privilege and entitlement and metropolitan effeteness, the place of Blair and Corbyn and Starmer and a shrink on every street corner. North London is elite, north London is out of touch, north London looks down on the rest of you while eating plates of £16 pasta.
