London is “Obama on steroids,” she said; the rest of Britain is “essentially Trumptown, where I belong.”
It is strange to me that some Britons who live outside London seem to mistrust
and feel alienated from it, given how essential, and central, the city is to the country and how much people like it when they visit.
He lives in Bristol now but grew up in London, and the city, he says, “feels like a uniquely encapsulated version of what Britain means to me.”
“The government says it’s trying to get the country back,
but in the process it’s losing the heart of its people in London,” Mr. Shukla said in a telephone interview.
“We should be moving together,” he said of Europe, “instead of moving apart.”
I met Mr. Eden as I wandered around St. Pancras at the moment Britain officially filed for divorce from the European Union.
“The one thing we don’t actually see a lot of here is English people,” Mr. Djarian said.
To many people in the capital, the vote last year feels like a rejection not just of Europe but also of the values embodied by London, perhaps the world’s most vibrantly and exuberantly cosmopolitan city: values like openness, tolerance, internationalism and the sense
that it is better to look outward than to gaze inward.
London, she wrote, is “a city of ghettos behind a thin veneer of civility kept polished by a Muslim mayor whose
greatest validation is his father’s old job.” Far from getting along, she said, people hate one another.
But as Britain tries to bid farewell to its now-estranged partner of 44 years, London faces a different sort of challenge: how a great global city whose residents voted
overwhelmingly against Brexit in last summer’s referendum should adjust to an uncertain future governed by principles that feel antithetical to its very being.