I LIVE IN one of the UK’s most multicultural areas. People with different backgrounds and beliefs are piled on top of one another, jostling for position. On my street there’s a Romanian seafood restaurant, a Polish delicatessen, a Mauritian bakery, an Islamic community hall, and an Irish-Caribbean fusion pub with tricolours and Jamaican flags billowing in the dirty London breeze.

We all get along, more or less, because we have to. No one has the time or energy to argue about whose culture is best. Everyone’s too busy trying to get through the day.

There’s a relentlessness to life in this city that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. Commuters rise early, bleary eyed and irritable, dodging cyclists before nudging their way onto a packed tube. Revelers stay out late, delirious on a bespoke blend of intoxicants, navigating night buses and taxis through the jumble Victorian villas, brutalist blocks and glinting skyscrapers. Rents soar, bus fares go up, and everyone scrambles to keep going.

Sometimes it feels like the housing sector has been designed specifically to drive ordinary people out. Ireland gets bad press, but England is still the natural habitat of the unscrupulous landlord. Estate agents are to London what Orcs are to........

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