London

I was on a train heading into London yesterday, intently listening to the News Agents podcast, when I found myself listening to a version of the city I didn’t recognise.

The guests were MAGA supporters who had apparently decided, from somewhere across the Atlantic, that London was a no-go area. Crime-ridden. Islamist-controlled. A city that had lost itself it its search towards multi-culturalism. Those being interviewed spoke with the particular confidence of people who have never needed to test their certainty against reality. Albeit, one had claimed that he was “nearly mugged three times” during his visit to London a few weeks prior to finding himself in a MAGA convention.

A little later, I was in a Costa near Victoria station and whilst I sipped on my tea, two elderly women asked a young Asian man if they could share his table and gesticulated that there was no space anywhere else. He said “yes, of course”. They ended up in conversation for twenty minutes. Another ordinary scene in the London that I know and love.

There’s a concept in social psychology called the contact hypothesis, developed by Gordon Allport in the 1950s, which suggests that prejudice diminishes when people have meaningful, equal-status contact with those they’ve been taught to fear. The conditions matter. It can’t be fleeting or forced. The premise is simple: proximity humanises whilst distance allows othering to flourish unchallenged.

What I kept thinking about, on and off the tube, in and out of the museum, was how othering requires a kind of enforced distance. It depends on the story never being tested. It needs you to stay away.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote about the “stranger” not as someone unknown to us, but as someone that we have decided to keep unknown. The stranger is a category we maintain, not a fact we encounter. That’s a harder thing to sit with, because it means othering isn’t passive but a choice, often dressed up as instinct or common sense or, increasingly, concern.

On the way home the train doors closed at a station and a boy, I’d say around ten years old, found himself on the wrong side of them. His parents were still on the platform. He was crying, properly crying, the way children do when the world has suddenly become very large and quite frightening.

The other passengers responded without hesitation. They spoke and reassured him. Someone flagged down the train staff and the doors were reopened. He was reunited with his parents within minutes.

Nobody asked where he was from. Nobody weighed up whether he was their responsibility. He was a child who was frightened, and that was enough.

I think about what that moment asks of us educationally. We spend a great deal of time in schools and services thinking about belonging as something we build through curriculum or policy or initiative but belonging lives in the unremarkable, the unreported, the everyday decision to make room at a table or make an effort to sort out the reopening of a door.

The narrative of London as a place of threat and division is not a neutral observation. It is, as Stuart Hall might have put it, a representational practice. It selects what to see and what to ignore. It frames difference as danger. It asks us to look at a city of nine million people and find only the evidence that confirms what we already decided to believe.

What I found, instead, was chatting about chips on a train (salty and hot was the shared understanding of what makes a good chip) followed by a conversation about the Natural History Museum. I found women who didn’t know a young man but sat with him anyway. I found strangers who looked at a crying child and moved towards him rather than away. This is the London I know.

The psychologist Brené Brown talks about the stories we tell in the absence of information, the narratives we construct to fill gaps in understanding. We are, all of us, meaning-making creatures. The question is always: whose meaning? Whose story? And what does it cost the people it’s told about?

Children growing up in London, in any city, are navigating versions of themselves that others have already decided on. They encounter the weight of those narratives long before they have the language to name them. Part of relational practice, whether in a classroom, a provision, or a policy, is holding open the possibility that the story isn’t fixed. That ordinary moments of humanity are not exceptions to the rule, but evidence of a different one.